Funding Friday: "Arduino Meets Crypto"

Comments (Archived):

1. I like it too & supported it.

2. how fun.Beauty video. Particularly interesting that the company is based in Egypt.

   1. Hey @kenberger:disqus, I’m one of the developers of Elk. If you ever come to Egypt, be sure to hit us up. You’d be welcome to visit our office anytime 🙂

      1. Great! Been there, loved it, would love to go again.I also like your thoughtful responses here on this post. I’d bet your project finds some really useful use cases, beyond the ones you’re thinking of.

3. A lot to think about. Advancing the concept of blockchain to the physical world. The door lock app wthout using a centralized server looks interesting. Probably not too hard to do a one off with BTLE/WiFi but scaling to volume without a centralized server?

   1. Hey @disqus_umS4KZZW8k:disqus, I’m one of the developers of Elk.Decentralization with the physical world is certainly a tricky combination. For controlling your devices without a centralized server we are currently using the Ethereum Whisper protocol. It’s still very early stage and I wouldn’t say it “scales”, but certainly in a decent enough shape to be used by users of our board.Using BTLE is certainly a great option, and strictly speaking is also decentralized. The challenge though is when you want to communicate with your devices remotely.I should also add that Elk is blockchain agnostic. We’re building an open-source SDK so that the community can contribute and add support for more protocols (be it payments, messaging, or storage).

      1. Thanks Islam! When thinking about your project the idea of mesh networks came to mind to achieve a higher level of distribution and decentralization. The individual nodes form the network so might help address the remote access issues.https://www.meshnetworks.com/Best of luck with your project.

         1. Thanks @Mike, will certainly check that out. Could be a great addition to our boards in their next stage.

4. Very nice.. Love this project! There seems to be a lot of us working on building new devices that cater to the blockchain space. Also. Great video.

5. No even a word about security, so for sure this is totally for DYI useAnyway this is AWESOME thing for community development and use-case experiments!Very well doneI certainly need to get in touch with them for collab, based on our root-of-trust for embedded.

   1. Hey Artem! I’m one of the developers of Elk. I’m glad our project is to your liking :)We touched on security in our FAQ but given your feedback we’ll update the campaign page to make it more explicit. The original plan was to include a secure hardware enclave by Maxim. However, we decided to not include it at this point given that it would increase the cost of development very substantially.Our current focus with this initial version of Elk is for prototyping and to provide a 10x better development experience, which we think is quite lacking in the blockchain space today.Please do shoot us a message with ideas on how we could collaborate.

      1. Hi Islam, u certainly did right about missing secure part for now. It’s cheaper and more convenient. What’s the best way to get in touch?

6. thumbs up on this one.

7. So, they are using IPFS. Okay.But for blockchain, what are they doing with blockchain that could not be done as well or better with a high performance and relatively reliable and secure traditional relational database running somewhere on the Internet?

   1. Hey @sigmaalgebra:disqus, I’m one of the developers of Elk.I think the use of blockchain is a much broader topic than our project. I personally think decentralization in general can bring many benefits, specifically in the world of IoT.An example: Right now, if you buy a smart door lock off the shelf that you can control remotely, the company who made this door lock is, by necessity, the central authority that relays any communication between you and your door lock. The company, or whomever hacks it, have full control of your device, can deny you access to your device, and have information on when you’re coming in and out of the house. Additionally, if they were to ever go out of business, like when Pebble technologies did, your door lock will malfunction.Decentralization allows us to fix these issues. Rather than communicating with your door lock (or whatever the device is) via a company or some cloud provider, you can communicate with them through decentralized messaging networks like Whisper. No one can track your device usage, deny you access to your device, or control the device on your behalf.We call this “Decent IoT”, and that’s one of the use-cases that I think are practical within the realm of decentralization today. Check out this tutorial from our campaign page that shows how easy we enable developers to build Decent IoT: https://www.youtube.com/wat…Of course, there are a lot more use-cases like accepting/receiving payments, interacting with smart contracts, etc. These will definitely take more time to gain widespread adoption.

