An Erlang-Based Blockchain Meet Yanislav Malahov, Founder Of Æternity

基于Erlang的区块链 会见雅尼斯拉夫·马拉霍夫，Aeternity的创始人

Yanislav is a true veteran of the blockchain space, having exchanged ideas and pursued blockchain endeavors with many of the greatest minds. Back in 2013, the "Godfather of Ethereum" envisioned powerful algorithms on blockchains. With æternity, his vision is becoming a reality of enabling faster transactions without sacrificing rich functionality and decentralization. The protocol of the æternity blockchain is based on an entirely new architecture and is an important step toward mainstream adoption of the blockchain.

雅尼在区块链行业是一个真正的“老兵”，他与许多最伟大的头脑交流思想并致力于区块链事业。早在2013年，“以太坊教父”就设想了区块链上部署强大的算法。通过aeternity，他的愿景正在成为现实，即在不牺牲丰富功能和去中心化的情况下实现更快的交易。æternity区块链的协议基于一种全新的架构，是区块链被主流采用的重要一步。

David: Thank you very much for being here with us, please tell me your name and your project and what is your role in the project.

David: 非常感谢你来到这里，请告诉我你的名字和你的项目以及你在项目中的角色。

Yanni: My name is yanni, I’m the founder and CEO of the aeternity establishment. We are developing a blockchain called aeternity blockchain. Um we launched it already in 2018 with a public mainnet, we did a one of more famous token sales in 2017. And I’m almost now for 10 years in the crypto space. I went to my first bitcoin meetup in 2011 and I realized that people who are involved in this or were involved back then it was very interesting very fascinating crowd or combination of people. And I stayed in touch with let’s say this very small community since then and yeah late 2012 I decided to become a blockchain professional was involved in multiple blockchain projects. For example the dark wallets which was a crowdfunding campaign for a wallet for web-based privacy focused wallet for bitcoin and I created probably the first browser wallet for dogecoin. I maybe have created the first NFT token wallet for issuance as well as transfers together with vitalik trent mcgonagay in 2013. As well and since I was working with vitalik we were frequently chatting about what we could improve over uh yeah having tokens on blockchains and I suggested to him in a chat to have updatable algorithms. And I posted this chat log with his permission under the title godfather of ethereum where I described my backgrounds connection to the ethereum projects and yeah…

Yanni: 我叫yanni，我是aeternity区块链的创始人兼CEO。 我们正在开发一个名为 aeternity 的区块链平台。嗯，我们已经在2018年通过公共主网推出了它，我们在2017年进行了一次最著名的代币销售。我现在在加密领域已经快10年了。我在2011年参加了我的第一次比特币聚会，我意识到参与其中或当时参与的人是非常有趣的，非常迷人的人群或人群组合。 从那时起我就与这个非常小的社区保持联系，是的，2012年底我决定成为一名区块链专业人士，参与了多个区块链项目。 例如，dark wallets是一个针对基于比特币网络的隐私钱包的众筹活动，我创建了可能是第一个狗狗币的浏览器钱包。我可能在2013年与 vitalik一起创建了第一个用于发行和转账的NFT代币钱包。此外，自从我与vitalik合作以来，我们经常讨论我们可以改进哪些方面，呃，是的，在区块链上拥有代币。我在聊天中向他建议有可更新的算法。我在他的许可下发布了这个聊天记录，标题为以太坊教父，我在其中描述了我与以太坊项目的背景联系，是的……

David: Now let’s see what was your thinking and what was the basis in creating your new blockchain what were the deciding factors and the features that you wanted it to have?

David: 现在让我们看看您的想法是什么，创建一个新区块链的基础是什么？您希望它具有的决定性因素和功能是什么？

Yanni: Yeah my background is computer science I studied in munich computer science and economics is a minor and I mean how I got to crypto as I googled literally google for cryptocurrency, knowing that we need crypto and we need probably new currencies and we need to combine these things. And with aeternity blockchain I mean I wasn’t really happy with what was available back then on the markets, meaning there was only ethereum as a smart contract platform and as you probably or as probabley now understands there cannot be just one blockchain, where we put all the transations which people are going to need whether it’s like marketing transactions or more complex financial instruments or just notarization. Statements on the blockchain so we need to scale, we need to have ways how we can handle billions of transactions every day, many billions of transactions every day. So to improve the scalability was from the beginning on very important for the aeternity blockchain project. So we built in state channels um state channels kind of like the payment channels on the bitcoin blockchain you can do them also for smart contracts on for example ethereum. But we built them into the protocol itself meaning the smart contract language with aeternity and the virtual machines understands already what state channels are so it’s really streamlined the expericence is really streamlined to open up a state channel in the future also to network its and other scalability improvements as well.

