SuperNET Update #1
It has been a long road for SuperNET towards making its first appearance. JL777, its creator, has encountered many twists and turns in the road from both internal and external influences. The end result is now to be known as Iguana, an easy to install application based on iguanacore. Iguana will be able to run on a lot of platforms. This is where SuperNET Weekly begins.
JL777 originally was building SuperNET on top of NXT, a Bitcoin 2.0 platform which became famous for its Asset Exchange. This system served SuperNET well for quite some time. However, things eventually turned sour. NXT is a forever-progressing system, always trying to better itself through a mountain of updates. This can be a good thing but also a curse. For those building on top of NXT, most notably JL777 and Coinomat, this was a nightmare as the updates meant they always had to update their software along with it. JL777 asked for some kind of stability and his request was turned down. This led to the inevitable separation of SuperNET from NXT.
To make matters worse, Jean-Luc's NXT 2.0 proposal came as a complete shock to the NXT community. In general, NXT holders were very happy about the decision, while asset holders felt betrayed. For information on NXT 2.0, please refer to CORE Media's article on the changes coming to NXT.
In response to NXT 2.0, JL777 announced on BitcoinTalk his Declaration of Independence from any single blockchain. This means that SuperNET, or any other asset, is to be made free to move from one blockchain to another. If a particular coin is not progressing, one can simply move their assets to a different platform. For example, those that do not agree with the direction of NXT 2.0 may wish to move their assets to another Bitcoin 2.0 platform using technology like SuperNET's Iguana.
Iguana is being built by JL777 with an excellent team behind him. When asked "what would be the most killer feature of crypto777 (Iguana is the platform name using crypto777 technology)?" JL777 replied "privacy, speed, scalability, adoption and girls".
Let's take a closer look at what this means.
- JL777 has been been able to code iguana to download the BTC blockchain within 30 minutes.
- Privacy will be maintained through BTCD and Jumblr.
- JL777 with Iguana will enable assets to be built on top of the B TC blockchain.
Is SuperNET a coin?
"With the current API, there are independent category/subcategory network channels. Which is its own encrypted data flow. Now, that means each node can submit to the specific category network (all this runs on the same supernetwork which is actually using the various bitcoin protocol networks as its transport). So there is a Pangea category and each table is a subcategory. Players in each table communicate by posting messages to the Pangea/tablehash. But, let us imagine that these messages are actually like blocks and they make a chain. Does that make the Pangea/tablehash a coin? If so, what does the SuperNET become? If it allows anybody to dynamically create a new category, I think the lines between coin and not coin can become blurred.
Within each category, the creator can define how it will be used and maybe it won't even be any chain, but just a collection of posts. Now if I add a counter so that each time someone creates a new post in the chain, they get a credit, it would seem to have most of the aspects of a coin. But I am not sure this level is needed yet. However, it does solve the future problem of an infinite number of transactions. By making a hierarchy of categories, you can have higher frequency ones feed into lower frequency ones. For example, the Pangea chain doesn't really care about each and every player's bet, so the Pangea/tablehash will deal with that level of details and only post to the main Pangea chain the result of the game. If there is a casino category on top of this, then the Pangea chain would report when a table disbands/player cashes in or out. So I probably will implement something along these lines. For now I'm just talking out loud. It seems to make sense to have these dynamic chains report to a more permanent blockchain, like BTCD." - JL777
Atomic swap implementation covers what extent of crypto777 tech? Will it cover swapping between crypto tech 1.0 and 2.0? By 1.0 tech I mean BTC protocol specific currencies, and by 2.0 tech I mean NXT, Ethereum, NEM, etc. I hope I'm making some sense with my limited understanding on Atomic swap tech's role in crypto777 tech. Will it be possible to see something like doing atomic swaps between Bitshares Asset <-> NXT Asset?
"Eventually in the fullness of time, anything is possible. At first it will be bitcoin protocol <-> bitcoin protocol. I can also work in NXT with its phased and 2.0 without bitcoin protocol can be done indirectly via the PAX for them." - JL777
Could you estimate how many hours you might have spent/invested on SuperNET tech and what are you invested in?
"18 hours per day, 6 days per week many weeks. If my time is worth any measurable amount, the 5000+ hours I have put in is the biggest contribution. Actually it is over 8000 hours now. I have mostly SuperNET, BTCD and assets." - JL777
Iguana Timeline
"I have a pretty complete roadmap in mind. The first step is to achieve a fully functional Iguana wallet as all the services require that. I just got the unspent data generated without adding any extra time. The total dataset size is 17GB compressed into read-only files, 1.2GB for the accounts and 35GB for signatures which can be purged after the initial sync. I plan to increase the 1.2GB a little bit as today I figured out how to allow calculation of any address' balance as of any block and that seems worth an extra 400MB. So with a dataset size of less than 20GB, it gets more than any block explorer does and much, much more than the raw bitcoind. It's one-third the size, is created in as little as half an hour and has a full block explorer level dataset for all addresses, including multisig, at any block.
Once this is validated, then I'll move on to the atomic cross chain protocol so that the "bitcoin" virtual exchange works as Poloniex does in the InstantDex API. Then it'll be Pangea. Then it'll be PAX.
I'm not sure where the jumblr, micropayments and asset passports fit in, but I have a set of usecases in mind that needs to be supported and will get them done as fast as I can but held to a quality standard. It took me ~4 months to get Iguana to where it is so, while it was new tech, it was well worth it, especially considering the external events that happened after the switch.
To my knowledge there are less than 5 Bitcoin Core equivalents ever written and most of them are ports of the bitcoind. Iguana is one of very few totally-from-scratch implementations of Bitcoin Core and, of course, it directly supports BTCD and can run a full BTCD node as a Chrome app while running a validating BTC node at the same time." - JL777