Apparently in a post like this, we are supposed to include information about listings in a prominent position.
Blurt is listed on:
- Ionomy
- Beldex
- Steem Engine
- Hive Engine
- Stex
There, I have listed our exchanges. We anticipate a probit listing very soon, as well. A number of large exchanges are in posession of user funds, largest of which is Upbit. Learn more here:
https://blocks.blurtwallet.com/#/richlist
We figure that those larger exchanges will list eventually or hopefully at the very least ensure that users get their BLURT.
What is Blurt?
there are many ways of looking at this question and I intend to get into most of them in this post, which I anticipate will be rather long.
My recent learnings and research have shown me that Blurt is first and foremost a governance change to the steem blockchain, available at the option of users. We sent a special node into the steem Network, That was programmed to dump state, specifically account names, public keys, and balances. Since we were getting rid of the SBD concept, SBD was converted too BLURT at the price reported by the steem network's price feeds at that time. So when this special node synced to block 43,526,969 It stopped syncing and wrote to a file called snapshot.json.
Even today, that file is required to start a node on Blurt, and you may review it here:
https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmPrwVpwe4Ya46CN9LXNnrUdWvaDLMwFetMUdpcdpjFbyu
If you hold one of the 1.4 million steem accounts that existed in block 43,526,969 then you can actually log into blurt and begin using it exactly the way that you used steem.
https://blurt.world
I would like to tell you about some of the things we have changed and our future plans because in fact we don't really see ourselves as competition to steem or hive but instead another path.
I titled this post with the phrase economically rational because I think that most likely Dan baked some irrationality into steem to increase pumpability.
The irrationality was of course that there are no transaction fees. Without transaction fees, a chain is doomed to certain forms of spam and unbounded state growth. Both of these are very unhealthy to the blockchain organism.
https://blurt.world/blurt/@jacobgadikian/blockchain-application-tco
The ideal blockchain organism has a symbiotic relationship with its user community. It pays its users to fulfill its needs, basically machines, upgrades, network service.Users advocate for the blockchain organism in meat space. Users ensure that The blockchain organism is well recognized and well understood. In turn, the blockchain organism benefits them through its continued operation.
So one thing that Blurt is: a weakly intelligent form of life.
I'll also argue that chains that exhibit excessive centralization may be alive but are effectively slaves.
We have gone to great lengths to increase blurt's bus factor. Now the ideal bus factor for anything is zero. That means that the entire project team can get hit by a bus or die in a fiery crash and the project will continue to run smoothly.
Initially we had a bus factor of two, and currently I would say we have a bus factor of between five and 10. There is no company or other centralized entity although we have at times referred to a foundation. Generally these days, we are calling it by its accurate name, the shart.
In order to execute the needed changes to governance, I personally entered the accounts held by Stinc, Tron, and friends into a purpose-built ventilation system written in C++, designed to clear the fart smell from the air. The ventilation system did not ventilate any personal accounts, as was the case with Hive when they created their continuation of the steem chain of cryptographically linked blocks. Notably, Blurt is not a continuation. We are a fresh chain with no cryptographic link to Steem or Hive, but we did use balances from Steem's block 43,526,969 to populate our genesis state.
Essentially, they chose to curate in a different fashion. We felt that the real problem was excessive centralization and that the solution was temporary centralization.
Blurt kind of sort of has dictators at this time. I am one of them, and my partner is the other. We have what are called regent capabilities on the chain. This is what enabled us to give funds to all individuals, whether or not they wanted our chain to even exist. For the next 20 months, the regent allows us to curate the witness set, and that ability weakens each month. We actually don't need to use it much, here are our witnesses:
https://blocks.blurtwallet.com/#/witnesses
This is actually a radical simplification of the past situation. In the past situation, you had an organization that was effectively in control of the chain, while stating that users were in control of the chain. I can assure any reader that given the weight of the shart and the power enhancement provided by the regent, if it were necessary, we could dictate the entire witness set.
This probably opens up lots and lots of questions and I'm happy to discuss it but the basic idea here is to allow us to react and protect the chain while it is still a baby.
Would you send your 15-year-old kid to Chicago's South side without at least an AK-47?
I wouldn't. So we also gave the chain an AK-47: transaction fees.
That's why blurt has the regent and transaction fees that are determined by the witnesses. If troubling activity occurs, witnesses can always increase transaction fees. If someone comes after the witness set, for the next 20 months, my partner and I can curate the witness set. We launched into an environment where we knew that both economic and infrastructural attacks would occur. Both have occurred, and blurt is now stronger because they have occurred.
Okay I realize that is a fairly hyperbolic example, but the base point about protection remains. In fact a blockchain especially a proof-of-stake blockchain requires multiple layers of active protection and as time goes on, that protection certainly does not require the sort of centralization that the regent implies. That is why the regent is programmed to get weaker and weaker each month for the next 20 months until it has no vote weight.
Cock fault tolerance
If you're building a blockchain that includes a media element, you had better ensure that it is cock fault tolerant. Cockfault intolerance can kill your blockchain. I actually saw that happen on another chain where nodes stopped operating because there was a sudden influx of a very certain cock that was posted all over steem by some gentleman NGC / Bernie Sanders.
That cock then flooded whaleshares and blurt.
And what a mighty cock it was!
This cock was so powerful It managed to get whaleshares witnesses to quit, causing the chain to fail. They had proven cockfault intolerant. A cock was enough to make them run away. Luckily, our witnesses are a harder sort. The cock motivated them to find a solutions to 2 gigabytes a day of cock spam in the form of links to an enormous, swinging cock.
During this time, We at blurt, in particular, one engineer who I have an undying gratitude to, worked frantically to implement a feature that we had discussed pre-launch, transaction fees. These fees quickly served as a very effective cock block.
Trajectory
So what do we have?
We have a new way to execute governance changes on blockchains, which has received great validation because it has already been copied by the NewBitShares project.
We have a rapidly growing community of fairly fervent supporters.
We have skills and a human network that bridges several blockchain ecosystems.
We have the ability to export our own state, if we so choose.
So in the long run you should expect us to continue our hydra strategy, where our community build more and more front ends. Expect language and topic flavored front end interfaces, and expect the most popular ones to end up becoming new chains so that we never run out of capacity or experience runaway state growth.
If our chain should become full in terms of transaction capacity, you should expect that we execute a fork upon the willing, which is different from what we did to start Blurt. The fork upon the willing involves users posting the public key to the original And then The Genesis state of the new chain will reflect only the current balances of the willing. This prune stuff down to only active users who are interested in the new chain.
New chains will likely be based on Cosmos / Starport. It is an incredibly ergonomic tool for building new blockchains and I suggest that any engineers here check it out. It even automatically generates raspberry pi images. In our case, these new chains will be launched either to scale blurt or to allow a specific content vertical to have their own chain.
thank you for reading and learning about blurt.