Topic: Calibrae - Cryptocurrency and Forum based on SporeDB technology - Presale now on - page 2. (Read 1085 times)

Calibrae is a cryptocurrency, forum, and e-commerce platform built on the new technology from the SporeDB project https://gitlab.com/SporeDB/sporedb, and uses Ed25519 EC keys, blake2s hashes github.com/ArtemKulyabin/cryptostack, Reed Solomon encoding https://github.com/templexxx/reedsolomon for Reliable UDP https://github.com/xtaci/kcp-go p2p network and transcription keys for secret keys, and the financial ledger will be based on the Tendermint Basecoin library, though the replication of the database will not be performed via the Tendermint blockchain protocol. It is being written in Golang and will compile for any x86 based platform, and perhaps not quite so optimised, for ARM based devices, and will be released in precompiled binary form for linux amd64, windows and mac platforms, and others, if possible, later.

The first draft of the Whitepaper can be seen here: https://git.calibr.ae/calibrae/spawn/blob/master/whitepaper.md and is also available in pdf format here: https://git.calibr.ae/calibrae/spawn/blob/master/whitepaper.pdf

Presale

The Presale can be seen at https://calibr.ae where the offerings for those interested in supporting the development of the system can be found.

About Calibrae

It is important to explain that this is not an ICO. There will be no tradeable tokens available to purchase before the network goes live. Instead, those who run servers that power the network are granted a non-liquidatable stake upon running their node for a full 24 hours, and from this stake they acquire the right to staking payments, which they submit to the network periodically, and are paid in accordance to their staked amount, divided by their ranking in the reputation system. It is possible to convert these staking payments back out, but the network will refuse to grant staking rewards to a server account under the initial minimum amount, as well as refusing to liquidate this initial stake, so, it's not money, but a necessary requirement that creates the base currency supply upon which basis the issuance rate is derived, which will be at 5% per year, the basis of which will be the supply irrevocably locked up as non-transferrable stake for server accounts in the initial, cryptocurrency phase of the network.

The advantages that are offered by these presale items have to do with increasing the voting influence of their server node, and later on, also in the forum that is planned. The network punishes detected attempts to propagate false transactions to the network as well as to attempt to vote for transactions that fail the quorum, as part of its security against corrupt data being stored in the distributed database, so even if a malicious player buys in, and then proceeds to try and poison the network, they will erode the advantage that they got paying in to the development funding pool. So it would be stupid to do this, but regardless of this, there will probably be those who will try, and of course this will necessitate regular security audits to ensure that any holes that are found by blackhats (or, for that matter, white and greyhats) are plugged up.

The Calibrae Spawn server software is in early phases of development, and currently is only being developed by volunteers, who are also working towards the acquisition of funds to pay coders and other necessary personnel to run the development process and market the project.

Calibrae is not a blockchain, but rather, a decentralised, crowd-sourced granular, consensus trust computation, distributed database and application platform

Another distinction of this project is that it does not use a blockchain model for replication of data. Instead, within the database itself, the data is stored in a certified format by the server nodes operating the network, and the replication process is much faster as instead of it being required to first transmit the full, mingled ledger, and then play the transaction log back, the nodes directly replicate the database state, either wholesale as for initial rollout, or piecemeal out of the structured format of the database so that nodes that have become out of date only have to request the parts of the database that are outdated.

It also does not include the supposedly privacy enhancing multiple, dynamic addresses used by most cryptocurrencies. Similar to the model used with Steem, and for that matter, most distributed databases, each account has one unique identifier, and a key pair for signing, verification, and the basis of the encrypted messaging system based on xtaci's reliable UDP library.

Development Roadmap

We have a multi-stage development plan laid out, and the initial release will be for the server operators earning staking rewards from a 5% per annum increase of supply, derived from the initial stake granted by the network to operational servers, and calculated completely upon the basis of the actual uptime of the server node. Depending on the results of the presale, which aims at a target of around $400,000 initial seed funding, we may also add a special development account with a boosted stake reward equal to 5% of the supply that can be distributed (out of the 5% per year amount) which decays at a rate of 1% per day, meaning after about 6 months the increase is under 1% of the total supply allocation, and dwindles to zero within 2 years.

The second phase of development is in the social network forum and messaging system. The social network will be built with a full set of languages built in, and the web application is served directly by most types of full nodes in the network, as well as shard nodes that read-only replicate only specific languages. Outside of staking rewards for full, internet routable nodes, when the forum is in operation, built into the node.js web application served up by nodes, is a grant of a 5% share of the rewards allocated by the voting system in the forum to the server operators. This is available to any node that holds the database that is required by the application, including such as sharded language specific 'mirror' nodes which provide access to both the ledger as well as one or several specific languages. The purpose of this is to lower the hardware and connectivity requirements to participate in the network.

