ncodes

I think most people prefer tools that are convenient to use. Centralized code hosting services are super convenient. They offer many useful social features that make it tasking and unappealing to use git as intended. Even with tools like Gitea, we still flock to GitHub.

> So I just withdraw my funds take photos of them, "upload" them. Go back to my bank, exchange the bills and repeat?

Yes. Anyone else who gets hold of those bills you used and exchanged with your bank will find them "burned" when they try to use them on Ellcrys.

> What am I missing here. What is being accomplished by photoing bills?

Aside from fair distribution of the Quant, It is meant to create a sense of value. If your net worth is $1000 and your understand that sending this in will invalidate those banknotes, you might value the Quants you get differently. Going to your bank to exchange invalidated banknotes takes some effort as most people don't have their banks close by. You might take this effort into account when valuating the resulting Quant.

Basically, you'll need to give something of measurable value to receive a share of the root Quant.

> So I take a picture of a $100 U.S dollar, send it to your contract app, and I will get quant tokens? Which quant tokens are a cryptocurrency that I can sell on a exchange?

Yes. You take a photo of your any supported banknote and you get the equivalent in quants. We will be working with exchanges to have them listed.

> If this is true, you pretty much built a system were I can duplicate money because all I had to do is take a picture and send it? I didn't physically give you the money, I took a picture and you gave me money, while I kept the original money.

A banknote submitted and processed will no longer be usable on Ellcrys. It is simply a model for fair distribution of the digital currency such that everyone can claim what they are worth (cash) in quants. After the "blood fire" event and the total supply is claimed, no new banknotes will be accepted or processed. The initial value is derived from this conversion process; a banknote processed is considered "burned".

Most digital currencies gain their value from the utility of the platform they are native to. The Quant will be used to pay for resources allocated to contracts and could serve as a payment method for services offered by contracts.

I hope I answered your questions well. Happy to explain further if you need me to.

> What you are not understanding is that a smart contract is a protocol amongst people. You don't code it anywhere in the blockchain directly. It a a protocol that explains how, if each party runs code independently, assuming everyone as a criminal, still achieves its goal.

Okay, I see your point. This kind of smart contract you describe definitely needs strong cryptography and a blockchain would not be needed. I guess the issue is still about what a smart contract truly is and how it should work. I personally prefer the term self-executing contract as the "smart" seems too sensitive. Regardless of the language or definitions, I am interested in a platform were multisig applications can be executed safely and efficiently.

Thank you so much for your kind words and advice. It means a lot to me. I will definitely remember these words as I build on and receive feedback :-)

> "Ellcrys" is a word that is likely subject to trademark and owned by Del Rey.

umm, I will be looking into this. Thanks for the heads up.

I understand that there is a lot of debate about what a smart contract is, its legal scope and functions. However, we are not only building to host legal contracts but contract applications that are user-facing or API-based, owned and maintainer by teams or communities. These are the kind of contracts I believe will be most useful and practical today

Thanks for taking the time to check us out :)

> Surprisingly, there is code backing this crazy idea

Yes! and it works really well too :)

> ummm... huh ? This is a Shannara reference

Yes, it is :D

I respectfully disagree. You do not need a decentralized, social protocol to build a smart contract or self-executing application platform. A smart contract is simply an agreement between parties, written in codes and enforced by a third-party. In the case of Ethereum, it is enforced by cryptography, nodes independently executing codes and validating the results. This is great but hard to scale or build certain kind of applications. Ethereum introduced decentralized smart contracts, but it does not mean smart contracts need to be executed and secured decentrally.

If a platform can provide multi-signature environment, security and the ability to enforce and execute codes, it is a smart contract platform.

Thank you for checking us out :-)

This issue has been fixed. Please take a look again. Thank you :-)

I knew the "no gimmick" phrase will be subjective :-D

> And I still can't think of a single use case

If you and a several persons are in need of a platform to build any kind of cloud-based application but also do not wish to cede control of share resources (source code, keys, passwords, revenue etc) to your partners, then this will be the platform you will pick. Any existing application like a community built Uber/Airbnb alternative and more can be built on this.

I will fix the spelling errors. Thank you.

Exactly. As much as we believe decentralization will remove the middleman, we need to understand that not every application can be built on decentralized systems. Our goal is to provide a platform where communities/teams can build simple to complex projects without learning new languages, new best practices and maintain the ability to scale horizontally.

I'm so sorry about this. I will take a look and fix it.

> I'm not sure a quantum mechanical metaphor is the best way to describe your service

The service is not actually being described in the context of quantum mechanics. The native currency borrows some ideas from this paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.09047).

The primary offering is a platform to run scalable smart contracts or multi-signature applications with modern languages.

> I can't tell if this is serious or not (admittedly without reading the white-paper)

This is a serious thing. Please take a look at the whitepaper. Your feedback will be greatly appreciated.

> A reference to 'tokenized quantum signatures' (what the hell is that?)

We are basing our "cryptocurrency" on some of the ideas from the paper "Quantum Token Signature" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.09047) which is suitable for the kind of service we hope to offer. Tokenized quantum signatures allow for tokens to be used to sign messages just once. It requires an authority to keep track of the state of the token.

> New cryptocurrency without the crypto part and without the decentralized part

The idea is to build a platform for multi-signature applications without decentralization. If you take a look at the whitepaper, you may agree that the native currency is some kind of a cryptocurrency :-) .

> Basically its just contracts as a service with some token setup thrown in

Yes, its contract as a service platform and the token isn't just there for no reason. It is meant to fuel an economy of contract applications offering useful services.

> There are so many buzzwords in this, I can't make sense of it.

I am sorry about this. I am also not a fan of buzzwords. Please feel free to ask specific questions and thanks for taking the time to go through it.

I do not think there is need to encrypt the data as the JWT signature ensures the content cannot be altered successfully.

You will need the private key to successfully alter the token.

Also, the tokens shouldn't contain private information since JWT tokens can easily be decoded.

I am not exactly avoiding the blockchain. There isn't any production ready database that I am aware of that provides immutability like the blockchain and an advanced querying system like NoSQL database systems.

I looked at BlockchainDB which solves my immutability requirement but I don't think it's production ready yet and if I host one myself, I can mutate the data by destroying my BlockchainDB machine.

Justified paranoia :)

IPFS looks quite interesting. I will study it more to see whether it would play an important part in solving my problem. It appears there isn't an exact open source solution out there.

Thanks for your suggestion. The fact that data written to BigQuery can still be modified is not so great for my case. I want to be able to make data immutable forever. Nobody should be able to modify or delete it. Malicious alterations should not affect other nodes holding replicated data.

Actually, I want no admin.

Maybe this might sound a little crazy, I am trying to build a system where arbitrary number of persons maintain nodes (I don't even need to know these persons) that have my data. The software managing my data should only allow me append and read from it.

This kind of database makes it impossible for me to alter data once appended.

The distributed databases I have looked into have a user who grants roles/access to every other user. This means someone has to be trusted with full privileges. A solution where the access/role is baked into the software could be ideal.

This is a great. Finally, early stage ideas can get some support. Good one YC.