HN user
Spent last 18 years setting up new banks and services that extend the ecosystem around industrial products - helped build 12 bank and industry startups in the Americas, Asia and Europe. Now we're building BigchainDB, a massively scalable blockchain database.
Openchain is a series of sidechains that communicate to one another, with only one authority that validates transactions within each sidechain.
BigchainDB is a single instance that leverages distributed databases but builds on top decentralized control so that for every transaction, a least a majority of nodes must validate and approve. Each block is validated and then chained together, giving the characteristic of immutability.
The DNS was our inspiration. The fmr CEO and CTO are advisors and guided us through the process to build both the technology and the surrounding incentive and collaboration model.
To your point about "have to trust a handful of big guys to play fair," please refer to exhibit A - https://blockchain.info/pools - where 2 miners control 52% and 4 miners control over 75% of the hashing power. If that's not trusting a handful of guys to play fair, I don't know what is.
We can take a permissioned, federated model because we have no native asset coin that needs to be backed up by wasteful mining, meaning that BigchainDB can handle an infinite number of assets on the same ledger. That, along with our pipelining innovation, we can hit writes/s up to 2 million.
And it scales. BigchainDB isn't meant to replace Bitcoin, it's meant to serve enterprise customers who want to be able to run blockchain systems in production, at scale.
People collect autographs from the stars. Wouldn't it be cool to collect brainscans as a unique autograph? Kevin Spacey, thinking in-character to Frank Underwood or Stephen Colbert, as Stephen Colbert (pre-Late Night).
Yes, the API is ready and will soon be available at https://github.com/ascribe0