PCHAIN Technical Q&A

A technical Q&A captured in official PChain telegram channel is reproduced below for your convenience. Q is the question asked by the PChain community, and A is answer provided by Dr. Feng Cao (Jeff), founder of PChain.

Q: Hey Jeff how much Pai roughly would be required for staking? I’m here for long term

A: Generally, the more pai you have，the larger chance you will become a validator. While it‘s still a probability. And we adopt sigmoid function to reduce Matthew effect.



Q: Hi Jeff, glad to see you being active here, answering question after the ICO. Just wonder you will issue a short term roadmap of the technical implementation for further raising the transparency of team progress for the community? I do appreciate your regular updates over Twitter but I guess that would be helpful to give us a general picture or the direction of the project going.

A: We have weekly report. And generally，we are on the roadmap of test net in Oct 2018. Everything goes smoothly both tech and biz aspect. And our internal test net has been successfully extended to 100 validator nodes which is a huge tech progress as you known EOS has only 21 validators/supernodes.

Q: I see that's great progress in decentralization but does it impact the tx speed or it maintains while having more node?

A: Of course，decentralization will compromise tx speed. The advantage of PDBFT is to have a relative high speed in the mean time to keep relative high decentralization.
In short，we hope to achieve comparable speed with EOS while 100+ times decentralization in terms of validators/nodes


Q: Will it be only possible to earn pos rewards being masternode or everyone will be able to earn pos rewards in proportion to held PAI?

A: To have PAI is the 1st step，and you need to become a PCHAIN validator which is a dynamic process. If you are a validator，you will contribute to the blockchain generation and get PAI reward as virtual mining.


Q: I see. So to become validator probably I would need to get voted and without connections that’s not likely at all and simply holding large amount of PAI isnt enough

A: Yes，you need to join the virtual mining which is the key of decentralization

Q: But lets say hypothetically a masternode would require 50k PAI in the future. So would I be able to setup a full node myself if I would have a required amount for a masternode therefore more decentralisation or the masternodes would be delegated/selected by someone and there would be limited number of them?

A: If you got even 1 PAI，you still get chance to become a validator. The only problem is your chance is much lower. To keep fair of the consensus，the validators are dynamic and renew from every new epoch

Q: I see. So masternodes are selected not based on meeting the minimum holdings of PAI but rather randomly with the chances growing proportionally to tokens held?

A: We have an interesting mechanism called blind voting ：）


Q: Blind meaning random I guess. Thats nice, looking forward to that !

A: Some what random and verifiable


Q: This method of choosing a validator is really interesting, never seen any other projects use this method before

A: Yes，it‘s PCHAIN innovation


Q: Nice. How many people are working full time on this beautiful project and how many of them are full time developers ?
A: 17 full time + 6 part time


Q: Very amazing, this method of choosing validators will make sure whales will not control all nodes and good use of pai

A: Exactly，to reduce the Matthew Effect

Q: If we increase the number of nodes, is the blockchain will slow down?

A: Yes，as we reduced to communication cost from O(N^2）to O(N) So it will be somewhat slow but not that sharp


Q: isn't a higher hash rate = more secure?

A: Yes, it‘s true. But hash rate is not the only way for security


Q: What is the new security measures?

A: PDBFT requires 2/3 validators signature to confirm 1 block is valid or not and these validators are dynamic


Q: Right, so mathematically very very improbable to have 2/3rd attack?

A: Yes，and dynamic blind voting makes it harder to be attacked


Q: Any idea what the total PAI would be? Is that a variable

A: Similar to bitcoin，our current design is to have a convergent function to ensure the total number of PAI is limited and fixed