Howdy from Eris Industries

Development
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Howdy Maidsafe folks - Preston Byrne from Eris Industries here.

The reason I’m here is because I was chatting with @happybeing on Twitter; our project isn’t designed to be a standalone blockchain, but something which allows various distributed protocols to talk to each other in a single application (“silo-busting,” if you will). And they’ll do so through a normal web browser at localhost.

We’d love to have a conversation about how we can help MaidSAFE developers achieve their objectives by supporting interoperability between your protocol and other protocols, including Thelonious-based DApps (Thelonious is our open-source blockchain protocol design).

We plan on doing this with our distributed application developer platform, which we call Eris. I’ll spare the details as to how it works here on the forum (if you’re interested we have a very full exposition of how it works here and elsewhere on our website but long story short, it has two main components:

A) a blockchain back-end we call Thelonious which holds the application logic for a given application. Thelonious is designed to be secured without mining; like its uncle Ethereum, it is smart contract enabled, but it is also smart contract controlled - meaning it can do some interesting things like

  • secure itself without mining,
  • amend its parameters over time without a hard-fork and
  • control which users have write permissions on the blockchain.

It’s not a single blockchain administered by EI, but a blockchain design which is designed to spawn many millions of blockchains of its class, each of which is controlled entirely by the developer deploying it. It is designed to hold application logic (arbitrary data), not tradable units of value - although as the design is open-ended devs can frankly build what they like on it.

Accordingly, we aren’t selling any tokens - Thelonious is using a blockchain as a pure open-source database technology, so devs will own and run and be in control of every aspect of their applications, not us.

B) The distributed application server, or Decerver, which is designed to allow these applications to plug into other distributed protocols such as Bitcoin (QT and BTCD), Ethereum, and IPFS. BitTorrent support is in the pipe and any other protocol (including MaidSAFE) can be supported by simply writing a module wrapper.

We’ve currently got a Hello World DApp and will be releasing something a little more advanced (distributed YouTube) in about two weeks.

Between now and then, though, we thought it’d be good to pop over and get the conversation started! Thank you for inviting me across.

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Welcome and great you reach out, the more projects actually co-operate the better. There is a Storj dev on this forum and he is very balanced and helpful. Not that we do much with storj and don’t know really if they will work together or not its good to get input from differing sources. Your project sounds interesting, as there is a need for open ledgers in some situations for sure. I think you may find some interesting attributes to our decentralised consensus and will be able to make great use of it as an alternative to a blockchain, we will see. The main thing is it’s not ours it’s ours meaning everyone’s :slight_smile: so belongs to anyone who wants to interact with it, fork it, build on it etc. It’s a pretty huge codebase, but going the right way and we take a lot of community feedback in moving forward so that is also really good.

I see SAFE as the peoples project and not led by any names or companies and the faster we get there the better. So no ego no ownership and no fear of mistakes. It’s all good and again welcome.

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Hello David! Thanks for the swift reply and the warm welcome.

We’ve actually reached out to StorJ, Counterparty and SAFE alike, and with the same idea in mind - crypto has a big mountain to climb and there’s a lot of room for different distributed computing projects (we each have different skill sets and different design aims). We’re all more likely to succeed if we work together to make the space as a whole more useful.

We’re actually pretty open on consensus models - our use of a blockchain to hold application logic is an implementation detail rather than a matter of dogma so we’re happy to discuss alternative parameters (as well as know-how transfer to make our stuff more useful to you or vice-versa!). Additionally, one thing we’ve done is remove all of the hard-coded logic of the blockchain into a smart contract kernel - so devs can parameterise the design to do whatever they want.

Looking forward to working with you. We can all be reached by email at firstname@erisindustries.com (Casey, Preston, Tyler, Ethan and Andreas). We’re HQd in London (and both Casey, our CEO, and I are always looking for excuses to go up to Scotland - for my part because I went to uni up there!) so happy to pay you a visit.

If you or your community has any questions we’d be happy to answer them here, on our subreddit at https://reddit.com/r/erisindustries, at #erisindustries on Freenode or by e-mail per above.

Best,

Preston.

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‘Trade with Dave’ has some interesting posts discussing Eris Industries…so you must be pretty important to the big picture I’d think:

http://tradewithdave.com/?p=23028

http://tradewithdave.com/?p=23036

http://tradewithdave.com/?p=23076

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I’m a fan of Dave’s - not sure I agree with his interpretation of what we do on every single point, but he certainly appreciates the scale of what we’re trying to do.

That said, the wider distributed computing community is going to be the judge (jury, and executioner too) of where we fit in the big picture. Our work’s wider relevance - reiterating David (Irvine’s) sentiment that open-source belongs to everyone - will be measured entirely in how effective we are at delivering useful and free tools to projects like MaidSAFE and the developers who work on it and projects like it.

On a related note: an acquaintance of mine in SF said we were “too focused on blockchains” and hadn’t focused on dev tools - that was a marketing fail on our part. Fortunately we’ve also got a comprehensive smart contract testing suite we call the Eris Package Manager which we need to start screaming about a bit more!

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He certainly has a good handle on ‘trustless networks’

With ‘Smart Contracts’ already baked into the SAFEnetwork, what else does Eris offer, that ProjectSAFE devs might find interesting?

An interesting post by @dirvine commenting on projects that build on the Blockchain. Seems appropriate to point it out to you, in case you missed it.

What about projects built on the blockchain?

I believe these are a good thing! Now that seems to fly in the face of what I have laid out so far, is this not the ant growing a paw? Well yes this is in many ways bad. To have many projects depend on a centralised data structure is bad. The core protocol could take down the eco system so it is bad in that sense.

The intent is great though. I believe these projects do not need to be locking themselves into ‘the blockchain’ they simply need a mechanism of an agreed mathematical lock. Bitcoin agrees this for them and they can flourish. They do and will continue to flourish if their offering is of value. That’s evolution again.

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Preston, do I understand correctly that you are making the software components of a bridge between Internet(www), maidsafe, etherium, and Storj?

I came onto the forums today to see how maidsafe people felt about a router. I should certainly be talking with Eris also it seems. Okay here goes, here is the machine that I am planning:

Mesh2Freedom(not the final name by any means) is:
Open hardware (not the CPU or GPU cores…)
Open software (probably Ubuntu, maybe Arch)
4 or 8 core ARM or dual core x86 in the form of an Intel or AMD CPU
2 or 4 GB RAM
10/100/1000 Ethernet 4 ports and 1 port for internet connection
Tentatively the router will support connecting to neighboring nodes in meatspace so that neighbors can pool their bandwidth

Eris / Maidsafe / Storj:

We’re Dawn, and our goal is an open source world and a better life for all. We have released 1 piece or hardware, Fenix. We might change its name to AppStick to more clearly state its purpose. Yes that right, its a server for open source webapps on a stick. It is also a monetization tool for the makers of open source web apps, because when it is sold as a server, they choose the price and the split of the profits between Dawn and themselves.

We are in the planning stages on the router. Depending on how we spec it out, it could be ready as early as two weeks from now (could ship a demo immediately) but would be lacking a lot of the sw functionality that I have described here. Oh, and here’s something that might go with a decentralized youtube: since this router has PC class hardware, it would also have an HDMI port.

Fenix @ http://fenixer.org
Dawn @ http://itdawns.org

Thoughts?

[@faddat I edited the URLs to be active - hope that’s OK, revert them if not - @happybeing]

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Looks like they’re going to be using IPFS not Maidsafe. They’re big against tokenization.

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