Welcome to the ninth edition of “This Week in Quai,” an initiative by the development company of Quai Network, Dominant Strategies. This Week in Quai offers weekly updates to the Quai Community by aggregating popular Quai quotes and social posts from the past week and offering a schedule for upcoming events.
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What is Quai?
Quai Network is a pre-launch cryptocurrency. Quai is the first blockchain protocol that is simultaneously decentralized, censorship resistant, and infinitely scalable. Quai, in contrast to traditional cryptocurrencies, functions as a network of many interoperable blockchains braided together. Due to a discovery that occurred during research on Proof-of-Work, Quai Network utilizes a new consensus mechanism, Proof-of-Entropy-Minima (PoEM), which eliminates all consensus-based forks, and enables all Quai nodes to remain in “perpetual consensus.”
Quote of the Week
“Money is supposed to represent value. But when you create a system in a fractional reserve banking system that socializes risks into the money itself, we end up creating a bad representation that underprices the cost of money, underprices risk, and creates systemic instability.”
– Quai co-founder Dr. K, via Twitter Spaces
Within this quote, Dr. K touches on the core idea of why cryptocurrencies were invented: to provide a better alternative to fiat currencies. Fiat currencies, maintained by a central bank, often function as an inaccurate representation of value due to central bank interference in free-market activities.
A prime example of fiat money socializing risks into the money itself could be seen in 2008; the US government’s “Troubled Asset Relief Program” socialized the risks that individual financial institutions had taken on into the monetary supply itself, devaluing the US Dollar through quantitative easing.
Technical Term of the Week
Node (blockchain) – A computer or server that participates in a blockchain network.
Nodes are one of the fundamental building blocks of blockchain technology. The geographic and ideological diversity of nodes plays a major role in the decentralization and censorship-resistance of a blockchain protocol.
Nodes maintain the state of the blockchain, validate the legitimacy of all state transitions, and propagate blocks to their peers. Some nodes, known as mining nodes, are constantly attempting to find a Proof-of-Work that meets the difficulty threshold of the blockchain, which allows the mining node to propagate a new block in the blockchain.
The Proofs-of-Work contained in new blocks shared by mining nodes prove to all other nodes that a node expended some amount of energy to create the block. This energy expenditure acts as an attestation. Nodes verify that the state transitions included in the block are legitimate, and then append it to the blockchain they store. This process ensures that all participants in the blockchain have a chance to verify the legitimacy of each new state transition, and allows the disparate group of nodes to come to consensus on “canonical” information.
The hardware requirements to operate a trustless node can vary wildly by blockchain. The Quai Network protocol has been designed to keep trustless node hardware requirements as low as possible in order to remain accessible to as many people as possible. To learn more about the requirements to run a Quai node, or to learn more about the different types of nodes in Quai, check out the Quai documentation.
Top Posts of the Week
- A discussion of the mining algorithm change from Blake3 to ProgPoW:
- What “firsts” we could see on Quai Network in the Iron Age Testnet:
- Quai University Call #10, a discussion on Proof-of-Work vs. Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanisms, has been scheduled:
- A breakdown of the name “Quai”:
Upcoming Events
Quai Network Office Hours with Justin: July 11, 2023 @ 10am CST – Join Dominant Strategies team member Justin for a casual discussion/AMA on Quai Network’s technology.
Quai University Call #10 with Dr. K: July 12, 2023 @ 11am CST – Join Quai co-founder Dr. K for the tenth live Quai University Call hosted in the Quai Discord. This call will focus on Proof-of-Work vs. Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanisms.
Join us to build a better blockchain.
Quai Network is an open-source Proof-of-Entropy-Minima blockchain network utilizing the capabilities of merged mining to increase throughput and security. Users of Quai Network will enjoy fast transaction times without compromising decentralization and security. Miners will have competitive mining opportunities across the many blockchains within the network.
Capable of thousands of transactions per second, the Quai Network is a new solution to scalability that is soon to be ready for mainnet release.
Terms & Conditions / Disclaimer
The entirety of the Quai Genesis grants program, including the content of this article, is subject to the Terms and Conditions outlined here.
Opinions, ideas, and statements shared in this update are delivered with numerous assumptions, risks, and uncertainties which are subject to change over time. There are multiple risk factors, including those related to blockchain, cryptographic systems, and technologies generally, as well Quai’s business, operations and results of operations, that could cause actual results or developments anticipated not to be realized or, even if substantially realized, to fail to achieve any or all of the benefits that could be expected therefrom. We reserve the right to unilaterally, completely, or partially change plans, expectations, and intentions stated herein at any time and for any reason, in our sole and absolute discretion, and we undertake no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments, or otherwise. ACCORDINGLY, WE RECOMMEND THAT YOU DO NOT RELY ON, AND DO NOT MAKE ANY FINANCIAL DECISION OR INVESTMENT BASED ON, THE STATEMENTS CONTAINED IN THIS UPDATE OR ANY OF OUR UPDATES/ARTICLES — INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY SELLING OR TRADING OF QUAI TOKENS, ETHER, OR ANY OTHER CRYPTOGRAPHIC OR BLOCKCHAIN TOKEN, OR THE SECURITIES OF ANY COMPANY.
The views, opinions, and statements made in this update are those of an individual author and not those of any institution, University, or legal entity operating within the jurisdiction of The United States or beyond. There is no association between these views, opinions, and statements and any for-profit or non-profit entity, particularly with Universities, Foundations, and other Agencies located within the United States. Any perception of such an association is purely accidental, and will be rectified immediately if brought to our attention by the reader.