CryptoDogs: thoughts on Achain’s fork theory

CryptoDogs is a blockchain-based virtual game. It allows players to adopt, raise, and trade virtual dogs, and it represents one of the earliest attempts to deploy blockchain technology for recreational and leisurely purposes. It’s a re-visitation of Ethereum’s CryptoKitties on the Achain platform developed by the community.

But why it has to prove something about a fork theory? And what is Achain in the first place?

Achain is a public blockchain platform that enables developers of all levels of experience to issue tokens, smart contracts, create applications and blockchain systems. But what really elevates Achain is their fork theory: on Nov. 23 of 2017, Achain founder Tony Cui posted on BitcoinTalk Forum to unveil the basic framework of the freshly designed Fork Theory on chain-split. Basicaly instead of creating tokens and services upon the main chain (eg: Ethereum) you fork the Achain main chain (eg: Bitcoin Cash), this way the new platform has it’s own blockchain increasing speed, scalability, security and flexibility.From Achain, user can fork multiple new blockchains easily, and user can even fork from newly created blockchain continuously. All forked blockchains are equal, which means they are not hierarchical from technical or economic perspective.

At the time when CryptoKitties first came out on Ethereum all people went crazy. For weeks everybody talked mostly about kitties, for a few reasons:1) With Cryptokitties it was really easy to explain people what blockchain and cryptocurrencies are;2) People spent over $2 millions to buy these kittens with ETH making it the most popular smart contract on the network;3) Ethereum for the first time showed its limits: the network has been congested for weeks, you can look here at the Ethereum Pending Transaction Queue of those weeks;

That network congestion brought a lot of debates and made it clear that there was the need for more improvements to speed and scalability.

With Achain that congestion that we saw would never happen, for a few reasons:1) Achain unlike Ethereum is able to preccess 1000 tx/s (instead of Ethereum’s 12 tx/s) with a 10s block generation timestamp: it’s really fast, try it;2) By forking Achain CryptoDogs has its own blockchain, that means that even if there were millions of people buying dogs all that traffic would be managed by their own blockchain and by their own miners, without passing through the main chain.

By forking and running your own blockchain you don’t only make your service faster and more stable you also increase the security of the whole ecosystem.Also there is a cross-chain comunication protocol called Value Exchange Protocol(VEP). On the Achain’s whitepaper is stated that “ the more forking blockchains are connected, the more values are created. VEP supports two major user scenarios: cross-chain communication and cross-chain smart contract invocation.” So all assets based or forked on Achain will have the possibility to communicate with each other through atomic swaps, without passing through exchanges: take a look at the roadmap of kcash, it’s already happening.

Another very interesting aspect of Achain is the Recommended Delegated Proof of Stake (RDPoS) consensus mechanism. This means that from now on you put your money on stake so you won’t need high processing power but just a simple notebook or even your phone.When run just as securely as DPoS, RDPoS can increase the block response and improve the stability and security of the network. But the interesting thing is that when you fork the main chain you can set your own consensus mechanism (PoS, DPoS or RDPoS) that better suite your use case. So it’s not a big surprise that Achain partnered with another company in order to create and sell a little and nice PC that you can use to store crypto, mine and run Dapp’s nodes (you also can use it like a normal computer).

Acute Angle PC

On Acute Angle PC website it’s stated that their PC “spend less than 0.08 Dollar on electric charge per day”. So you could keep it on 24/7 and keep mining without any huge energy consumption.So it’s clear that Achain team knows what they are doing, and they are doing it right.

It’s clear how the fork theory actually make sense and how this is the natural evolution of a blockchain: that started just like a very powerful calculator to then became a computer and to finally evolve into a real entity.

Achain already had its first fork (ABTC) and is preparing to the next ones (that should be BitcoinOS) and it will be very interesting to look those forks closely and see how this entity called Achain will grow and evolve. Very hyped for the future!

Some of the services based or partnering with Achain

References and resources:

• Achain智能合约平台
• CryptoDogs
• CryptoKitties | Collect and breed digital cats!
• After BlockShow: How Achain's Fork Theory Has Worked in Real Life
• Achain's Fork Theory -- what do you think?
• Acute Angle Coin Miner

CryptoDogs: thoughts on Achain’s fork theory was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.