| Respondent Id | 10670254789 |
|---|---|
| Application Date | 2019-04-17 8:43:13 |
| Application Language | English |
| Applicant City | |
| Applicant State/Province | |
| Applicant Country | United Kingdom |
| What languages do you speak? | English, French conversation, |
| What is your occupation? | IT |
| How many years experience in your field? | 16+ |
| What is the highest degree or level of school you have completed? | Professional degree beyond bachelor’s degree (for example: MD, DDS, DVM, LLB, JD) |
| Please describe your experience in the Crypto/Blockchain space, if any? | Since 1985 |
| Are you an individual or a group? | Individual |
| Node City | I run hosting facilities for industry and NFP projects in UK, EU, Iceland, US, Switzeland |
| Node State | |
| Node Country | UK, US, EU, Switzerland, Iceland, Isle of Man, |
| For which networks Have you ever operated a node? | Bitcoin (BTC, BCH, etc), Bitcoin Jan 2011 to Jan 2014 - I stopped after that. Although did consider Dash. Ethereum I discounted in 2014 as the project is trying to boil an ocean before it can make a cup of tea. |
| What kind of improvements would you like to see in Elixxir nodes vs. previous the previous nodes you have supported? | decentralised hash, decentralised governance, distribution of concerns, no bullshit about governance, fully open source as possible. |
| What are potential setbacks preventing you from operating an Elixxir node? | knowing what is real now. |
| What is a reasonable maximum connection speed on which you could operate a BetaNet node in your geographic region? (Where 0 = 10 Megabits/second, and 100 = 10 Gigabits/second) | 100 |
| What is a reasonable uptime estimate you can provide for your BetaNet node? (As a percentage) | 90 |
| Please estimate the cost of electricity in the geographic area where your BetaNet node will be running. . | when I know what the deal is I will know what to plan for |
| On a monthly basis, how much time can you publicly commit to dedicating toward governance if you were selected as a BetaNet node operator? (Where 0 = 1 hour/month, and 100 = 20 hours/month) | 10 |
| If you were selected to run a BetaNet node, would it run on your own hardware or be deployed to cloud-based servers? | Both |
| In what type of environment would this server be located? | it depends on the arrangements (budget) and need. |
| Do you have past experience deploying hardware servers in a datacenter? | Yes (please describe) |
| Do you already own sufficient hardware to meet the published Elixxir BetaNet node specifications? | Yes (Please list specs) |
| Yes (Please list specs) | I've not read these specs. I don't currently have much spare online capacity. Cloud capacity is about 1 hour lead. Fresh server install about 5 days. All new installs have to pass my testing rig (on linux debian/ ubuntu laptop) for proof of viability. |
| Do you have hardware you would like to use but does not meet the stated BetaNet node specs? If so, please provide specs on that hardware below: | |
| Do you have past experience deploying servers to cloud-based services? | Yes (please specify) |
| Yes (please specify) | I have a hosting service for organisations I incubate, help start up and oversee including Internet Society UK, and hosted apps such as app.growthrater.com. In UK I use Bytemark as primary hosting infrastructure since 2004. I also run my own registrar(DNS) under opensrs, and mainly use Lets Encrypt for TLS Certs. |
| Why do you want to be a node? | I don't know I do yet. But I met David Chaum when we both keynote speakers at the Web Science Conference in 1994 in London and I thought DigiCash was very exciting. So I am excited to see David revisit this space and provide hopefully some grown up wisdom and capability to an area dominated by deeply unstable and in some cases plain dangerous outfits |
| How did you originally hear about Elixxir? | Maybe an email? |
| Which current Elixxir communities are you a member of? | Medium |
| Are you an active member of those communities? | Yes |
| What specifically, interests you about the Elixxir platform? | scale |
| Outside of Elixxir communities, are you an active participant in other node or developer community groups? If so, which ones? | I've been lurking in pretty much all of them from one time to another since 2009. |
| Have you ever attended a blockchain conference? If so, which one(s)? | |
| As part of growing the Elixxir community, are you willing to create content as part of operating an Elixxir BetaNet node? Examples would be node setup & on-boarding review vlog post, bi-weekly twitter update, medium review of on-going node operational process, etc. | Yes (how much content on a monthly basis?) |
| If yes, how much content on a monthly basis? | Really this depends on the level of personal engagement I can justify. |
| What is the difference between decentralized networks and distributed networks, and where on the decentralization spectrum do you sit? | This is an old chestnut. I am a technical pragmatist when it comes to moving bits about. I firmly hold that privacy requires the user at the edge to hold the levers of power over their communications and data. Both decentralised and distributed network models can work symbiotically to achieve this. All too often though the terms are misused to confuse people as to whether they hold power or whether they have in practice ceded that power to a third party. |
| As best as you can given currently available information, please describe the value proposition of the Elixxir platform and how it differs from other current blockchain solutions. | I am waiting on seeing a technical description. I am concerned by concentration of hash in Bitcoin. I am concerned that Lightening is not that quick. I am concerned that DAO put such a huge spanner into Ethereum that it can only hobble ever since. I think the PoW being used by most "coins" is excessively wasteful even criminally so in today's climate challenges. I am concerned by the endless politics and scheming between participants in so many "crypto!" projects. I am concerned that blockchain sold as a tool for decentralisation of power is also an architecture that could concentrate it by forcing people into a closed loop community than anything Facebook or Amazon or Google have achieved so far. What we need is transparency in code, in operations, in plurality, peering for dealing on fair terms. We need infrastructures to establish key digital services such as identity, key management, transaction handling, proof of entitlement and so on which are not platforms but protocol rich environments. Maybe Elixxir can be a part of that. If so then yippee. |
| Privacy by Default is a goal of the Elixxir Platform. In your opinion, why is Privacy by Default critical for the future of the internet? | Can I offer a soft nudge? the internet is spelled the Internet. The key is I think about control. The problem with privacy is that if it is not on by default you have by default lost privacy. So in a real sense you can drop the default and just talk about privacy and then describe how to share and join in communities locally whilst maintaining global default privacy status. It is a very hard thing to architect as a capability. It is also a very hard thing for people to manage. |
| Tags | Individual, UK or US or EU or Switzerland or Iceland or Isle of Man, English |
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