I want to create a tokenomics database.
I want to build a bot to automate data collection that answers for each token on the blockchain some of the questions asked and answered in this article.
I am a total newbie when it comes to blockchain. So, I have some basic questions.
Where is this information located? How did the author discover the numbers he quotes? Is there an API one could use to collect this information? (See update.)
Update: In writing this question, I discovered this Etherscan API. How might one leverage that API to obtain the tokenomics data I want?
Source [emphasis mine]
There will only ever be 21,000,000 bitcoin, and they’re released at a rate that gets cut in half every four years or so. Roughly 19,000,000 already exist, so there are only 2,000,000 more to be released over the next 120 years.
What about Ethereum? The circulating supply is around 118,000,000, and there’s no cap on how many Ether can exist. But Ethereum’s net emissions were recently adjusted via a burn mechanism so that it would reach a stable supply, or potentially even be deflationary, resulting in somewhere between 100-120m tokens total. Given that, we shouldn’t expect much inflationary pressure on Ether either. It could even be deflationary.
Dogecoin has no supply cap either, and it is currently inflating at around 5% per year. So of the three, we should expect inflationary tokenomics to erode the value of Doge more than Bitcoin or Ethereum.
The last thing you want to consider with supply is allocation. Do a few investors hold a ton of the tokens which are going to be unlocked soon? Did the protocol give most of its tokens to the community? How fair does the distribution seem? If a bunch of investors have 25% of the supply and those tokens will unlock in a month, you might hesitate before buying in.
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I've watched a lot of Cryptocurrency lectures on how they work and I think I am about 75% of the way of understanding completely how they work. One question has been bothering me though.
When a miner solves a block, he gets a block reward made out of thin air. For Bitcoin this is currently around 12.5 BTC. What dictates this specific amount of money? Is the the locally ran software? If so, can't that be tampered with? Does the miner ask other clients what the current block reward amount is? If so how does it know it's being fed the right updated information?
Same goes for the number of zeroes found on the hash. If a miner finds a hash value like 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000010101111110110101010101 he would then check how many zeroes it starts with. Let's say the current solve requires 30 zeroes. Who makes that rule? How is it updated? At what points does it change from 30 -> 31? Who makes that decision to increase or decrease it. What if one computer thinks it's 29 and not 30. What stops people from gaming the system?
Same with block sizes. What stops miners from sending blocks with increased maximum sizes? Would clients reject the block if they don't match a certain size? If so, how do they know what are the maximum amount of transactions? Who told them?
A single miner can tamper with a block as much as they want, changing block award or difficulty or double-spending, but such a block will not be accepted by the rest of the network.
Bitcoin network needs a consensus to accept a specific block. As long as more than half of the nodes of the network are "good" ones, the tampered block will be rejected.
This functionality is implemented by Bitcoin P2P protocol.
I was going through the Ethereum White Paper and it was mentioned that the scripting language implemented in bitcoin blockchain has a limitation of value-blindness and Blockchain-blindness (point 2 and 4 in the paper). I am finding it hard to comprehend what this means. It would be great if someone could help understand this with an example.
Value Blindness:
There is no way for a UTXO script to provide
fine-grained control over the amount that can be withdrawn. For
example, one powerful use case of an oracle contract would be a
hedging contract, where A and B put in $1000 worth of BTC and after 30
days the script sends $1,000 worth of BTC to A and the rest to B. This
would require an oracle to determine the value of 1 BTC in USD[Note
3], but even then it is a massive improvement in terms of trust and
infrastructure requirement over the fully centralized solutions that
are available now. However, because UTXO are all-or-nothing, the only
way to achieve this is through the very inefficient hack of having
many UTXO of varying denominations (eg. one UTXO of 2k for every k up
to 30) and having O pick which UTXO to send to A and which to B.
Blockchain-blindness
UTXO are blind to certain blockchain data such as the nonce and
previous block hash. This severely limits applications in gambling,
and several other categories, by depriving the scripting language of a
potentially valuable source of randomness.
I am fairly new to the bitcoin and blockchain technology and have recently started reading about it. So my understanding and the question bellow may not be very accurate.
As I have understood so far, proof of work is the basic building block for a bitcoin block chain and because of it, an attacker will have to produce more than 50% of the total compute power (i.e control more than 50% of the nodes)
in order to manipulate the block chain by being able to produce longest block chain consistently.
Now bitcoin guys were bit lucky as they were the first and nobody paid attention in there early days. Once bitcoin gathered momentum, number of honest nodes become predominant and system became inherently secure.
But now, how someone can start a new public blockchain (for completely different application) safely ? Because, if a new blockchain is floated with few mining nodes,
any attacker can come with more compute nodes and hijack the blockchain as there are small number of honest nodes.
it depends on what you want to do. There are many implementations of Blockchain, each of them has its objective. Bitcoin was the first implementation of Blockchain. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and like Bitcoin, there have been developed many other cryptocurrencies.
However, the Blockchain technology would be useful to many things: for example, to control the vote in a distributed way in the elections. Because of that, there are many implementations of Blockchains.
Hyperledger Fabric is a private Blockchain, where the acces to it must be controled
Ethereum is a public Blockchian to transfer assets. Anyone could create his tokens and start using them through the Ethereum network. So, you will use an existing Chain and attackers couldn't hijack you. I think that this would be a great start. If I were you, I'd continue reading this.
