Tokyo Tower looked especially beautiful tonight.

Jason Burns for Substratum:

Hi guys, I’m here to drop a quick video update for today to talk about how Substratum is speeding up blockchain content delivery with machine learning. Now, as most of you know from being involved in crypto, the blockchain is an intriguing decentralized approach to content storage with many benefits. However, the one area blockchain is weak, and thus one of its biggest problems is network latency.

What the f*** is “blockchain content delivery”? Blockchain is not a “decentralized approach to content storage”. Blockchain is a decentralized approach to record keeping through an immutable ledger with the storage component as a tradeoff for traceability and security. Network latency is simply a measure of the time that it takes for data to be sent between two network nodes. It doesn’t make blockchain “weak” because it’s only an issue if your blockchain project is too sh**ty is attract users.

So, why does blockchain have latency? Good question. The same feature that makes the blockchain so powerful is the feature that slows it down. The data that servers deliver, in this case the web content, needs to be verified by other nodes on the blockchain before it’s served to the end user. That involves more queries and responses, and those add up to significant amounts of time from an initial query to the final response, in some cases, servers need to communicate with servers across the world for authentication before reporting and responding to the end user.

This is an outright lie. Substratum’s networking layer uses standard TCP/IP and encryption technologies and does not use blockchain whatsoever. Web content is not “verified by other nodes” — that’s just a terrible idea. Substratum used this video to hype up ICO investors by showing them the glorious power of the blockchain and how it can be used to verify web content to create a “free and fair Internet”. In reality, the only blockchain that Substratum used is Ethereum’s ERC-20 protocol to create SUB, the company’s fundraising vehicle and monetization currency.

Our goal is to eliminate every barrier to widespread adoption of blockchain technology and high latency is one of the major barriers we’re addressing. Our solution uses machine learning or artificial intelligence to optimize server response times by incorporating geo-location data into our querying process. Our blockchain system will cut latency by working with only those nodes closest to the end user.

What blockchain system?

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During its ICO, Substratum accepted BTC, ETH, XRP, BCH, and LTC. Below are the total contribution amounts for each cryptocurrency. These numbers are sourced from Substratum’s whitepaper.

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This post will be a high level overview of how to easily block traffic coming from SubstratumNode v0.4.1. Since this version of SubstratumNode is still technically in beta, I won’t be going into detail about how to reproduce each step. However, if you have a basic understanding of Unix command line, spinning up a VPS, and firewalls, you’ll be able to identify, log, and block SubstratumNode IP addresses as well.

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Justin Tabb:

If you’re part of the pump and dump groups… Raise your hand if you’ve been part of one! I’m raising my hand… I’ve been part of one.

This is seriously one of the funniest things I have ever watched, and I’m not sure how I missed this. In this video, Substratum CEO Justin Tabb admits he used to be part of a pump and dump group in front of a live audience. This is honestly what I love about crypto. The contrast between some of the most brilliant minds in the world with CEOs who discuss their past lives as pump and dumpers makes for such a beautiful shitshow. I don’t mean this in a bad way at all. Crypto is an emerging industry, and it’s truly fascinating to watch it mature. Can you imagine what would happen if Tim Cook went on stage at WWDC and announced told the audience he used to pump and dump stocks?

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We went to Zōjō-ji to check out the New Year festivities last night. I love the architectural mix of old and new.

Earlier today, I came across this Reddit thread about the price of SUB pumping 15% in the days leading up to the scheduled EOY2018 release of SubstratumNode V1. I did not find this initial price increase to be suspicious because “buy the rumor, sell the news” is a very well documented behavior in capital markets. What I did find suspicious was the subsequent downtrend that started around 7 PM (UTC) on December 30, 2018. Here’s a chart showing the price action of SUB/BTC on Binance along with a few observations.

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Justin Tabb:

When you go and connect to a VPN server, you’re connecting to vpn.myvpn.net or whatever it is, and that’s a single point of failure most of the time. So China’s able to very easily pull down from what we’ve heard from Chinese citizens that are inside of China uh new VPNs as they pop up. The difference with Substratum is that it’s myriad points, right? So if you knocked down one point even if you could, which you know it’s being built that you can’t. But even if you could knock down that one point, you know because of the self-healing that’s rolling out right now, it finds another one automatically. You don’t have to restart the product, you don’t have to change any settings. The idea is that it just continues to work. It does all the hard work for you. And so I’m very excited where we are headed in 2019

I think Substratum’s “self-healing” property will ultimately be the cause of its downfall. It’s obvious that a node on the Substratum network will always know the IP address of the next-hop node. Since this is the case, a quick inspection of SubstratumNode’s command line interface (CLI) will reveal the IP address of another node on the network. If that IP address is locally blocked, the node software should then begin the process of “self-healing” and look for another node on the network. Rinse and repeat this process, and you’ll soon have a list of the IP addresses of nodes on the Substratum network.

Now that I think about it more, it doesn’t even have to be so complicated. Another way to harvest IPs would be to set up a basic VPS with NGINX or Apache and upload a simple web page. Next, just browse to the VPS’ IPs through the Substratum network and block the exit node IPs that hit the VPS. If Substratum’s self-healing feature works as advertised, the node software should continuously rotate exit nodes, which makes it extremely easy to compile a full list of IPs to block. This flaw could potentially be very dangerous for Chinese citizens due to the government’s control over telecom companies. With a list of IPs, the Chinese government could potentially identify individuals who are using SubstratumNode. I hate censorship, but SubstratumNode doesn’t seem to be the answer.

Self-healing or self-destruction?

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Substratum’s second ICO for its Amplify Exchange started over two months ago on October 1, 2018. Two days ago, I noticed the whitepaper link was no longer working on Amplify’s website. Since then, the 404 error has been fixed with a link to a newer version of the whitepaper. The original whitepaper was marked V5.12, while the new whitepaper reads V7. It’s strange for a project to swap out its whitepaper during an ICO process (before or after is okay), so let’s take a look at the changes that Substratum made mid-ICO.

To compile the information below, I ran a diff between the two PDF files. The text from each whitepaper is highlighted by individual blockquotes (V5.12 comes first, V7 comes second), and the changed text between the two versions is bolded and italicized.

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ICON recently released an updated development roadmap.

• I like the new milestone-based approach. The previous date-based approach introduced a level of expectation in the community that has hurt the project’s reputation from a PR perspective. By switching to a milestone-based model with regular monthly updates, the community will be able to observe month-to-month updates, which will hopefully result in productive conversation about the ICON’s progress.
• The section in the roadmap about ICON’s decentralized identity service (DID) is interesting. In addition to DID integration in the ICONex wallet, there is also a milestone goal that reads “Launch DID based service with business partner.” I wonder if this has anything to do with more widespread usage of ICON’s CHAIN ID.
• ICON is working on smart contract templates for both STOs (security token offerings) and stablecoins. I hope the team will reveal more about the stablecoin project in the coming months.

ICON fan for not, I highly recommend checking out the updated roadmap as well as the recently released IISS yellowpaper which details the network’s staking mechanism.

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