The Bigger Picture - Part 1

The Bigger Picture - Part 1

By Christopher Franko

In this blog series i’m going to try to describe my overall vision for Expanse and the direction that I’d like to see Expanse go in. I’m going to describe what Expanse is and what it can do. Some of the projects I’m working on, and how they all connect with each other and what you can do to help. Let me first start off by saying, the path we are taking in is one that we have to make first. There are no roads in this brave new world, there are no guidestones or maps to read. We have essentially chose a direction to walk and just started walking. That’s what makes everything we do so exciting and rewarding.

What is Expanse?

Expanse is a public blockchain based platform that facilitates the creation of decentralized applications through the use of smart contracts. Smart Contracts are applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference . Expanse is a fork  of the Ethereum project. Early on in the life cycle of Ethereum we recognized there were some things that we, the Expanse developers, would do differently. Ethereum was branded as a decentralized virtual machine without the possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference but there was some code that conflicted with that ethos. For instance there was a piece of code known as the canary  that checked every block for a special signal that if found would kill the chain. There was also another piece of code known called bad blocks  that if used in conjunction with the canary could be used to double spend  or rewrite history at will, with very little recourse or even awareness. 

Then we removed the “difficulty bomb”  because again, that just seemed like a terrible idea. Once we took all of the stuff we didn't like out, we started to make what we like to consider improvements. We increased the block time  from 13 seconds to 1 minute as to allow blocks to propagate. By doing so we have significantly improved mining efficiency, lowered blockchain bloat, and lowered our inflation rate. Ethereum has system known as GHOST . GHOST is a blockchain scoring method that includes orphans in the total weight calculation of the blockchain. Because ETH’s blocktime is so low they suffer from a very high orphan rate upwards of nearly 8%. When I addressed this concern to Vitalik himself, his response was “blockchains don't need to be efficient”. I chuckled at the hubris and now ETH has insane bloat while EXP doesn’t. Could be anecdotal though because we also don’t have as many users as them, but if I were a betting man, i’d say even if we did have the same user base we would still have a lot less of the aforementioned issues. Moving forward.

Ethereum plans to introduce a new consensus algorithm they call Casper . Casper is a mixture of proof of stake and gambling that’s supposed to be able to lower the block time to a mere few seconds.  This is great and all, but like I pointed out earlier, we haven’t even solved the bloat problem yet so why throw gas on a fire? This is another area of concern that Expanse will be looking at with a different light. Because the lifespan of a decentralized platform is directly correlated to its affinity for scalability and accessibility, Expanse plans to take a more hybrid approach. Proof of work miners will still be able to mine, and stakeholders will be able to participate also, but its better to keep the blocktime around where it is now and wait for new developments on the scalability front before we crank up the speed to infinity and beyond.

Since we have adopted this “wait and see, then act” approach to developing the Expanse platform it gives us a lot of time to develop functionality FOR the platform. Which is exactly what we have been focused on lately. In the next blog post I’m going to describe some of our ideas, how we see the ideas being utilized, and how you can participate in their creation.

The footnotes.