Orbs Contributor Guide

Onboarding and Background Reading

Light introduction to blockchain

• Definitions - Blockchain and Decentralized Consensus

• Why Decentralized Consensus (Blockchain) Is Good for Business

• How to Run a Blockchain on a Deserted Island with Pen and Paper

Introduction to Orbs

• The Orbs Position Paper

  This is our guide. It's long but important. Read this 4 times with at least a few days in between until it all sinks in.

Diving deeper to blockchain in general

• TODO

Diving deeper into Orbs

• Helix Consensus White Paper - Ordering Service

Orbs Federation

Motivation for consumer apps to run on top of the Orbs platform

• Kik - challenges launching Kin IPLv2 over Ethereum
• TBD

Developer Guide

Orbs Plafform reference implementation repo (points to Alpha)

V1

TODO

Developer blogposts

• Getting into blockchain - an engineer's story

TODO

Learning checklist

These are questions that an Orbs contributor should feel comfortable in answering to some level. This is not an exhaustive list but can help you in focusing your learning, especially if you are new to this world.

• Where is Bitcoin actually stored (explain blockchain as the agreed upon view of history)
• What is Proof of Work (PoW), what are its pros and cons
• What is Bitcoin mining (transactions, blocks, miner reward/fees, PoW)
• What is a smart contract made of and how is it run
• Why is Ethereum not suitable for consumer app token economies (gas price, transaction confirmation time)
• On which blockchain does the Orbs token live, and why