1.1 Problem Identification
Why Blockchain Technology?
Technology is centralising industries through monopolies and oligopolies (Hall, 2021) at an alarming rate, destroying healthy competition and removing innovation in exchange for the few companies in charge's profit lines. Yet in recent years crypto currencies and other decentralised technologies have risen up in a fire of publicity and investments, sparking a new wave of technologists sharing rumours of a new generation of the internet, a generation that is decentralised and owned by it's users rather than by a small group of powerful leaders that care more about the lining of their pockets rather than their users.
Although technology is definitely not the only culprit of this growing wealth (and therefore power) inequality, as ever since the dollar became a fiat currency in 1971 its value has continued to diminish. Which paired with inflation being higher than that of interest rates means that the average working or middle class citizen who chooses to save their money in a bank is actually loosing money over time, rather than gaining it, and the real way that the corporate elite increase their spare funds over time is through the use of stock exchanges and investments.
Fiat money is a government-issued currency that is not backed by a physical commodity, such as gold or silver, but rather by the government that issued it.
A monetary system dominated by central banks and use of traditional fiat money has shown to benefit certain people more than others, such as bankers and moneylenders (Thornton, 2015). The traditional fiat money system is an inflationary system with a tendency to hurt the workforce and savers, resulting in hurting the lower and middle classes. It is designed to enrich those who control and operate the financial industry and the upper class (Thornton, 2015).
That is where blockchain technology comes in, allowing data to be stored on a decentralised series of nodes (user's computers) so as to give people control over their own data rather than the oligopolies and governmental bodies, and because of how this data is signed by the sender and we can track such data through the entire chain, this also allows the construction of cryptographically verified data and proof of ownership.
However, current Blockchains don't tend to have much support for actually useful data and either only have support for the currencies they were built alongside - Such as the bitcoin blockchain which only has support for bitcoin - or very small amounts of metadata. Such as the Ethereum blockchain, which relies upon all nodes that store the blockchain storing all of the data in it, or having connections to other nodes with all of the data, massively limiting what can be stored - right now this is about 0.5-1TB of data. (Anon, 2022).
This is where this project comes in, as instead of the methods of data storage mentioned above, the "monochain" (The name of the blockchain being developed in this project.) will be based upon using JSON data that can effectively store any form of data needed (by putting raw binary in a string, converting other data objects into JSON format, etc) and does not need every node to store every piece of data, instead nodes just need to be aware of enough other nodes that store all the other data, such that any individual node can always get any piece of data it needs. This will mean that initially, nodes will need to store all the data on the network as there won't be enough of them to only store a portion each, however if the network was to scale to one of a fraction of the size of a system such as bitcoin or ethereum's network then this segmented data storage method would take maximum effect.
What does this actually mean?
This project will come in three parts:
A protocol that enforces the rules of which to create a decentralised system of computers (who are referred to as nodes throughout this documentation) that can interact in such a way that they can trust each other enough to agree when someone holds an item/some data with value without requiring a governing central body such as a bank.
A node software that will run on any computer that wishes to be a part of this network, this software ensures any blocks generated by the computer running it abide by this protocol and that other nodes that it interacts with are also doing so. The way to think of this is that the protocol is like the blueprints for a city, and this node software is a house that fits into that blueprint, other people can build their own houses, as long as they fit to the blueprint of the city, but for most people a standard house is all they need.
A website, which will act as the portal into this blockchain for the majority of users, it will contain a basic wallet viewer, a basic transaction market for users to buy and sell items on the blockchain, a source for downloading the node software and a place to learn about this blockchain. This will be referred to as the webportal for a lot of this project, that's because it is website that acts as a portal into this blockchain, hence webportal.
Last updated