Exclusive Interview with Stephen Xu
Key points for this article:
- Questions from readers
- Interview Questions
- Qtum Review: Current state of the project
‘Qtum’ since its crowd sale in March 2017, has gained quite a lot of respect in the developer as well as investor community. The project is a hybrid of the best of Bitcoin and Ethereum plans to make blockchain user-friendly for businesses. The project inherits the UTXO model from Bitcoin for tracking funds and utilizes Ethereum’s EVM to allow smart contracts. With major releases for Qtum yet to be announced, the recent exit of the ex-lead developer of Qtum Stephen Xu has raised some eyebrows. So today we will be interviewing Stephen and asking him questions regarding Qtum and blockchain’s future.
We will start by asking questions from our readers that we received through various social media handles. Though we were not able to address all of them we have selected two of them.
I have discussed this with Patrick many times before; I am excited about leveraging blockchain technology that users can directly use. Qtum Foundation presents a public chain platform that only developers can use for application development. Embarking on DREP (Decentralized Reputation System) Foundation is a move toward working on a solution that is closer to users.
Well, the BitCoin bubble has also burst many times before. Each time it burst, the price came back higher! I am a supporter of BitCoin, a pioneering project in the field of blockchain. Bitcoin is more than its price. As one of the first blockchain projects with user applications, the price of BitCoin also reflects the public’s perception and hopes for the future of blockchain technology.
As the nascent blockchain industry continues to grow and develop, we start to see more use cases for blockchain – such as in the finance and government sectors. I am very excited about the future of blockchain and its uses in the real world!
I am very confident that Qtum Foundation will do well in the hands of a well-qualified team of developers and Patrick Dai, my friend and the co-founder of Qtum Foundation. While I was with Qtum Foundation, we were able to release both testnet and mainnet within six months of the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) – this only shows how highly efficient and motivated the team is!
Blockchain may be a very nascent industry, but the increased development in the blockchain industry signals an exciting introduction of blockchain into mainstream interest and consciousness. Some of the technical problems that blockchain projects face today include balancing scalability and security.
Scalability has been an issue for existing blockchain platforms; high traffic can bring a platform down, as we saw recently with a large number of users on CryptoKitties causing congestion on the Ethereum network.
However, newer platforms that try to tackle the issue of scalability often end up compromising security and decentralization in what seems to be a zero-sum game. Using delegated proof of stake (DPOS) for example increases the transactions per second (TPS) but by leaving verification of transactions to a few supernodes, which makes the network more centralized.
“The recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) also poses new obstacles for the technology. The regulation mandates data be removable, but data on the blockchain is immutable. However, this regulation will only spur further innovation in the realm of blockchain. For us, we are working on a way for private data to be inaccessible, even if it remains immutable.”
DREP is a decentralized reputation ecosystem. We want to help both internet platforms – from e-commerce to content to gaming – and internet users tap onto the value of online reputation and overcome challenges of quality user acquisition, traffic monetization, and poor user engagement.
The foundations of our system are the quantification and tokenization of reputation, and aggregating each user’s reputation across platforms. Each user’s reputation is quantified through an algorithm that evaluates how desirable or meaningful their contribution to internet platforms is. Tied to this reputation value is the awarding of platform tokens, which may be spent on voting, tipping, or investing as well as traded on various token exchanges. DREP also aggregates the reputation values of each user across multiple platforms to present a single reputation value that can be referenced on our system.
Internet platforms can use DREP in multiple ways, including disincentivizing malicious behavior and incentivizing positive behavior. With the quantification of reputation, platforms can weed out malicious users or bots that distort reputation values. These users could be in the form of “fake armies” on e-commerce platforms, which create a large volume of fake orders to dishonestly inflate a vendor’s sales volume. Platforms will also evolve as users start to self-govern by leaving feedback on each other, hence encouraging positive behavior. For e-commerce platforms, this could be good customer service from vendors; for content platforms, this could be factual or meaningful content. Beyond this, platforms can also acquire quality users through filtering of reputation values, and monetize traffic.
Meanwhile, users will be able to harness the value of online reputation to build a transparent community built on trust. By disincentivizing malicious behavior and incentivizing positive behavior through tokenization, users will be more cautious of their behavior on the internet.
They are also able to gauge the trustworthiness of another user in their interactions. An example case of how this can be useful: users can check the reputation value of vendors on e-commerce platforms, which could reflect the quality of goods and services, before purchasing from them.
