Sep 7, 2018
Q&A with Julian Meyer
Phore Core developer
1. Tell us about your background and how did you get into programming?
I’m a completely self-taught programmer. I’ve only taken a couple of actual programming courses. I started off writing games when I was 10 and then I got asked to write blog articles for a tutorial site called raywenderlich.com. Eventually I became interested in blockchain and specifically Ethereum. I wrote a disassembler for the Ethereum EVM so people could audit smart contracts without having the source code. A prominent member of the Ethereum community saw my disassembler and donated money to me. I used that money to buy Phore and eventually became interested in helping with development.
2. What are you currently working on aside Phore and what are your plans for 2018 onwards?
Just tiny side projects. I wrote an alternative client for Ultimate Guitar recently. I’ve advised some ICOs/blockchains on some tech related stuff. I’m mostly focusing on Phore.
3. How did you get involved with Phore?
I asked the lead developer at the time, Phroshi, if I could help develop Phore. He said yes and I started working on a Discord bot. I then just kept working on Phore because Phroshi had basically left at that point and I was having fun. Eventually, I was asked to join the team permanently and since Phroshi left and I was the only one who could really take his place, I accepted.
4. What do you like about Phore?
Phore has a great team behind it who are passionate about the coin. I like being able to focus on development and leave other aspects such as marketing to other members of the team.
5. How do you see Phore differentiating from Ethereum and other top projects?
Phore will be scalable from the beginning, focus on use-cases, and have unique useful tech. The way we’re developing our system is inspired by Ethereum sharding but also fundamentally different. We’ll provide a way to run any block/transaction validation algorithm on the Phore blockchain without implementing it inefficiently in Solidity. We’ll also help develop actual use cases once the blockchain is scalable unlike ETH which is solely focused on building out the tech.
6. Why did Phore update the roadmap to an agile one? What are the benefits of doing this?
We were originally going to implement smart contracts at the end of this year, however we found out that the system we were originally going to implement could be scaled using ETH’s system. Also, we identified several important features that needed to be implemented before smart contracts. We can now modify the roadmap if we need to squeeze in new features before something else is implemented.
7. Can you give us any more information about Phore Synapse, Smart Contracts? How will it work?
First of all, it will be a 1-way peg to the new chain. If you want to be a validator (which will probably be somewhat similar to staking and somewhat similar to a masternode), you’ll need to burn some Phore (maybe around 100 PHR) and then run a computer that validates the chains and signs crosslinks. Stateless clients that can sync up within a couple seconds are extremely important in Synapse because they will allow us to shuffle validators between different shards fast and provide more security for network transactions. One of the huge differences between Phore Synapse and ETH Sharding is that we will be able to run any type of blockchain as a shard. In this case, we’ll start off with one Phore shard and one smart contract shard.
8. Can you tell us about plans for the new Go Wallet and the SPV Wallet? What are the differences and benefits of each?
gophr is a complete reimplementation of our current full node. gophr isn’t really a wallet. It’s just a full node that can talk to the Phore network. It doesn’t have a wallet or a GUI built-in. This separation of the code base is extremely important in finding and fixing bugs. Go is also more readable and more documented meaning more people can understand the code. The SPV wallet will require a hard fork. We’re going to put all UTXOs in a sparse merkle tree and include that in block headers. This will allow for the possibility of stateless clients which are better than SPV clients anyway. SPV clients will be able to sync up just the block headers and stake witnesses meaning MUCH faster, more secure syncs. This differs from PIVX’s implementation of their light node which relies on a central source of information to validate block stakes or may rely on masternodes to provide correct information. Our implementation will be more secure and actually validate blocks more fully.
9. What is your vision for Phore from a development standpoint? 1 year out, 3 years out and 5 years out?
We’re going to build a scalable, useful blockchain foundation. We’ll then focus on building out use cases including something similar to Purse and different payment processors. We’ll also focus on marketing Phore to the general public and pushing for widespread adoption.
10. What is your long-term vision for the Marketplace, and when will it be out of open beta?
We’ll be implementing the SPV wallet before the full release so that the marketplace doesn’t have to rely on our RPC service. We’ll also work on adding community requested features and pulling in from the OpenBazaar upstream.
11. What challenges have Phore development encountered this year?
The project we’ve had the most trouble with is our RPC service which runs the marketplace. We’ve also inherited a couple of problems from PIVX that have required us to do hard-fork fixes in minimal time. The Zerocoin bug comes to mind.
12. What differentiates other projects vs. Phore in terms of quality of coding?
Most projects don’t do much coding at all and if they do, it’s not combined with useful features. We’ve analyzed some of the features we could implement and always work on more useful projects than other coins. Also, in porting the code to Go, I’ve noticed MANY bad design problems as a result from forking the code from PIVX/DASH/BTC. For example, look at the Phore difficulty adjustment function in the C++ client vs. the new Go client.
13. What do you do for Phore aside from coding, for those who do not have visibility of your IRL interaction?
I’ve gone to a conference and plan to continue going to conferences to talk about Phore. Recently, I went to a blockchain meetup in Oregon to discuss our scaling solutions and I also went to the blockchain futurist conference to promote Phore.
Phore is one of the very few blockchain projects thats has an actual working product, a complete team of talented professionals like Julian, and a very engaged and collaborative community. Our team is not only doing the talk, but also walking the walk, below just a few talks about Phore’s walk:
- Our co-CEO Anthony Alleyne co-Chaired the Global Assets and Wealth Form (GAW Forum)in Singapore (August 31st and September 1st).
- Partnership with UniFox will allow Phore to potentially be used in as many as 50,000 Point of Sale terminals, 10,000 ATMs and hundreds of currency exchange offices around the world by the year 2020.
- We partnered with StoneCash, an online wholesale stone buying and selling platform, to support cross-border payments for this large wholesaler.
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DISCLAIMER:
I have been strategic advisor at Phore since April 2018, I have done my research and due diligence on the project, I am convinced that Phore will be a success; but you should not trust what I am writing here as I am convinced already.
This is not a financial advise and you should do your own research on Phore before investing on it, and understand if you are willing to lose this investment, as there is always risk in innovative markets as, technology, fintech, and cryptocurrencies, due to regulations, geopolitical issues, and what not.
