Overview

The Shell Project: The Shell Project (working name) aims to build a viable general purpose blockchain, with attributes of security, ease of deployment, clear specification, ease of use for DAPPs, and multiple implementation interop. Since the focus is on generalized use cases, not specifically cryptocurrency, it becomes possible for others to adapt this to their own use cases. The goal is to keep this project pure OSS, although it is associated with a business entity. We don't care who uses it, forks it, distributes it. And we don't intend to file patents on anything that has the intent of requiring commercial licensing or targetted patent trolling. The first implemetnation would be in Dlang. We will be working with another developer to ensure at least one other blockchain implementation is built in Java.

References

• Shells were used as an original currency and value store for early civilizations around the world, primarily in coastal regions. In particular, Indigenous people of North America used shells along the pacific coast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money

Why create The Shell Project

Why not

Why not fork Bitcoin?

Bitcoin has addressed the mainstream view for cryptocurrencies and large use of blockchain technology, demonstrating great potential for market change such as new ways to generate and manage digital assets. However, problems involving limitations in scalability and performance with the PoW (Proof-of-Work) such as security had lead to new implementations of Bitcoin and newer approaches. In the Shell Project we aim to work side by side with Bitcoin as matter of keeping up all the blocks generated since when Bitcoin was launched.

Why not fork Bytecoin?

TODO

Why not just use an ECR20 Token

TODO

Use Cases

Tons of great use cases here: https://medium.com/swlh/blockchain-benefits-use-cases-d259c823e968

Design

From Pedro:

1. Simple block generation and verification;
2. Node addition and recognizing;
3. Simple consensus of which operations was really performed into the blocks:
4. Shared state of hashed blocks;
5. Node health checking and consensus exposition;
6. Consensus achievement and possible "race conditions" that could be envolved
7. Design of simple business logics that could be run into the transaction blocks

TODO

• Initial commits
• Project plan
• A white paper
• Perform experimental (but very simple) transactions to validate the prototype
• Find some additional contributors
• Define model and micro-transaction architecture for the blockchain

General Notes

The D language (dlang.org) plays such a special role in software engineering space, providing amazing features for the purpose of saving lots of hours of work and empowering developers and engineers with awesomeness, just for the sake of simplicity and sanity. Some Dlang features aprecciated in this project should be noted :

Design by Contract

Template Programming

Metaprogramming

Fast compiling

Good readability

Code eficiency

Multiple platforms at once

This undoubtly extends the potential of a general purpose blockchain to not only multiple platforms but others devices types, providing fertile field to explore Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios into the blockchain ecosystem, none to say other use cases in so many industries and academic researches.

Future benchmarks with other platforms

TODO