Elastic Project - The Decentralized Supercomputer

Lead by Lannister, a cryptocurrency enthousiast since 2011, the Elastic Project is a cryptocurrency driven infrastrucute for decentralized computation.

This week, we interviewed Lannister to know more about its project.

What is Elastic and what can it bring to the crypto world?

Elastic is not just a super computer, it is THE super computer.
In our vision, people (such as scientists) who are in need of large amounts of computation power do not have to rent an expensive, commercial cloud computing solution anymore. Instead, they can submit their tasks to the Elastic Network along with a certain amount of Elastic Coins. Other users can then offer their spare processing power to contribute to the calculation of those tasks and earn Elastic Coins in exchange. This is similar to the Bitcoin mining process, but without wasting the energy.

A brief explanation can be seen in our promo video:

How does Elastic Project cames to your mind?

Elastic Project is one of those platforms, which is entirely decentralized. It is is an open source project with contributors from around the world.
In fact, Elastic Project was started with a vague idea on Bitcointalk that interested me, which I have then pursued and learnt more once I was involved. This idea then was improved by a number of very bright members of the Elastic community. At the moment we have a very precise idea of how Elastic should be built to ensure reliability, robustness and security.

How and where will people be able to participate to the ICO?

People are already able to secure their portion of Elastic Coins.
Donations in the context of our donation-based crowdfunding are already being accepted for the upkeep and support of Elastic Project. We give away a certain amount of Elastic Coins (ELC) voluntarily to those who support Elastic and record it in the so-called genesis block. This number depends on the time and on the size of the donation.

More information can be found on http://www.elastic.pro
The ELC giveaway ends when Bitcoin block 425920 has passed.

Why should people invest in Elastic?

I would like to cross out the word “investment”. Please do not consider Elastic Coins (ELC) to be shares, futures, certificates, securities, bonds, treasures, profit-sharing agreements, or anything similar. Obtaining Elastic Coins or participating in the donation-based crowdfunding does not imply that shares in a company are offered.

However, Elastic Coins do have an intrinsic value. This value is determined by the amount of processing power the Elastic Network is able to offer for a given amount of ELC and how expensive it would be to obtain the same amount of computation power from commercially available cloud computing solutions.

But please note, Elastic Project does not come with any guarantee of success. You are not investing, you are donating. Never donate more than you are willing to lose.

How is the development going actually?

The entire development takes place on GitHub (using the push and pull process) and everyone is entitled to contribute. There is no company or single person behind the Elastic Project. However, we have a hand full of “core programmers” which do their work amazingly good and who publicly committed themselves to a productive and indefinitive ongoing development.

According to the Official Presentation, to contribute to the development, it is possible to just fork one of their GitHub repositories at https://github.com/elastic-project to start working. All pull requests sent be the developers are discussed in the community and if there is a consensus, they get pulled.

More about Elastic Project

As mention in the Official Presentation, Elastic Project is a “loose formation of developers. As such, nobody can speak with authority in the name of the Elastic network.”

Schedule to launch during the summer of 2016, an Alpha and Beta version can be expected earlier.

Conclusion

Elastic Project offers many interesting topics of research. This includes for example the verifiable computation part, the prunability of the blockchain, or the security of the blockchain in terms of a certain type of attacks.
If you are interested in getting involved, just visit us on Bitcointalk and join our development team.

Thanks to Lannister for the time !