Aleph.im x Satoshi Club AMA Recap from 18th of December
Tags: Ama, Recaps, Cryptocurrency News, Bitcoin

PART 1, INTRODUCTION AND COMMUNITY QUESTIONS

Mary | Satoshi Club: Hello, Satoshi Club! We are happy to announce our AMA session with Aleph.im! welcome to Satoshi Club.

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Hello! Happy to be here!

Mary | Satoshi Club: Welcome to Satoshi Club! Happy to see you here again!

Please, introduce yourself to our community and tell what’s new happened to Aleph.im since August.

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: I am Jonathan Schemoul (alias Moshe Malawach) from aleph.im, I am here with @claudio_101 Claudio, our UX designer. Yup, a lot of new things happenned since then! We integrated the Cosmos and Polkadot ecosystems, Accepting their addresses on the network. We have worked on our staking and core channel nodes program, that is now going live… today!

Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: We have been working hard on this one!

Mary | Satoshi Club: Wow!!! Already or some hours later?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Mmh, I can share the url with you here as a first! To register nodes and stake on them https://account.aleph.im You need an account with metamask or similar to login.

https://esatoshi.club/wp-content/uploads/photo_2020-12-24_03-51-10.jpg

The nodes that we are speaking about are these, the core channel nodes

Q1 from Telegram user @batrud

700,000 tokens need to be staked in order to create a NODE. That’s a huge amount for an average crypto user. How do you plan to attract medium users as well to participate in the nodes? Is it possible to create pools for that?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: The idea is that there will be two types of nodes: the core channel nodes and the resources nodes. Here we are speaking about the core channel nodes. Those are the network controllers, they need to have skin in the game, they will decide who gets paid or not. And as a side note, to create a node, it’s 200k ALEPH. The 500k can be entrusted by the community. The resource nodes (coming in 2021) on the other hand will require no token collateral to start.

https://esatoshi.club/wp-content/uploads/AF2.jpg

Let me share with you a quick comparison of the node types:

https://esatoshi.club/wp-content/uploads/AF3.jpg

The network provides decentralized database, file storage and computing, the resource nodes will be providing this!

Mary | Satoshi Club: Which month, quarter are resource nodes coming?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: ETA is currently mid-2021. Until then the core channel nodes will do that work as well. As the network is already live.

D. | Satoshi Club: So, core channel node always get reward, even if it’s goes offline?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: No, if they go offline they don’t get paid. But they always receive rewards, even if they don’t provide a service at this exact time. As the service they provide is the network security and not just hosting or computing.

Mary | Satoshi Club: Do you users have possibility to join something like shared nodes services?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Mhh they can stake on any nodes, the staking needs at least 10k ALEPH. The node owner needs 200k to start the node. That being said, we will support smart contracts to allow pooling.

Mary | Satoshi Club: That’s good news! Can you tell the amount of rewards which node owners will receive approximately for one month?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Hard to say before having enough live nodes, the registration just opened right now when we shared the url here.

The node owners get a share of 15k ALEPH daily, shared between all nodes that are active.

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: I can share our node operators one pager document here.

Aleph.im_NodeOperators_OnePager_20201204–2Download

Q2 from Telegram user @alex_satang

In your whitepaper, it is written that the current state of applications is written (or computed from) on a blockchain, this is immutability. But what if you want instantaneous actions, batching user requests for non-critical items? When you say non critical items, what do you mean by that? how do you classify them as such? Also, is it possible to wrongly classify a critical asset as non-critical and exploit this somehow?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: That’s a good question. Let’s take our staking for example. When you go on account.aleph.im and join a node as a staker, you sign a message, the message is taken into account instantly by the network, but the value date for it is the next ethereum block it gets included in and if there is thousands of messages that are waiting, they all get included as a single transaction the distinction is done on the application side: if you decide it’s critical you take the confirmation height/time, if not, the reception time that could be a bit before. I don’t think that there is that much of a risk, beside on virtual machine, but those will use a chain as a single source of truth (for ordering).

D. | Satoshi Club: And by the way, by now only ethereum users can take part in staking? if im not mistaken you working on cross-chain solutions?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: There is a bunch, my-beta.aleph.im that is our personal storage dapp, blogtest.aleph.im that is the blogging dapp beta, starname.me that allows to receive cryptocurrencies with a simple name (it’s a partner), and a lot of others.

Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: We have the node and staking dapp. The storage dapp in beta. The note taking dapp in beta. A blog dapp in beta.

Mary | Satoshi Club: Starname, everyone can join?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Yup! using a ledger nano with their app on it you can use https://app.starname.me/, the user profile is stored on the aleph.im network, (name, description, picture…)

Q3 from Telegram user @madkaren

One of your use cases is related to Social Networks, Blogging Platforms, Chat Apps and Media Sharing App. This is especially interesting given the interest of big players like Facebook in this field. How are you going to implement your solutions for social media?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Using channels: the network is split into channels, each one with its own set of files and database entries. This way it’s fully scalable: not everyone stores everything, and the core channel coordinates everything. Basically all the social network data is stored on the aleph.im network as database entries and files, and retrieved from nodes that have the data.

This way we can achieve huge amount of data stored for each dApp. Also, our decentralized identity solution developed with synaps and ledger gives a single identity source (to have decentralized blue check marks, like the ones on twitter), and avoid spam.

Mary | Satoshi Club: How i, a single person, can use it? Or it’s using by platforms?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: The network itself by developers, but you as a person can use the dApps built on the network.

Mary | Satoshi Club: What new developers currently preparing for users?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: There is Orion protocol that works on a trading terminal, BCDiploma on a diploma verification platform, Serum that is a dex, Jarvis margineum for margin trading which is made trustless by aleph.im, and many others. Those aren’t directly on the social network side, but for trading we are working on trader profiles with verifiable trade records.

Q4 from Telegram user @surdumiha

I’m very interested in your serverless file storage. What are the requirements for the people to be part of this (i mean to contribute with their storage and get rewards)?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Those are the resource nodes, between 1–8TB of hard drive, and 32gm of ram at start, but it might be lowered between now and the actual resource nodes launch. As we have a few corporate clients who need to store on company computers (like all the company personal computer become the company cloud) or on small devices on-site (your printers become your cloud). So we will need to have “light” storage servers.

Mary | Satoshi Club: These nodes are not live yet, right?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Yup, not live yet. That being said, you can start a node right now, as the network is permissionless for that part, but you won’t get paid yet. The only nodes that are getting paid are the core channel nodes for now (until official launch).

Q5 from Telegram user @nasharussia1

There are very few entries in your explorer. Can you explain why is that so? Usually even not very popular projects tend to have a lot of activity and transactions.

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Uhhhh, 12.5M entries there

Even if we are a bit prunning the history right now when going on ethereum mainnet as a sync source for the new core channel nodes, the archival nodes (including the explorer) continue to hold these 12.5M messages. So there is plenty of entries!

But if you are speaking about ethereum erc-20 explorer, we did a token swap not that long ago, so the history is split between two erc-20 contracts.

Mary | Satoshi Club: Why did you need token swap?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Following the kucoin hack, to return the token the hacker took so the users didn’t lose their funds, we were able to do it back then, we won’t be able so easily now since the network gets decentralized with the core channel nodes. Such move will be made much much harder.

Mary | Satoshi Club: Oh, i thought about this. Was it hard decision? I know that some projects rejected swaps.

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: Yeah, really didn’t do it happily. We didn’t have the choice and it was the only option. We had to act fast, and we did.

Claudio_101 [AlephIM]: We got lots of credit for it from our community for this. We have a great community!

Mary | Satoshi Club: Sure, i understand, 50/50, that situation wasn’t good.

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: It has been hard due to the AMM pools as well. So we had to take it into account. For people on uniswap and balancer that weren’t able to remove liquidity on time, we gave them more ALEPH tokens.

Q6 from Telegram user @peachespecos

Looking on your roadmap, there is a dapp called Personal storage. Can you tell me if this dapp is running, and if yes how is the data/ information protected? Is it safe to use, and I’m thinking if there is not a high risk of losing the data?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: It’s my-beta.aleph.im, live now. Data is hosted by the network that ensures it’s always live and stored on multiple places.

As for security of your private data, it’s encrypted end-to-end for your own private key using state of the art encryption (ECIES).

Mary | Satoshi Club: How can we use this dapp?

Moshe Malawach [AlephIM]: It’s pretty simple, go on the top right button, create an account, and you’re in! Then you can store files and notes instantly.