Yani: 是的，我的背景是计算机科学，我在慕尼黑大学学习计算机科学辅修学习经济学专业，我的意思是我是如何进入加密的，因为我在谷歌上搜索加密货币，知道我们需要加密，我们可能需要新的货币，我们需要结合这些东西。对于aeternity区块链，我的意思是我对当时市场上可用的东西并不满意，这意味着只有以太坊作为智能合约平台，正如你现在可能理解的那样，不可能只有一个区块链，我们把人们需要的所有交易都放在那里，无论是营销交易还是更复杂的金融工具，或者只是公证。关于区块链的声明，所以我们需要扩展，我们需要有办法每天处理数十亿笔交易，每天处理这么多。因此，提高可扩展性对于aeternity区块链项目来说从一开始就非常重要。所以我们建立了状态通道，嗯，状态通道有点像比特币链上的支付通道，也可以理解为以太坊上的智能合约所做的这些。但是我们将它内置到协议本身中，这意味着具有aeternity的智能合约语言，并且虚拟机已经了解什么是状态通道，因此它确实得到了简化，体验得到了真正的简化，可以在未来打开状态通道，也可以将其和其他可扩展性联合、改进。

David: You are chose a very exotic language erlang to be the basis. In erlang was designed for real-time high transaction uh reliable performance operations originally by the telecom industry by Ericsson. And it does that very well, however it is still a pretty exotic language. So do you find the trade-off between its ability to be expressive in certain way and not a lot of people knowing the language intimately a right kind of trade-off.

David: 您选择了一种非常奇特的语言Erlang作为基础。Erlang最初是由爱立信为电信行业设计并用于实时高事务且可靠的性能操作。 它做得很好，但它仍然是一种非常奇特的语言。 那么，您是否发现它以某种方式表达的能力与没有很多密切了解这种语言之间的人之间的权衡是一种正确的权衡。

Yanni: Interesting question, I don’t believe it’s so exotic everybody is using erlang every day with every phone call you do or every time you go online or every whatsapp message you send. There’s erlang back running in the background. Not many people know of this but the telecom swiches are running erlang and yes it was invented by ericsson in the year I was also made over the same year like you’re the same age me and erlang. It was at the beginning I must say it was a positive thing because not every developer learns erlang meaning they’re all self-driven highly intelligent people who are starting things with erlang, especially becoming professionals in this field. This is not something for everyone. But we were able to hire we believe the best development team which ever desiged adn developed a blockchain like for people who have co-created or solely created programming languages and virtual machines in the past. Such as the co-creator of scala sole creator of actor the co-creator pascal, and the co-creator of erlang robert werding, we hired them and also three more PHDs and other people highly skilled developers erlang professionals. We put them into this original core development team, and it was almost like a wonder meaning I was very pleasantly surprised by how well we built this team to create this the blockchain, the aeternity blockchain. So this was a definitely kind of like a benefit. I thought it was also interesting that the last day of our token sale, was also the day of the yearly erlang user conference where I went to in stockholm. And obviously I was very excited and I showed everybody like what we did and what we have now funding to build the next generation smart contract platform in erlang. So we attracted really the best people in the erlang world, probably the best team which ever existed in the erlang world was working on the aeternity blockchain. We launched it in 2018, since then the world changed a little bit also through covid. People went actually more online, so the big internet giants they had more demand for erlang developers. And I must say right now it isn’t that easy yes to build such a great team again. We have still some of people from original team involved, but yeah when for example facebook pays double the price, then we would like to pay or have paid in the past it’s difficult to compete. So yeah erlang is really everywhere, it’s not exotic and there’s a high demand right now for it.

Yanni: 有趣的问题，我不认为erlang是多奇异的语言，每个人每天都在使用它，你拨打的每一个电话，你每一次上网，你发的每一条WhatsApp信息，都依靠后台运行的erlang。没有多少人知道这一点。电信交换机正在运行erlang，是的，它是爱立信在我出生那一年发明的，你、我都和erlang同龄。一开始我必须说这是一件积极的事情，因为并不是每一个开发人员都学习erlang，正在用erlang开始工作的这部分人，意味着他们都是自我驱动的高度聪明的人，尤其是成为该领域的专业人士。这并不适合所有人。但我们能够聘请我们相信最好的开发团队设计和开发区块链，他们曾是过去共同创建或单独创建编程语言和虚拟机的人。例如 scala 的共同创造者，actor 的共同创造者，pascal 的共同创造者，以及 erlang 的共同创造者robert werding，我们聘请了他们以及另外三名PHD和其他高技能开发人员，erlang专业人员。我们将他们放入这个最初的核心开发团队，这几乎就像一个奇迹，这意味着我非常惊喜地发现我们建立这个团队来创建这个区块链，aeternity区块链。所以这绝对是一种好处， 我觉得有趣的是，我们代币销售的最后一天，也是我去斯德哥尔摩参加年度erlang用户大会的日子。所以我们真的吸引了erlang世界中最优秀的人才，可能是erlang世界中有史以来最好的团队正在研究aeternity区块链,我们在2018年推出了它。自那以后，世界经过COVID-19发生了一些变化，人们更多的需要互联网，所以大型互联网巨头对erlang开发人员有了更多需求。我必须说，现在再次建立这样一支伟大的团队并不是那么容易。虽然我们仍然有一些来自原始团队的人参与其中，但是是的，例如当facebook支付双倍的薪酬时，那么我们愿意支付或支付原来的薪酬很难竞争。所以是的，erlang真是无处不在，它不是异国情调，现在世界对它的需求量很大。

未完，待续…..