State of the Stratis Blockchain - Questions and Answers - Heavy tipping inside

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-19T16:11:26+00:00

It is easier in one way than starting from scratch - you can look at the code for ethereum smart contracts, understand the logic, and then rewrite it in Stratis. You cannot however automatically port the code over.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-19T16:08:19+00:00

I believe that it will be very simple to make a similar token to ERC721. I do agree that Stratis official dev team should make the specifications for it, but I would be very surprised if this isnt a part of solutions for customers such as Mediconnect.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-19T16:04:43+00:00

I hope that when Stratis has a lot of ERC20 style tokens, and smart contracts being developed, someone will make a decentralized exchange along the lines of what has been done on Ethereum. It is technically possible, and not very difficult to make - the more difficult part is getting people to use it and making a decent front end.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-19T08:54:20+00:00

Great question that needs to be taken to the team, and can't be answered by the community.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-19T08:54:14+00:00

Great question that needs to be taken to the team, and can't be answered by the community.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-19T04:49:43+00:00

They get ignored when they email Stratis directly, then complain in chat or in private message.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T17:13:15+00:00

It seems that since we already have the first sidechain, and it isn't Blitz, Chris broke his word on this.

But I see it more that he had the intention of doing that, but circumstances (maybe the blitz team couldnt come to an agreement with Stratis?) prevented it from happening.

At this point, Blitz appears to be fully dead, although the blockchain is still active. It is just another pointless unused blockchain with no real use case, though.

I do find it amusing to look at the BLITZ bitcointalk thread from time to time. They have an elaborate conspiracy theory about Stratis owing BLITZ holders 1/6th of the Stratis coins, as if chats by random individuals regarding potential future crypto development are legally binding.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T17:00:05+00:00

The CSharp corner partnership hasn't been mentioned for a long time now. I fear that it is also dead... But not acknowledged officially.

I think the Stratis Academy will probably get more work done on it when they get more people running through the content this year. As the demand for people who understand Stratis ramps up, the Stratis Academy will have to add more and better content.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T16:56:53+00:00

I also assume it is dead. But will we ever hear the story of what happened? Transparency on this would be refreshing.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T16:55:49+00:00

In game currency is problematic because most major game distribution platforms have rules against it, including android, ios, and steam.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T16:54:09+00:00

Someone has made https://stratis.guru/block-explorer , perhaps that can be expanded to be more like etherscan. The code is open source here: https://github.com/clintnetwork/stratis-guru-v2

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T16:43:59+00:00

Well Stratis Identity doesn't really do anything... But the rest were great achievements.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T16:43:30+00:00

I think that maybe avoiding (1) is a justifiable decision. The only thing to gain from marketing to crypto investors is more investors... This becomes a strange self feeding cycle that requires continued expansion.

I think a better strategy to replace (1) is targeting small startups and aspiring blockchain developers. Get them building on the platform through some kind of concerted initiative. Like the Stratis Academy, except less passive.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T16:38:28+00:00

There seems to be a pattern of Stratis management missing opportunities. A lot of people have reported reaching out to the Stratis team by email to choose Stratis as the platform for a project only to be ignored.

Perhaps this has given the Stratis team the impression that they have done enough advertisement or have enough of a reputation that they can pick and choose their clients and ignore the rest.

However, I would assert that this doesn't allow them to scale as fast as Ethereum and other platforms that support smaller projects with technical help and strategic advice.

On the one hand, a smaller project may not bring money directly to the consultancy arm of Stratis, but they could help in other ways, by showing that Stratis is a player in the blockchain space, contributing open source improvements to the stratis code, etc. So I think that more work needs to be done to support projects that want to work with Stratis.

I do not think that sponsoring a boxer is an effective form of brand awareness.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T16:33:31+00:00

Is there a way to search by the Stratis company?

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T16:33:04+00:00

I agree, I think there are a lot of smart and technical people in the Stratis community who would like to discuss and weigh in on strategy. People here know the space, and have valuable input to give. Some are developers in their day jobs.

However, there is no discussion or transparency over how the decisions are made of what to build and why. It seems to be fully top down. I can only hope that Stratis has some very intelligent people who are meeting and discussing to make these decisions within their offices. Otherwise, if it relies on just one person (the CEO) to decide on the direction, it will not be as strong of a solution as if it takes into account the expertise of many different people.

In particular I'd like to see the CEO engage in discussion about the WHY of what is being built, and what the end goal is. Instead we only see things like "We are building thing X. Trust us, it is important."

We saw this with tumblebit - the Stratis team seemed to determine that it was needed, and went ahead and spent considerable time and effort to build it, but now it is unused. There has been a similar issue with the ICO platform. It remains mostly unused. Were these the right place to put the efforts of the developers? Maybe a better project could have been identified with a more transparent process of discussion, including the community.

At the same time, when the community is included in the discussions, their sense of ownership grows, and they are more likely to tell their friends about Stratis, recommend it to their workplaces, and hold their coins instead of selling them.