Security for the client-side application

The use of a client-side application delivered by servers is also protected by the covert certification process that ensures that all nodes serving the application are serving the canonical, and preferably current, version of the application. Note that the wallet application, which will be developed to be released alongside the launch of the initial cryptocurrency network, will be accessible by running a full node, and of course, if the full node has a listener on an internet routeable address, this node is able to win staking rewards as well. This simplifies the access to the application, though we would want native desktop versions and mobile versions based on the same code available, and will be implemented at least initially by directly integrating the node.js app into native application frameworks for Android, iOS, and also, of course, Electron, for desktop systems.

Security mechanisms for protecting the integrity of the database

The mechanism that will operate to ensure that malicious behaviour by server operators does not cause damage to the integrity of the data in the network, is from several methods. The reputation system forms the basis of this, and a reputation ledger is attached to each account that records consensus decisions about the trustworthiness of account holders, that can be in part automatically degraded due to repeated attempts to poison the network, thus reducing the ability of such nodes to upvote bogus transactions, and it will extend further with the rollout of the forum to also include the results of crowd-sourced judgement of alleged bad behaviour by both simple forum accounts as well as server accounts. Running altered versions of the web application front-ends will also result in degradation of the reputation of a node, as any number of malicious things could be inserted into a non-open-source modified version of the app, such as stealing passwords, assigning reward splits to the server operator that are not equal or less than the canonical, consensus level of reward allocation granted to server operators, as a way to pay them for their work and expenditures.

Reputation system

The reputation score is calculated from the range of rankings of all accounts in the network, and is multiplied as a coefficient against stake to derive voting power. This voting power operates automatically from the server operator's system, as agreed by consensus throughout the network, as well as limiting the influence of stake within the forum system. If a non-posting account is causing problems in any way, either by downvote attacks, or upvote collusion, and users on the forum perform investigations and can produce evidence of mischief, the users of the network have the power to diminish the reputation of such accounts using a mechanism based on 'muting' and 'ignoring' which puts a hold on a portion of the targeted account, based on the voting power (stake x reputation rank) of those 'shunning' the mischief maker.

The reason for building in a system like this is because of what I learned from experimenting with the very flimsy and overly simple reputation system in the Steem network, which was being actively abused by numerous high stake accounts, as well as other accounts that had manipulated their reputation score in order to either bully others, or exert undue control over the witness election. Another element of this 'shunning' transaction, is that when serving up results of database searches in the forum, the posts of shunned accounts will not be passed on to the user. It was infuriating on Steemit, seeing the web application still downloading the crap from muted accounts, and briefly flashing them up on my feed of posts from myself and those I was following.

Plans for further development beyond the cryptocurrency and social network

Just to give some idea of where we will be taking it after that, will be the creation of an e-commerce system which will include the integration of both inventory and logistics management systems for multi-stage processes such as deliveries and production, and within the forum, there will be 'community' accounts, which enable a profit sharing scheme from posts made within the community forums, and include a namespace tree for multiple subforums within a community, and the owners of the community namespaces, will have the ability to delegate moderation functions that allow the protection against spam/scam/troll activity. This community system will be built into the second phase forum system, and it forms the basis of a namespace system that will grow into a full name service system.

From this point, there will also be the addition of client-side programmable relaying, enabling location obfuscation a-la Tor and I2P, as well as the use of this routing to enable fully private servers that cannot be geographically located via traffic analysis. Whether the server endpoint is a public IP address or hidden behind the routing system, we then enable the use of custom databases and associated front-end applications, much like websites, within which framework private services can be implemented. The idea will be that as well as centralised, and private secondary internal network services, it will also be possible for a service to be farmed out to other users and monetised in similar ways as the main forum network system, by allocating a share of revenue created by users paying for services of these second level network services that live within the Calibrae network.

As mentioned in the Presale, also, part of the forum system will also be a peer to peer media hosting system based on IPFS, and nodes that offer the service of delivering media files to users will by this enable the earning of an extra amount of share of the rewards splitting from users who upload content along with their text posts.

I hope that I have sufficiently explained the general outline of what the project will be delivering, please do ask questions to clarify any points and I will do my best to clear up these questions.

Thankyou for reading.

Loki