The Open Source Leveraging and Smart Contracts Composability in Public Blockchains Ecosystems.
First things first: What does Open Source mean?
“ The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration.
A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public.
The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery. “
From the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_model
(Oh, by the way Wikipedia is Open Source)
To anyone wondering how the hell could Open Sourced Companies make any money, the practical business model of any Open Source Company is “Free Software, Paid Assistance”. This not only allows individuals to use the software for free but also allows for the cheap formation of experts that could later join the company.
Why is Open Source important? By using Open Sourced software you’re able to develop and deploy applications faster by effectively not having to build everything from scratch.
In Latin “nanos gigantium humeris insidentes” (“discovering truth by building on previous discoveries”).
This is simply how humanity always worked, compounding knowledge that eventually produces even more knowledge.
This article is a must if you wanna dig deeper https://garrisonhughes.com/hubbub/open-for-business-leveraging-the-power-of-open-source/
Now let me briefly explain what a smart contract is:
“ Smart contracts were first proposed in the early 1990s by Nick Szabo, who coined the term, using it to refer to “a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises”. ”
-Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_contract
Vitalik Buterin (the one that came up with the Ethereum WhitePaper Idea) explains them as “Self Executing Agreements” or “Deterministic Digital Agreements”. If certain conditions are met, the contract executes itself.
EXAMPLE: (this is obviously pseudo-code)
“IF the_temperature_in_San_Francisco < x degrees AND
the_rain_precipitation_per_square_meter_in_San_Francisco > y THEN
my_insurance_company_wallet SEND z $ TO my_personal_wallet”
This is already possible using the Ethereum’s Blockchain.
But how the hell is the blockchain able to know the temperature in San Francisco or the precipitation per square meter? The answer is decentralized Oracles, think of them as the equivalent of the Bloomberg’s terminal, if you’re interested in further investigation: https://link.smartcontract.com/whitepaper
Smart contracts are extremely powerful tools because they allow to automate any contract you could think of assuming it’s based on quantifiable entities.
Not only they allow to cut costs of middlemen in transactions, they eliminate any risk of fraudulent activity and they’re orders of magnitude faster than their legacy counterparts. (Cost and time of bureaucracy should be known to anyone)
It should go without saying that smart contracts are open sourced and you’ll always be able to verify what you’re being proposed. Thanks to the blockchain technology, once you have approved a smart contract, it will be immutable for its entire lifetime. This only brings benefits to society, it levels the playing field.
It’s always been such a no brainer to me. As an Italian, how could I not understand how useful this technology is and how much it could simplify my life?
Ok so finally we can combine the Open Source superpowers with this ability to create smart contracts and obtain: Money Legos
Borrowing words from this article https://medium.com/totle/building-with-money-legos-ab63a58ae764
“ The core philosophy of the DeFi space: build for interoperability. This allows the ecosystem to benefit from individual progress, pushing decentralized finance continually forward.
This ideology is reminiscent of everyone’s favorite toy, Lego. As people visit a large bin of random legos, pieces get combined together in new and creative ways. Then when new people dive into the Lego bin, they find preassembled combinations of Legos that they too start building with, creating bigger and better things. This eventually snowballs into a whole universe of exciting Lego creations.
In DeFi, projects are designed to not only be used as a stand-alone product but also easily integrated into products that can benefit from their functionality. Thus, this ecosystem will eventually snowball into an exciting universe of decentralized financial products! “
There’s no better way to explain how this DeFi’s protocols work.
Don’t forget about the emergence principle: by compounding this protocols together we’re able to achieve composed protocols that not only offer everything that the subprotocols offer but they offer it At The Same Time.
The whole will always be greater than the sum of the parts
It shouldn’t be hard to realize that this tools are essentials and probably enough to create an ecosystem that rivals the legacy financial system.
Some could say “Yes but Ethereum will never scale enough to offer competitive prices” and he/she might be right but we don’t need Ethereum to create a decentralized NYSE (New York Stock Exchange). Solana is enough. https://solana.com/
Solana offers 50’000 tps (transactions per second) vs Ethereum’s 12 tps. What about the fees? Solana is truly an engineering masterpiece, the average fees per transaction are 0.00005 $.
This is possible thanks to the Proof Of History intuition that Anatoly Yakovenko and his team (Solana founders) came up with.
Solana is also Open Source and the Solana’s ecosystem follows the Ethereum ecosystem’s principles of interoperability between protocols. (also Solana has smart contract already working, it’s not a Cardano style “work in progress…”)
Now to put things in perspective, Ethereum’s GitHub’s count of different accounts that submitted useful contributions to the project is around 800. You might think this is a small number but imagine a company where you have 800 high skilled software engineers that are concurrently working on a project. Have you realized how big this number is?
(this counts only the approved modifications to the project, high skilled software engineers is an assumption made on the technical complexity of the project)
Open sourcing is fundamental in today’s society, not only for computer science applications but also for scientific research. Should the search of a cure for cancer not be accessible to anyone if this means that we could possibly find it in much less time and potentially save many lives?
Anyway it’s clear to me that many discoveries in the crypto’s world were immensely enhanced by this massive cooperation of geniuses and by the approach to let everything be public, accessible and implementable by anyone.
This is the open source leveraging.
(This post was originally uploaded on my LinkedIn profile on the 3rd of April, 2021: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/open-source-leveraging-smart-contracts-composability-public-pardini/)
