Interesting People #18: Alex Sterk, Community Manager on Ubiq

Alex Sterk is Community Manager for the Ubiq Slack, as well as the CEO of Ubiq Technology Inc, and also a Ubiq holder. I spoke to Alex about his background, the origins of Ubiq, what’s in store for Ubiq miners, and much more.

"Ubiq is a decentralized platform which allows the creation and implementation of smart contracts and decentralized applications" - learn more at https://ubiqsmart.com/.

So to begin, please give us a little bit of your background up to the time you joined the Ubiq team.
Alex: Well, being a community manager was never a plan of mine – it’s more something I stumbled on to. I come from a small farm here in Canada and I’ve always kind of been an entrepreneur, always interested in new technologies and how the world is changing, and what impact new technologies have on us.

I came into the Ubiq community really in its inception. It started in an IRC room –Bitcoin launched with an email list, Ubiq launched with an IRC chat room. That’s really what makes Ubiq different, is that it’s all built around a community. It’s not like we built a coin and then asked a community to come there. In that way everyone’s had a fair shot at it and anyone can do what they want with it.

Then about a year and a half ago I sat down with Julian (Yap) and Luke (Williams) and a few other members of the community and said, “look, we could really do something with this. What is the future plan? We can’t just say it’s this Proof of Stake or we’ve got this Bitcoin code and it’s going to last forever – no, we gotta think about where the industry is going and how can we be on the right side of it”.

From that first conference call we were immediately interested in working with the Ethereum code base – initially being an Ethereum token. So this was spring of last year, and we started the testnet for Ubiq about a year ago, in August. Then we launched the main network in January of this year. We’ve been going for about six months now and have a lot of tokens that are moving over. In our next announcement that’s coming out this week, we’ll be talking about more tokens that are switching. Some of them are old customers of Julian’s and Luke’s. These guys have been developing blockchain products for people for the last three years, and a lot of those people are realizing now that they didn’t want a whole blockchain – they just wanted a blockchain-based asset. I think the whole industry is sort of realizing that too. So, we’re moving a few of our old customers over who don’t necessarily have the resources to maintain the network. It consumes a lot of resources, so now they can move to Ubiq and pay per use.

That’s really one of our key aspects: sure, you can move to Ethereum but we are a little bit more of a close-knit community, we are a lot more outreach, and we avoid a lot of the politics of Ethereum. We’re a lot more low-key, and I think that shows with our marketing too. We don’t do a whole lot of marketing. Our main focus is on word of mouth. It’s a small industry, you want the right people to find you, and you really can do that through word of mouth – but it’s getting to the point now where we need to start looking at other options. It’s kind of the main focus of our discussions right now: what’s the most bang for our buck in terms of finding new users that add a lot of value to the space, and not just a couple guys who are looking to get rich in a week and then leave.

You mentioned the politics of Ethereum and that brings me to the next question - what is ‘wrong’, in inverted commas, with Ethereum and Ethereum Classic – why would somebody use Ubiq over those other two?
Alex: Well, we want to be for enterprise, and what we’ve realized through our conversations with people in enterprise who are used to established business models is that as soon as you bring up Bitcoin with them, they immediately think of Silk Road or Mount Gox – they only think about the worst parts of the history, and Ethereum has the DAO hack and that’s all that a lot of people know about, if they even do know about Ethereum. 

We are able to immediately dispel that as we don’t have any bad press related to us. Just on that surface level, that’s one easy selling point. If you look at something like Linux: it’s open source software but there’s more than one implementation of it. It’s the most popular operating system on the planet, but it’s very fractaled in terms of what version people are running or who is maintaining those versions. It all comes down to the team that you’re working with to maintain your software suite, so us being a smaller team with a bit more focus, we’re much better suited to go to enterprise and say, “look, you guys have heard of Ethereum and maybe you’ve heard bad news about it, but if you want to work with Ethereum, here we have a smaller community that can offer better support for you. Our 1-800 number is a little less bombarded!”

But then we also have things like not having an ICO or pre-mine really dispels a lot of ownership of the network, so it is a lot more distributed. Yes, our company has the same name and we release the official client but there’s nothing to stop anyone else from making their own client and making it theirs. That’s really important, I think, in a distributed network: that ownership is spread amongst everyone. So anyone can be a developer for Ubiq, anyone can write a new client.

Now with the SEC statement we’re even more confident now that we’re secure for the future. No one can come to us and say, “you’re distributing illegal securities”. We don’t control the underlying network – we have to ask for its support every time we want to do an upgrade, and that’s going to become even more apparent in the future if we want to do something like a hard fork. 

Hard forks are a good topic as well to try and prove stability. Doing a hard fork on a live network is very risky, and it always will be, but there’s always ways to mitigate that risk and one of the ways is to let someone else do the live testing of it. So we’re very excited about the new versions of Ethereum – Metropolis is suppose to be coming out shortly with more features, but we’re going to embed it a lot.

Then there’s other things like Proof of Stake. It’s going to be a major protocol overhaul for the network and I think we have a really good ability here to watch it from a distance and see how it pans out because our own network was Proof of Stake and we see small issues with it which could be big issues. Part of it being the consolidation of power… the only people who get new coins are the people with the most amount of coins, and over time that’s going to prove to centralize the network.

We’re hoping that we can not have that as our overall mindset (to be Proof of Stake). We’ve designed our Proof of Work to be Proof of Work forever, but we have the option of upgrading in the future. We have a plan for the next 10 years, the next 20 years, but it’s not our dead set plan – we can be beat from it. That’s really helpful for miners who want to know that the economics are going to be pretty sound and we’re not going to be changing things. Our monetary policy is very robust and will attract a lot of the mining community over time. 

