The Psychology Behind It
What you can do with US$70 million? You can buy Kim Kardashian and Kayne West’s California house at The Hidden Hills, or a Bombardier Global Express, or adopt 7 million trees a year. Maybe you can consider buying digital art over the blockchain.
Non-fungible token (NFT) is making it into mainstream media and almost every other person you know are talking about NFT after Beeple’s “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” was auctioned off by Christie’s recently for US$69.3 million.
In this article, I am not going to discuss what is NFT, but about WTF.
Why people buy NFTs? There are…
The Conclusion
Is there a panacea for all the blockchain headaches we have?
In the previous 6 articles, I have been comparing the features of Ethereum and Symbol side by side, and I am just scratching the surface. To recap:
- Part 1: Talked about their beginnings and their trajectories, briefly.
- Part 2: Talked about how both blockchains implement Proof-of-Stake with a different flavor.
- Part 3: Discussed Ethereum’s smarted contract and Symbol’s plugins.
- Part 4: Looked into different types of nodes in both blockchains and their roles.
- Part 5: Discussed how fungible tokens are represented in both blockchain.
- Part 6: Discussed how non-fungible…
You are one of many; you are one of a kind. You bear the common features of humankind, yet you are the one and only. You are non-fungible.
Blockchain allows parties to exchange assets without an intermediary. Sometimes, we exchange something fungible, like monies of different denominations. Sometimes, we exchange something fungible for something unique, like paying money to buy a house or exchange something unique for another unique thing, like a Pokemon trading card for another. Here, is where non-fungible token (NFT) plays its roles.
ERC-20 and Mosaic
When we talk about tokenization in the physical world, we want to make something intangible tangible. For example, a “token of appreciation” is how we make the intangible “appreciation” tangible through representing it with a gift. While in the digital or virtual world, when we talk about tokenization, we want to make something tangible intangible. For example, tokenizing USD to USD Tether.
Tokenization is an important and most used function of blockchain. It allows assets to be transferred from one party to another without an intermediary. There are 2 categories of tokens, the fungible ones, and the non-fungible ones. Fungible…
So, with all those choices around, what should you and I do to contribute to the networks?
Nodes are like the cells of your body. You are made up of cells but a single cell alone does not define you. You are not an amoeba. Neither is a blockchain. Your body comprises of different types of cells, blockchain has different types of nodes. You have cells that built up your heart and brain (and other organs) that you cannot live without, blockchain has its heart and brain distributed amongst the nodes.
Ethereum 1.0 uses Proof-of-Work has 3 types of node. You may set up nodes with different clients written in different languages.
Full Node
While Ethereum smart contract is like Play-Doh, Symbol plugins are like Lego.
Contrary to what most people are advocating, I believe comparison brings out the best in both parties. It is a matter of perspective.
What is Ethereum Smart Contracts?
The Parent, the Child, the Uncle, the Nephew, the GRANDPA, and the GHOST.
Though might be considered an extended family member to one another, they are under the big Blockchain family after all.
The Parent and the Child
Let’s imagine a blockchain is a family tree of the generations of a species, called the “block”. What each block carry with them is the “transactions”, something that happened during their lifetime. This is the karma that will follow them forever. There are many different types of blockchain, just like different human races.
There is something strange about this species. Other than the first block, usually called a Genesis Block, which is born without a…
For businesses to adopt blockchain, the possibility of rollback is always a concern. Finality takes away this worry.
NEM started with Proof-of-Stake (PoS) derivatives, and Ethereum has been planning in moving from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to PoS and it is now partially implemented. Let’s together look into how they mitigate some shortcomings inherited from PoS.
Proof-of-Importance (PoI)
NEM Infrastructure System 1 (NIS1) uses Proof-of-Importance (PoI), a proprietary consensus protocol that makes “the rich get richer” shortcoming in PoS.
The process of forming a block is called harvesting and the account that proposed and signed a block is called harvester. Harvesters in PoI protocol do not need to run a node. …
Both blockchains are released in 2015 and both are having their 2.0 released about the same time. With their second iterations underway, I dived in to look for the similarities and differences between them.
History
I always think it is important to look back on history as it tells us the direction of the future.
“It’s the world’s programmable blockchain.” — www.ethereum.org
Ethereum introduces smart contracts (computer codes that execute when criteria are met), DApp (Decentralised Application), and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM, Turing-complete and stake-based). It allows conditioned actions to be carried out. For example, Bitcoin allows A to send money…
“There is a whole world out there waiting to be explored.”
Symbol Blockchain Explorer is the window of the world of Symbol. It tells you its performance (price, traffic etc), its history (block heights), its activities (transactions), its community (nodes), and many more.
The explorer supports multiple languages. There are many ways to peek into what’s happening. First, at the top right-hand side, there is a box where you can search by block numbers, transaction hashes, addresses, mosaic IDs, and namespace IDs.
Let’s take a look at the subpages.
Here, you can find the list of every block, starting…
