Letter to Community
Dear friends and members of Seele Community,
I really appreciate your support for the past year and a half. When Seele was extremely difficult, two heads of the foundation signed a document on December 14, 2018, and handed over all the remaining digital assets raised by Seele to me (less than 400,000 USDT if converted to USDT at the price of the day): the mission was to release Seele Mainnet before March 31, 2019. At that time, my San Francisco team had a total of 6 people, myself included there would be 5 developers (now 6). With a sense of responsibility for Seele (though I started as only an advisor), confidence in my team, and my personal belief in cryptocurrency and blockchain, I accepted this challenge. As you all know, the end of 2018 was the lowest time for digital currency. Thanks to the outstanding efforts of Dev Team, Seele Mainnet was successfully released on March 31, 2019, and has been successfully operating till now! I am proud of my team. All of my colleagues are sharp, and 4 of the 5 developers have PhDs. In April, we have little funds left. In May, a colleague from the original foundation brought friends from polyChain Capital. After mutual understanding, the guests decided to invest in Dev Team 1 million USD for a year. They planed to wait for a year to see the development progress of Seele Mainnet, then decide whether to continue to invest. Seele Subchain Beta was released on March 31, 2020. Everyone knows the current situation. Because of covid-19, investors decided to suspend investment. My team and I are very grateful to the Seele Foundation, friends of polyChain Capital, and the Seele Community for their trust and support for my team in the past two years.
Let me share two stories that happened during development.
The most important feature of cryptocurrency is that it is not controlled by a few, known as decentralization; the entire blockchain and community should live as a self-organizing and self-adaptive system. In order to ensure this feature, Seele Team created the MPoW proof-of-work consensus algorithm based on hash and matrix algebra, which is different from the proof-of-work consensus algorithm of Seele when first released. Rewind to when Seele Mainnet was successfully launched and had only been running for about three weeks, a very powerful miner suddenly appeared on the Seele Mainnet, controlling the entire network, causing other miners to leave one by one. This is the first Seele Mainnet crisis! Through the efforts of our colleagues, we found that Seele's consensus algorithm, after a simple transformation, can be run on an ASIC mining machine, which makes it easier to control. After only three weeks of hard work, we successfully developed and released the MPoW that has been employed till now. This opportunity provided us a deep realization, that in a system easily controlled by a few machines through computing power it is difficult to encourage fair competition, let alone ensure safety.
The current consensus algorithm used by Seele Subchain is PBFT algorithm, a voting mechanism. How to ensure the safety of sub-chain funds is a very challenging proposition. For example, if a user of the sub-chain suspects that a transaction of his own has a problem, the usual practice is to let the user provide evidence, which is difficult for users with very little data available. Seele Subchain successfully implements the following logic: Users do not need to provide proofs; Instead, users will challenge, and it is the verifier/voter who will collect proof: The burden of proof is on the verifier/voter. Implement this logic requires plowing through immense difficulties, and Seele Dev Team did it!
Also, Seele's sharding technology is rare in the market. Seele Mainnet avoids the double-spending problem of cross-shard transactions to the greatest extent, and has successfully achieved long-term stable operation of four shards. With the support of sharding technology, the transaction speed of Seele Mainnet is four times its single-chain alternatives. Shards can be continually added depending on the needs of Seele Mainnet.
After two years of thinking day and night, my team's understanding of blockchain and cryptocurrency, and ability to research mathematical models and code has reached high levels of excellence, arguably world-class. They include physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists and so on, which is really great! I know that they use their faith in digital currency and blockchain to drive their daily work, not money: any of them can change jobs to easily earn more than their pay at SeeleTech. I am sincerely grateful. God will not mistreat the hard working!
Ok, now it is time to talk about myself. I am a mathematician and have worked in various jobs. But I have always been using mathematics. I have been studying mathematical models and algorithms for many years, and now I am working on writing Seele code. I love mathematics and freedom. I can’t solve all the injustices in the world as an insignificant scholar, but the emergence of bitcoin has given me a little hope: at least in the near future, people can be the masters of their own assets, without worrying that your account will be taken away by some power: It stays absolutely safe. I have a special liking for proof-of-work algorithms: not only does it incorporate the ingenuity and beauty of mathematics, but also the obvious truth that there is no free meal.
I am about to enter the ranks of receiving pensions. Money is no longer important to me. What is more important is my belief in freedom and mathematics, now extended to include cryptocurrency, PoW and blockchain. It is not the case that I am not willing to answer various questions raised by the community about Seele ERC20 tokens. I sincerely do not have the answers to those questions. I am sure that the announcement of the foundation and the announcement of the major shareholders answered your questions clearly.
One thing I can tell you is that some websites can be blocked, but no one can block Seele Mainnet! It is the community that supports it, thus you are the ones who can turn it off. I will continue to work with the team in the fields of cryptocurrency and blockchain: we will make a digital currency with no presets, reservations, privileges, control, or manipulation, and contribute to the fairness and justice of human society!
Thank you all sincerely. In the future, on our own team's digital currency blockchain project, I promise to answer every single question-because it will no longer hold ERC20 tokens! ERC20 tokens and the greed of men are too closely tied!
Dr. Maolin Zheng
April 27th, 2020
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