ArcBlock Community Technical Q&A 5/23/2018

On May 23rd, ArcBlock held the third Community Technical Q&A event. The excepts from conversation between CEO Robert and ArcBlock’s community members are as follows.

Q: Do you have source code control?

Of course. We use GIT as our source control system. And we use Travis as our continuous integration tool. We have a advanced and automated development process.

Q: ArcBlock is platform service, rather than a standalone software package or set of APIs. What is ArcBlock a comprehensive solution between? and how to contribute to the future technology community?

ArcBlock will provide API services, such as Open Chain Access Protocol, OCAP for short. It's a hosted service, which means developer can use it immediately without having to install or deploy it. We will announce how to contribute in the technology community. The contribution will include bug fixing, feature request, feature contribution, and document related works, etc.

Q: Hi Dev Team. I have a question. What is the difference between ArcBlock and Bitcoin and Ethereum. Can ArcBlock replace Bitcoin or Ethereum? Why or why not.

ArcBlock will not replace Bitcoin or Ethereum. Instead, ArcBlock will make Bitcoin and Ethereum better with our OCAP. Developers will be easier to implement applications based on Bitcoin or Ethereum, or any other blockchain supported by OCAP.

Q: Dear ArcBlock Team, I heard that, there are some Blockchain Projects nearby recently, they called Blockchain 3.0 & good roadmap is earlier than you such as Quarkchain.io. So, could you please tell us what are strengths of your project can compete with them.

Blockchain 3.0 is a wide and big concept. Quarkchain is an interesting project however we are aiming different problems and taking different directions.

Q:Do you have other ArcBlock Principle can share with us?

In ArcBlock, we really get inspired by the book "Principle" by Ray Dalio. And we try to build the company based on principles, hopefully someday we will open source our principles as well.

Q: How to choose the best team members in product development formation? Next plan for project Arcblock？

It's very tough work to pick right team members. In the past months, this is one of my most important tasks. In general we found we can send 1~2 offers from 100+ resume. We'll try our best to hire the right people for ArcBlock, so you will see we might hire slower than expected. However with higher quality people on board, we might be able to work faster and better with less people.

Q: If we can provide SDK integration for Microsoft development tools?

At this moment we didn't have time for this yet.

Q: So the SDK integration will be based on the .NET framework?

Unlikely it's .NET framework, our first language and framework support is Node.js, Microsoft did have good Node.js dev tool support recently.

Q: As mentioned in last week Tech Q&A, Amazon can join the ABT network as ABT computing node. Would Robert like to explain in detail the role and operation mechanism of the resource miners in the ABT network described in the ArcBlock Whitepaper. If joined, how does Amazon play a role in ABT network?

Just to clarify and not send wrong message, AWS is our first supported platform for ArcBlock. So in the first phase, resource miner will only be able to provide resource on AWS. In simple, resource miner can run ArcBlock platform in their own AWS account and provide ArcBlock service either for their own apps, or other's apps. ArcBlock's billing and operation support system are blockchain based, so it's inter-connected between all resource miners.

Q: Do you think you will ever expand to Azure and maybe google cloud too? Or just Amazon AWS?

The goal is cross-cloud support.

Sharing on Principle:

In ArcBlock, we have this simple principle: "we will not announce expectations, we announce surprises". So, when will we do XYZ, the general answer is "when we feel it's ready". If we feel something is likely off the track, we will communicate in the community, if we don't say anything, usually means it's on the track as we planned.