      1. I think the use of blockchain is a much broader topic than our project. Sure.I personally think decentralization in general can bring many benefits, specifically in the world of IoT. For some parts of decentralization for some purposes, sure. But we can’t say that decentralization is desirable in general because it is such a broad topic that it is impossible to argue for or against the whole topic.For your example of the door lock, don’t buy such a door lock. Commonly already people are wary of being strongly tied for the long term to just some one company. E.g., when I find a product I like, if I am going to depend heavily on it and have no good substitutes, then I will buy some spares. Gee, a wife will do this just for kitchen dishes: Since commonly a given dish pattern will after only a few months or years become no longer available, she buys some extras so that if a few dishes break she doesn’t have to replace all of them just to have a matching table setting.Or if the door lock is so that the manufacturer can communicate with it, then it should be reasonably easy for the consumer to have a device that also can communicate with it. Besides, why would the manufacturer want to mediate all usage of that lock? To get continuing revenue, e.g., as for some cell phone? Gee, who wants to have to pay a monthly fee to some door lock manufacturer just to be able to continue to get into their house? Instead, people buy a lock that has a traditional metal key and have some spares made.For blockchain my point was that so far it looks like the desirable functionality has long been readily available from more advanced versions and deployments of relational database — DB/2, SQL Server, Oracle, etc. And no doubt one of the main reasons for the standards for relational database is so that a customer could move their data from one of the versions to another.Relational database is keeping a huge fraction of the data in the world’s economy — banking and the rest of finance, inventory, insurance, etc. There has been enormous attention to issues of performance, concurrency, backup and recovery, security, reliability, system monitoring and management, and, yes, and in some cases of being “distributed”.If there is a serious need for more from being more distributed, then no doubt that is readily available. As it is, I doubt that many customers of, say, Citi Bank are concerned that all their account records will suddenly be lost due to some problem with hardware, software, security, etc.Some of what is commonly done for the general issue of data security is from impressive up to astounding.So, net, I see blockchain technology as having no advantage over relational database technology and otherwise broadly, seriously inferior.

         1. For some parts of decentralization for some purposes, sure. But we can’t say that decentralization is desirable in general because it is such a broad topic that it is impossible to argue for or against the whole topic.I agree 100%.Or if the door lock is so that the manufacturer can communicate with it, then it should be reasonably easy for the consumer to have a device that also can communicate with it.With the current internet architecture, you cannot easily communicate with your devices (or anything else, really) directly. You either need to give your device a static IP, or use some sort of intermediary server to relay your communication between the two of you.Besides, why would the manufacturer want to mediate all usage of that lock? To get continuing revenue, e.g., as for some cell phone?The manufacturer mediates the usage because they have to, per my comment above. They are essentially forced to mediate communication otherwise their devices won’t work for the consumer, and that’s why decentralization in this case can be to the benefit of everyone. It’ll allow consumers to do exactly what you said: to make it easy for the consumer to communicate with their devices directly.Instead, people buy a lock that has a traditional metal key and have some spares made.Sure. The door lock was just a simple example. The same logic applies to any human to machine or machine to machine communication.

            1. We would need more details on peer to peer communications for applications such as a door lock or, likely, much of internet of things, IOT.Sure with the 2^32 or some such limitation of the old IP4 standard, tough to give each thing, e.g., door lock, its own “static” IP address, but the Internet has been used heavily for peer to peer communications for years without either peer having a static IP address.Then, of course, one of the goals of the Internet standard IPv6 is to permit each “thing” to have its own static IP address.Then the owner of the lock can just send a message to some agreed on IP port number with agreed authentication, say, as in RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman) public key encryption.E.g., we have long had Ethernet MAC addresses:The MAC (Media Access Control) address is a devices hardware address. Each device on a local area network must have a unique MAC address assigned. The MAC address is often referred to as the Ethernet Address on an Ethernet network.Soooo, having millions or billions of devices each with its own unique address is old.In summary, I’m reluctant to accept that the manufacturer has to play a role for years after the product was sold. And as in general I don’t see that blockchain is better than what can be done routinely with relational database. But if today blockchain solves a problem and no one has implemented relational database for a better solution, then use blockchain.