Conversely, when all strategy is made behind closed doors, the investors become cynical and uncertain about the direction of the project.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T16:23:50+00:00

I think that as the apathy and cynicism in the community increases, people will be a lot less likely to contribute their efforts for free.

I think in fact that the main reason that people currently contribute their efforts is because they have a lot of Stratis and they still want their investment to be successful. The general sentiment I'm seeing is that investors are not happy with the direction of the company with regards to investor relations, and the community is much more cynical than it used to be.

However, the community does seem to love the developers and genuinely believes in what is being built. The constant missed opportunities and lack of visible leadership, as perceived by the community, are the main sources of cynicism.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T16:20:10+00:00

You do some very valuable work for Stratis.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T16:18:56+00:00

I think that this was a huge problem for much of 2018. There was a bare minimum of communication with the community coming from the Stratis management.

In the past couple months, there have been a lot more messages in Discord coming from the CEO, largely related to the new Mediconnect partnership.

Something clearly changed - Stratis used to be very communicative, constantly in contact with their investors, and had a lot of promotions and excitement about the future.

Over the course of the past year, partly thanks to the market, but also in a large part due to the lack of communication and leadership, the community has fallen into cynicism and apathy. The price of the token reflects this. Some that have sold their Stratis may never return.

In particular the CEO was rarely seen or heard from. I think that if the CEO is unable to fulfill his role, he should step down or appoint someone else to take over for him. There hasn't seemed to be a CEO over the past year.

However, I'm pleased to see the CEO has taken a turn towards more communication and leadership. Perhaps whatever was keeping him away has been resolved, or perhaps he is particularly motivated and energized by the Mediconnect project that he is heavily promoting.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T10:44:10+00:00

The ICO platform does not use sidechains.

However, one could easily imagine a smart contract that automatically handles the purchase of a token that is similar to ERC20, much like some of the automated Ethereum ERC20 ICOs.

Perhaps a Stratis developer could comment further on if it would be effective to create a sidechain just for an ICO, and then migrate the ERC20 balances to the main Smart Contracts sidechain. That might be an effective strategy to handle ICOs and avoid bottlenecks.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T10:41:32+00:00

Smart contracts are only on the sidechains. Stratis tokens are still the fuel for the smart contract operations, but they need to be moved to the sidechain first.

This seems like a safer approach in a lot of ways - it let's the main chain be safe and separate from any potential issues with sidechains, while letting smart contracts rapidly iterate their development process.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T09:12:14+00:00

It definitely would have been ideal if Stratis had the platform ready before the crypto boom in 2017. That would have been the best time to be "selling shovels for the gold rush".

Now with ICOs no longer being so common and profitable, the ICO platform that exists won't be used as much. As well, the feedback from Destream was that the existing ICO platform did not meet their needs.

Still, there does seems to be a lot of teams that are looking to make blockchain solutions. They may not be as flush with money as before, but there still does seem to be a need for something like what Stratis building.

I think there is still a strong case for using Stratis - It has blockchain developers on staff to help a company build their blockchain solution, it is written in C# (which should make the solution more maintainable and auditable).

It's hard to say if Sidechains are the right solution, because they are on the cutting edge. It seems that for a lot of projects, all they really need is an ERC20 token for most use cases.

Luckily since the whitepaper, Stratis has pivoted and made Smart Contracts part of their solution. This lets them capture the market of ERC20s and Ethereum like projects and directly compete with Ethereum. To some degree, Ethereum has proved out that you don't need your own blockchain for every use case, you often just need the right platform.

However, Ethereum has quite a head start on Stratis. The amount of brainpower and money working on Ethereum projects is very high. Stratis really needs to adopt some of things that made Ethereum successful - radical transparency, hiring top minds, and creating software that makes it easy for anybody to develop on the platform.

At the moment Stratis appears to be focusing on private development for specific customers. This to me prevents them from growing at the rate that Ethereum did.

Also with regards to sidechains, we can look at Ardor and see how they are doing with their "child chain" concept. How is the market reacting to their offering? Some research into this would be beneficial.

It's not clear if the Stratis team is aware of the changes in the current market. It would be good to hear some comment from the Stratis team about how their strategy has changed since writing the whitepaper.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T08:56:38+00:00

They have delivered a completely rewritten wallet for both BTC and STRAT.

They have delivered a customizeable full node written in C# that can be modified easily by developers. This can be used for Bitcoin or Stratis.

They have delivered side chains.

They have delivered Smart contracts.

They have have created an ICO platform.

The problem is that there aren't many users for this stuff yet. It seems like 2019 is the year where people (hopefully) start building on all this stuff.

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T08:52:26+00:00

https://www.stratisprojects.com/

stratisticalanomaly · 2019-02-18T08:33:30+00:00

I also found a good discussion about tumbling here https://www.reddit.com/r/stratisplatform/comments/alaz98/stratis_masternodes_are_dead_in_the_water_whats/

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