What can you tell me about that and what you guys are doing, if anything, to prevent people coming along with a bunch of ASIC miners and totally take over? Is this even possible with Ubiq?
Alex: So, Ethereum by design is not really ASIC compatible. There’s something called a DAG file and every certain amount of blocks, the DAG file increases and that changes the memory requirements of the mining rig. So, if you want to design an ASIC, you need to basically redesign it for every DAG change. That deters a lot of miners from ever wanting to design an ASIC to get that strategic advantage, but you’re never going to get that cost back because the DAG file changes a whole lot. In Ubiq it actually changes a lot slower because we have a slower block time.

We got a bit of an advantage recently when Ethereum Classic finally hit a 2GB DAG file. Ethereum hit it a little while ago, but now Classic has hit it too. So now all these people who have graphics cards with 2GBof memory can no longer mine Ethereum or Ethereum Classic are looking for other options, and so they either go over to ZCash or they can mine on Ubiq for probaby the next 6 or 7 years, which is what we’ve calculated it as.

That really allows us to be a long-term player in the mining space and have our Proof of Work a lot more viable too. That’s part of the design choices we made. 

Is this something that you try to promote – that when the DAGs for other coins get too large, hey, you can come and mine Ubiq?
Alex: Yeah, there’s definitely something that we try to promote. We have a lot of little things that we’re happy with the network about. To say that Ubiq is better than Ethereum because of x is a really hard conversation to have because we don’t have one point that is really robust – but we have all these little things where if you add them all up, you’d think that if you were to relaunch Ethereum today, this is probably how you’d want to do it. We’ve had Vitalik say that about some of our changes, like our difficulty algorithm.

When the network is a lot smaller with Ethereum code, it doesn’t adjust to large fluctuations in hash rate very well. But with the scale that Ethereum’s at now, their difficulty algorithm is fine, but if you’re wanting to launch a network from scratch, you’re going to need a lot of cards – like, a pretty big network – or else you’re going to have a lot of problems with the hashrate fluctuating too much. We designed our own algorithm so that you can actually run the Ethereum code at much smaller levels and it will still be secure. That’s another point in our design choices – with that custom algorithm, if you were wanting to launch your own Ethereum network today, you’ll probably fork our codebase rather than the Ethereum code just because we’ve made those slight improvements.

The difficulty algo is one thing that Vitalik commented on. We’ve had minor communications with him just asking his opinion on things, and that’s one thing where he described that if he were to redo the Ethereum network today, he’d include that as well.

A lot of our design choices are around mining and the network, the community and governance choices that are coming out soon too. They really just add a lot of strength to it. 

So yeah, we have a lot of small points where when you add them together, Ubiq is a really good choice, but it’s hard to communicate that in a short sentence. 

You said that you’re focused on enterprise, but should the average internet user be concerning themselves with Ubiq at this time?
Alex: Well, we certainly don’t see ourselves as competitor to Ethereum – we complement Ethereum, by providing another option that is more secure and has a better cost per use right now. If you were wanting to build an application and you’re not really set on which network you want to use, just that cost benefit alone… it’s 200 times cheaper to use Ubiq than it is to use Ethereum. That should be enough to consider us. Or, know that over time we’ll have some overflow effects.

I’ve heard some prominent members of the cryptocurrency space talk about Ethereum Classic like, “oh yeah, once Ethereum becomes too expensive to run a lot of your applications, Ethereum Classic is the next one” and I’m like, yeah, that’s an argument you can make about both our networks. 

Well that’s something I wanted to ask – if Ubiq’s value does go up too much, is that actually counting against you? You know – it’s nice for the people who are holding a lot because they want to cash in, but it’s not so great for the developers and users because when the price goes too high, Ubiq loses one aspect of its competitive edge?
Alex: I think that’s always a problem. It’s not a terrible problem – I think we are much more stable in terms of value. Because we didn’t have premine, no one has an unfair stash of these things and over time, since we are staying Proof of Work that distribution is going to stay pretty good.

So, another aspect too is we’re tying to avoid doing ICOs directly on the platform using Ubiq because you kind of get this cannibalizing effect that it has on the supply. Right now a lot of Ethereum is locked up in these ICOs – these projects that have a lot of capital now – and I think that really messes around with the currency too much. It’s a little better now that the liquidity is up, but when you’re talking about these multi-million-dollar ICOs, that has a huge effect on the price. 

Ubiq’s price chart from 1 January 2017 to 24 August 2017. View it live on CoinMarketCap. 

I think it’s only a short-term thing. It creates a lot of volatility that you don’t want to have, so with Ubiq we’re trying to avoid some of that by using our partners at Bittrex to do crowdfunding with Bitcoin and still accepting some Ubiq as well, but with Bitcoin being the actual currency we’re after. We view Ubiq as a currency, and it has the monetary policy, but it’s far too small to be supporting multi-million-dollar ICOs, at least at this point in time. 

And that’s not really your intention, is it? That’s not what you guys are going for.
Alex: No. We just want the network to be self-sustaining. To be used enough that it justifies any inflation from mining. Right now our inflation is around 7% and that will decrease down to less than 1%, and at that point a couple of good dapps using the network would probably consume the amount of gas that’s required, and generate it as miner’s produce more currency.

That’s sort of our overall thing: how do we get the network self-sustaining to the point where inflation takes care of itself.

That ends Part 1 – you can find the conclusion here. Follow Alex on Twitter at https://twitter.com/alex_sterk.

You can learn more about Ubiq from the official site at https://ubiqsmart.com/, read more from The Ubiq Report on Medium, and stay up to date with latest Ubiq news by following on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ubiqsmart. And if you’re interested, why not join the community at http://slack.ubiqsmart.com/.  

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