To avoid the attack you are describing (51% attack), where existing miners hijack a new network there are a couple ways to avoid this.
Merge Mining
The smaller chain includes block data in the larger chain (e.g. Bitcoin) so the blocks are mined with the hashpower of the larger network.
Change the hashing algorithm
For Bitcoin, two rounds of SHA256 is the hashing algorithm. Because there is so much mining power, it is possible to get attacked fairly easily because Bitcoin miners can just point their existing miners to the small network long enough to execute an attack, and then switch back. This happened to Bitcoin Gold recently. So, use something other than SHA256 where there is already a lot of hashpower in terms of hardware out there.
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The critical word in my question title is a.
I am not asking "what is bitcoin?". There are numerous articles that show up when a Google search is performed with that question, and they all involve in summarizing what decentralized currency means, what the blockchain is, how mining generally works etc.
However I find that none actually answer the question of "what is a bitcoin"?
If my child were to ask me "what is a dollar"?, I can pull out a one dollar bill or coin for him to hold and examine.
What can I give him to examine when he asks me what a bitcoin is? (Not counting the physical bitcoin makers) Is there a string of digits I can print out and say "this! this is a bitcoin!" , or do I point to some entry on a public ledger and say "there! That's a record of Dad's bitcoin!"
Essentially, I would like to know, what is the actual tangible representation of a bitcoin, or any cryptocurrency unit?
Basically, a bitcoin can be seen as a measure of work - of "mining" - done by other users. As you probably already know, the entire bitcoin system is pretty much depends on it's users constantly doing difficult computations, sealing and ensuring transactions between users. To ensure that users keep doing those computations (which are quite expensive, by the way, mostly due to electricity and hardware costs), for every block made it's creators are awarded a certain amount of bitcoins, simply for the mere presence of their block in the blockchain. To own a bitcoin is to being able to say "I've been given this bitcoin by that guy, who got it from that guy, who got it from that guy, who got it from lets-skip-these-hundreds-of-transactions from the guy who made that block (very deeply buried inside the blockchain by now) which means he was either very lucky or had a lot of computing power to make that lucky hash and release the block before others could do it". And since every user has a full copy of blockchain on their computer (hopefully correct and agreed by majority), every single transaction ever made can be traced to the source - to the bitcoins awarded for mining a block - and your claim can be easily verified.
Although that's a little bit simplified - since, as in practice, transactions are done in tiniest fractions of bitcoins, the bitcoins you have will most likely originate from different block makers, but in general the concept is the same.
Bitcoin is generated as a compensation for mining (running cryptographic calculations to maintain the integrity of transactions within the bitcoin network).
Every block in the blockchain has a specific value (in amounts of bitcoin) and this value is attributed to the bitcoin address(es) who submitted this block successfully.
From the bitcoin wiki:
The number of Bitcoins generated per block starts at 50 and is halved every 210,000 blocks (about four years).
Their value to the outside world depends on what people agree it’s worth (free market if you will).
We're adding extra login information to an existing database record on the order of 3.85KB per login.
There are two concerns about this:
1) Is this too much on-the-wire data added per login?
2) Is this too much extra data we're storing in the database per login?
Given todays technology, are these valid concerns?
Background:
We don't have concrete usage figures, but we average about 5,000 logins per month. We hope to scale to larger customers, howerver, still in the 10's of 1000's per month, not 1000's per second.
In the US (our market) broadband has 60% market adoption.
Assuming you have ~80,000 logins per month, you would be adding ~ 3.75 GB per YEAR to your database table.
If you are using a decent RDBMS like MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLServer, Oracle, etc... this is a laughable amount of data and traffic. After several years, you might want to start looking at archiving some of it. But by then, who knows what the application will look like?
It's always important to consider how you are going to be querying this data, so that you don't run into performance bottlenecks. Without those details, I cannot comment very usefully on that aspect.
But to answer your concern, do not be concerned. Just always keep thinking ahead.
How many users do you have? How often do they have to log in? Are they likely to be on fast connections, or damp pieces of string? Do you mean you're really adding 3.85K per time someone logs in, or per user account? How long do you have to store the data? What benefit does it give you? How does it compare with the amount of data you're already storing? (i.e. is most of your data going to be due to this new part, or will it be a drop in the ocean?)
In short - this is a very context-sensitive question :)
Given that storage and hardware are SOOO cheap these days (relatively speaking of course) this should not be a concern. Obviously if you need the data then you need the data! You can use replication to several locations so that the added data doesn't need to move over the wire as far (such as a server on the west coast and the east coast). You can manage your data by separating it by state to minimize the size of your tables (similar to what banks do, choose state as part of the login process so that they look to the right data store). You can use horizontal partitioning to minimize the number or records per table to keep your queries speedy. Lots of ways to keep large data optimized. Also check into Lucene if you plan to do lots of reads to this data.
In terms of today's average server technology it's not a problem. In terms of your server technology it could be a problem. You need to provide more info.
In terms of storage, this is peanuts, although you want to eventually archive or throw out old data.
In terms of network (?) traffic, this is not much on the server end, but it will affect the speed at which your website appears to load and function for a good portion of customers. Although many have broadband, someone somewhere will try it on edge or modem or while using bit torrent heavily, your site will appear slow or malfunction altogether and you'll get loud complaints all over the web. Does it matter? If your users really need your service, they can surely wait, if you are developing new twitter the page load time increase is hardly acceptable.