generic_FAQ_EN

1. What is Alastria
2. What is Ethereum
3. What is Quorum
4. What is the difference between private, permissioned and public networks, What is the Alastria case?
5. What is ETHER, how it affects to test-net 1
6. What is GAS, how it affects to test-net 1
7. The appearance of Solidity added
8. Aspects of programming in Quorum

What is Alastria

Alastria can be defined as a neutral, public, independent, and permissioned Blockchain/DLT network, designed to work with current regulations, and let the associated companies experiment with these technologies in a corporate environment.

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What is Ethereum

Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference.

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What is Quorum

Enterprise-ready distributed ledger and smart contract platform. Quorum™ is an enterprise-focused version of Ethereum. Quorum is ideal for any application requiring high speed and high throughput processing of private transactions within a permissioned group of known participants.

Reference

Quorum technology is the first approach used to build the Alastria Network, and we have full access to Quorum developer team. This doesn't mean that other teams generate other test-nets with other clients or other consensus protocols.

What is the difference between private, permissioned and public networks, What is the Alastria case?

A public blockchain is a decentralized network that literally anyone can join. This is because no permission to join the network is required. Users can connect their computers to this peer-to-peer (P2P) network as nodes. Every node has an entire record of the blockchain, which is stored on their computer.

The information on every public blockchain is subsequently replicated to sometimes thousands of nodes on the network. No one power administers it centrally, hence, hackers can’t destroy the network by crippling one central server.

Private blockchains, or enterprise blockchains differ from public blockchains in that they are permissioned.

They embody the following features:

• Controlled membership and access: Businesses can allow only trusted nodes to join their enterprise blockchains. They can validate new users with their organizations’ identity management system. This means that they can give access to information to only those who have the correct authority.

• Performance at scale: It is not uncommon for large businesses to process 100,000’s of transactions per second (TPS). Therefore, enterprise blockchains need to scale so that they can deliver performance accordingly. To achieve this, they can compartmentalize processes using containers or similar approaches.

• Resilience: They must have built-in redundancy, automated monitoring, and require minimal human intervention.

• Security and confidentiality: Enterprise blockchains need to encrypt data to ensure maximum security. Apart from that, they can follow the cryptographic standards that apply to public blockchains to secure transaction messages and ensure transaction authenticity.

• A degree of centralization: Enterprise blockchains can’t avoid embodying some degree of centralization. By requiring only trusted nodes to join the network there is no way that a private blockchain can be as decentralized as a public one.

• Consensus: Enterprise blockchain transactions are a lot more complex than just, for example, sending Bitcoin payment from one address to another. The consensus mechanism would need to involve different roles, for example, the need to work on different parts of the transaction lifecycle, such as requestor, approver etc.

• Supportability: Businesses need to ensure that their private blockchains are maintainable. This includes day-to-day administration, patching, and troubleshooting. They need to have processes in place to monitor service level agreements (SLAs) and manage operations.

• Integration: Businesses have their systems of record (SOR) applications, which their enterprise blockchain will need to communicate with. Before they roll-out their blockchain, they need to have the required application programming interfaces (APIs) ready to implement this integration.

• Governance: Every enterprise needs to design standards, processes, methods, and tools to develop and operate a private blockchain. To achieve this they will need tools and frameworks such as IDE, testing framework, security auditing tool etc. For long-term successful operation, they also need to develop high-quality documentation. This requires proactive governance.

Reference

Public permissioned: Like Alastria, a public permissioned network, is public for use but permissioned because you have to ask permission to become a member.

• Any citizen should be able to use the services available on the network.
• It depends on a trusted validated group of nodes and has no crypto coin associated.
• The transaction cost is low and predictable.
• It requires some kind of governance. In the case of Alastria, it's governed by a consortium that has agreed in the use of the network, although the way on how It has to be governed is currently being discussed.

What is Ether, how it affects to test-net 1

Ether is a necessary element — a fuel — for operating the distributed application platform Ethereum. It is a form of payment made by the clients of the platform to the machines executing the requested operations. To put it another way, ether is the incentive ensuring that developers write quality applications (wasteful code costs more) and that the network remains healthy (people are compensated for their contributed resources).

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What is gas, how it affects to test-net 1

Gas (Ethereum) refers to the pricing value required to successfully conduct a transaction or execute a contract on the Ethereum blockchain platform.

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Gas is the way how tariffs transactions are calculated. Tariff are paid in ether and are different to Gas.

• Gas cost is the quantity of work needed to do a job.
• Gas price is the salary in ether for every Gas unit.
• Tariff will be determined by the combination of Gas cost and price.

If Gas price is too low, no one will process the transaction(Trx.).

If Gas price is fine, but executed Trx. Gas cost is over assigned, the transaction will fail, but it will be registered in the blockchain without making any change in the storage of the contract, and all gas assigned to the transaction will be lost. This guarantees that nothing can be executed forever and that people will be careful when they execute their code.

Quorum does not spend Ether in transaction processing by default.

The appearance of Solidity added

Aspects of programming in Quorum