Emercoin is one of the early projects to create a full ecosystem of blockchain-based network services. It was founded in 2013, before the era of ICOs and smart contracts. This article was written by one of the founders and developers of the project – Oleg Khovayko, CTO Emercoin. It [almost] completely preserves the expression and identity of the author’s text.
Token! ICO! Mining! Farm! DAO! STO! IEO! Hype! Native! Piastres, piastres, piastres! Freebies, freebies, freebies!
Sound familiar? Tired of it? If it still doesn’t, stop reading this boring and annoying text and keep casting the above spells intensely and confidently, and keep buying tokens (this is important; magic doesn’t work without buying tokens). And you will get fabulously rich! For you obviously know better than anyone how to extract money from a speculative market in which no value is produced.
Technology instead of tokens
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We’ll go the other way! (V.I.. Lenin)
We, the developers of Emercoin, initially understood that we are far from the geniuses of crypto-trading and daring financial transactions. And initially we decided to develop a blockchain platform and services for practical use – both in business and by individuals. And we made a platform that – works. That is, it does what it needs to do, and most importantly, it does not do what it does not need to do.
In development, we consciously rejected smart contracts, which we view as an intractable security vulnerability. As a result of some healthy conservative technology decisions, we have made an industrial-grade blockchain platform that has been running steadily since 2013 without any major surprises like the TheDAO crash or the unintended dump of 300 million.. In general, the thing turned out to be boring, not hype, crypto-society of little interest. But very interesting to professionals and has received attention in both peer-reviewed scientific journals and military conferences.
U.S. MILITARY CONFERENCES.
We are happy about this recognition of our efforts and find it amusing that while the crypto-industry zombies are chasing discounted tokens and other mirages, serious professionals are studying our technologies and making articles and reports about them.. And some even use these technologies!
What are Emercoin’s technologies, and why are they of interest to professionals outside of fintech and other token activity?
Safety first
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Step by step, let’s reach the goal! (Mao Zedong)
As stated above, Emer prioritizes reliability. For if there is no reliability, then in spite of all the sparkle you have in your hands is a toy, nothing more. And no one is going to make the least serious business critically dependent on toys.
As everyone knows, blockchain is a distributed repository of trusted information, where trust (trust) arises as a result of the consolidated efforts of independent miners. Miners, on the other hand, are stimulated by freshly created coins circulating within the respective blockchain. Thus, a public blockchain without cryptocurrency is nonsense. A true public blockchain, even for non-monetary applications, must be built on cryptocurrency. Otherwise it simply will not have a trust (public trust). And that is exactly what all cryptocurrencies are, starting with Bitcoin. Incidentally, due to Emercoin’s uniquely hybrid three-in-one consensus, its trust is very high, and PoW complexity (which is what characterizes trust) exceeds that of Bitcoin.
But cryptocurrency blockchains only store information about payment transactions. The Emercoin blockchain extends this functionality by storing transactions that manage the NVS subsystem
– Name-Value Storage system.
NVS can be thought of as a global file system without subdirectories, in which anyone can place a file with a unique Name (up to 512 bytes long) and any Value content (up to 20 KB). And only the owner of the file has the right to change its content or transfer ownership to another person. The cryptocurrency transaction mechanism is used here as a means of trusted distribution of relevant “files” to all participants in the network.
The NVS subsystem is open and has a documented API. Thus, anyone can create their own service on the basis of the NVS, without any of our participation. And such services are being created! Examples include the DocSensus notarization service
Deloitte, or the authentic educational history of students at the Aktiv finacademy.
What services are on Emercoin
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Oh, my kobushka is full (Russian folk song)
Emercoin developers did not stand aside and made a number of non-monetary services on their own blockchain based on NVS. Unlike the promises sold by tokenizers (of varying degrees of feasibility) to do something, these services have already been made, are in commercial operation and are available to everyone, free of charge, as open software (Open Source).
Here’s a list of the most popular services that have “gone mainstream. You can see the full list by browsing the slideshow on the website.
1. emerDNS is a decentralized alternative DNS designed to build highly reliable, fault-tolerant networks. Appreciated by websites hit by Roskomnadzor blocks. Sites have been using an alternative DNS system for years, which blockers simply do not see. There are a number of articles on this topic on Roskomsvoboda, which explain the advantages of this boring system, which just works, and does not go in any comparison with revolutionary ICO projects like Nametoken or Dynatiq, launched in 2017 and 2018, while emerDNS worked already in 2014;
When you need to make money from readers of only the first paragraph – then the corresponding projects become the first and revolutionary. Moreover, some particularly talented individuals have even stated that emerDNS is bad because it has no speculative liquidity! The fact that it works, has the highest trust and is supported by many independent projects, such as OpenNIC, BDNS, PeerName, Fri-Gate – these individuals do not care at all. Good luck to them in their quest for domain system liquidity! We believe that Nametoken, Dynatiq and the like mentioned above are not the last attempts to make money, so those who want to play with domain systems liquidity will still be given enough chances to prove themselves. And we will continue to develop the boring emerDNS. And readers and site owners will use it without any tokens or ICOs.
2. ENUMER – distributed telephone directory for IP-telephony systems, VOIP. Allows nodes in federated Internet telephony networks to establish direct connections with each other, bypassing public telephone network operators. The article describes in detail how it is designed and works, as well as how to connect your VOIP-PBX to the ENUMER network. At the moment the system allows free calls to all toll-free numbers in the U.S. and Poland, as well as to any other numbers registered in the system. There is also an Android SIP software phone, VOIP by Antisip, that supports ENUMER. Just think – download the app, set it up, and you can call hotels, banks, etc. in the U.S.. – free, with no roaming or other fees! And no tokens or ICOs.
Emercoin partners in ENUMER project are PortaOne and eZuce manufacturers of software switches, and VOIP-aggregator SipBroker aggregates information from ENUMER network in its answers. We would like to add that Postmet and Meganet have created an automatic number validator for ENUMER system, where for only 1EMC you can validate your phone number and get the corresponding enum-record to your Emer-purse. What’s also interesting about this validator is that it supports emerSSL certificate-based user authentication, which we’ll discuss below.
You can find more information about the ENUMER system in the list of resources.
3. emerSSL – a decentralized password-free authentication system based on self-signed client SSL certificates and NVS-system EmerSSL.. The article explains in detail why this system is needed and why it is better than password authorization. Since emerSSL certificates are fully compliant with the X.509 standard, they can be easily loaded into any browser, both a computer and a mobile device based on Androind/IOS (other systems we just have not checked). Note that emerSSL certificate authentication has two advantages over password authentication, which is especially relevant for mobile devices:
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More convenience-no need to type a complex password on a virtual keyboard, especially from a small phone.
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Increased security – mobile devices are more likely to be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, where you can get “free WiFi” from an attacker. In this case emerSSL does not establish a connection, and the account is not compromised. No password leaks, for lack of them.
EmerSSL technology was used in particular by Livecoin for user authentication (the exchange shut down in January 2021). The very fact that the system is used by the exchange, which is financially responsible to its customers, shows the trust to this system. This article contains a video instruction on how to use Emercoin wallet to make emerSSL certificate, register it in the blockchain and set up access to the exchange with the certificate. Simple, cheap, effective. Also, emerSSL authorization is used on the server of phone number validation system ENUMER.
Once again, everything is mundane and boring. The system simply works. There are no bright and memorable events in her history, when someone hacked her and stole a lot of money, which love to read about crypto-chatters (especially stopped after the first paragraph). No romance or detective intrigue! There are no tokens or ICOs accompanying any fascinating crypto-action.
4. Randpay – scalable Emercoin cryptocurrency mass micropayment subsystem. Contrary to promises to make a payment system comparable to VISA sometime in the future, our Randpay already has that performance – tens of thousands of settlements per second, trillions per year. Because of the “freshness” of the subsystem, it is still not operational yet, although there are already applications for its use, for example by DeNet.
That concludes our brief overview of Emercoin technology. These and our other technologies and subsystems are described at emercoin.com. Visit our site and our other resources, ask questions in our Telegram group and on the Bits.media forum.
Knock, and it will be opened to you! (Matthew 7:7-11)
To summarize the above, the experience of the Emercoin journey says the following:
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Life outside of crypto-trading and other speculation – there is!
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Blockchain can be successfully applied to the broadest class of real-world tasks beyond speculation and token trading.
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Real-world projects can be done without tokens and ICOs, it doesn’t make them worse.
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Real-world companies have a moderate interest in blockchain and are willing to use the technology in their business.
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Blockchain suitable for real-world business applications must first and foremost be reliable and predictable, i.e., boring.
Boring is good!