More Than Blockchains: How Hashgraph & DAGs are Different

hashgraph.jpg

I do an awful lot of videos that speak about blockchain technology and how it’s pretty much amazing. It’s often described as the best thing since the invention of the internet, I mean there’s a reason why I decided to create a youtube channel dedicated to educating others on how it can change our lives.
But just wait a second,
there’s a new kid on the block that’s making some noise with some bold claims.

It’s name is Swirlds and it’s a software platform that is bringing us HashGraph technology.

Swirlds is labeling its Hashgraph technology as a “radically different approach to distributed consensus.”

They're also claiming that this new approach will be able to solve scaling and security issues.
Their Hashgraph technology uses a protocol called “Gossip about Gossip”. Despite what you may think, “Gossip” is actually a well-known computer technology phrase that refers to how computers communicate with each other.
The Hashgraph team describes it as,
“...calling any random node and telling that node everything you know, that it does not know. In distributed ledger technology the “baseline” or minimum bandwidth required is that the transactions go to every node. Gossip about Gossip refers to attaching a small additional amount of information to this Gossip, which contains the last person we talked to, hence, we are gossiping about the information we gossiped. Using this information, we can build the Hashgraph.”

This is the key for how Hashgraph would be able to know exactly when consensus would be reached.

Another aspect of the blockchain that Hashgraph is aiming to improve is the relative wastefulness of “stale” blocks and also to radically reduce the computing power needed compared to things like proof of work and proof of stake.

There is no doubt that Blockchain technology is a great step forward.

But it’s very much worth it to note that it has room to improve. And despite the fact that I am finally beginning to feel confident in my own knowledge of how blockchain technology works, I’m finding myself eager to learn more about other ideas on how it can be improved upon.

Swirlds’ Hashgraph isn’t the only platform that’s focusing on changing how a blockchain can be tweaked.

Byteball and other cryptos using DAGs are more or less on the same page in regards to their ideas for providing alternative options.
These are also called blockchain-free cryptocurrencies. The list of these types of cryptocurrencies includes Byteball, as I mentioned before, IOTA, and DagCoin.

Basically, a blockchain-free cryptocurrency is any distributed database that uses different tools to achieve essentially the same objectives as a blockchain.

These different tools used include what are called DAGs. This stands for Directed Acyclic Graphs. A quick Google search of this will show you an image of a DAG. If you’re like me and imagery tends to help you understand certain concepts, then take into account the context and imagery of a blockchain, and compare it to the imagery of a DAG. It might be a bit easier to wrap your head around how DAGs can be faster and more effecient in certain ways.
Now I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m still working towards understanding this concept better so I welcome anyone who can supplement with additional information on ways to break this down to please leave a comment down below so we can all learn more about it.

Additional Reading/Sources:

Swirlds Website
Swirlds Whitepaper
Squawker Article on Hashgraph
Dags Defined
Blockchain-free cryptocurrencies
Medium Article on Scalable Cryptocurrencies
Byteball
IOTA
DagCoin

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Very good video @heiditravels!

We need to explore more of similar technologies. All of them(Blockchain, DAG, Hashgraph and many more that are going to be discovered in the future) are implementations of a higher abstraction known as DLT(Distributed Ledger Technology). We still need to figure out if Hashgraph is either a sister or a child of DAG technology though.

Keep up the good work!

Thank you for the key word - Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). I didn't realize how many new discoveries where happening!

ATM hashgraph is patented and not opensource ^^ they still need to learn a lot :)

I'm trying to understand the key diffs between how consensus is determined between DPoS and this virtual voting across all node timelines and the witness nodes therein. Since both have the theoretical constraint on not having anymore than a third of the consensus network being bad players, than, with regards to the consensus problem , both models probably only are marginally different in performance, convergence, especially now that EOS is asynchronous and deterministic. I havent studied the gossip protocol to know what benefits we can infer beyond those of EOS multi-threaded messaging, but hashgraph criticisms that i find interesting are those that point out its weakness on a non-permissionend consensus network is no different than other voting models, indeed, if those other models ran private its consensus wouldno doubt perform better too. I bet on a horse that has run in bigger and higher stakes races than one that is private and controlled. We will see how the crypto community takes to it

It is a very good post ♫
I’m @moromaro.
one of japanese we accompanied party yesterday.
I'm glad to see you.
please follow me.

Hi @heiditravels, thank you vm for sharing this platform...this is really interesting. Do you know if it offers all the same features as Tangle, like allowing off-line consensus? Enjoy Portugal!

I love the concept of DAGs and am so happy to be able to follow these exciting technologies at such an early stage.
IOTA is very exciting, however I feel they might be about 5 years too early, not sure if you can justify their current marketcap.
Byteball on the other side has a much fairer model of distribution and actual real-live use cases right now.
There are so many new things in crypto, just today Bitcore BTX broke a new blockchain record: https://steemit.com/crypto-news/@xwerk/making-blockchain-history-bitcore-btx-is-currently-writing-blocks-with-over-3000-kb-of-data

@heiditravels You bring so much great info for us on STEEMIT and I appreciate it. I hope you are having a wonderful time in Lisbon. @jerrybanfield was even mentioning you today.......................

Thank you @stokjockey :) Yes, sitting next to @jerrybanfield made for a fun dinner with lots of laughs and matcha tea ;)

Hashgraph seems cool. Using gossip about gossip is part of the breakthrough from data-centric ledgers to agent-centric thinking. But it doesn't go far enough with that. Holochain is the whole deal. It enables true distribution while maintaining data integrity.

Great video Heidi! Just making this comment by Holochain more visible (it's in the comments of your YouTube video @heiditravels). Wonderful comment and comparison of #Holochain and Hashgraph @woitke.

We'd love for you to take a look at what we're doing at Holochain, Holographic storage for distributed applications. Here is a simple explainer video of #Holochain vs #Blockchain:

and we see that you've linked our co-founder's article above about how to go beyond Blockchain. Check out Art Brock's most recent piece on building responsible cryptocurrencies and ethical ICOs: https://medium.com/holochain/building-responsible-cryptocurrencies-d45d7d2173ed

Thanks for the great work you're doing, sharing what you're learning with the world. It's so cool you're in Portugal at the moment. We have a team in Porto, Portugal right now working on a related project, Holo - our distributed hosting ecosystem! If you have any questions about Holochain or Holo, join our public chat http://bit.ly/WelcomeToHolochain to speak with our devs and community members. Or, email [email protected]

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As usual, thanks for giving me a brief yet useful glimpse into aspects of crypto that I knew nothing about. I think it's cool that you are reporting from Steemfest. My wife and I hope to go next year.

I hope you'll be able to make it wherever @rolandp decides to organize it next year. It's so worth it.

Thanks for explaining hashgraph

Thank you so much for sharing @heiditravels! You're such an amazing inspiration to all of us working on Steemit, and maybe even more to those who are just starting in the crypto/blockchain world. I just wanted to say thanks for all that your doing!

Thank you for the kind words :) It was so nice finally meeting you yesterday! I hope to be reading about your travels sometime soon. In the meantime I've got some of your recipes to try ;)

Very interesting. Our team will be following Hashgraph some more as we evaluate the next platforms - a great innovative idea!

Thanks For Your Good Info.

I am interested to learn more about DAG as well! It is a very intriguing concept! Especially considering the vast quantity of power required to sustain a single blockchain currency.

I am not around or able to poke thru posts as much as before but you continue to make #Crypto101 great again heidi.

(:

Keep up the good work on leg days sister.

LOL

A parte de ser bella eres muy inteligente

I must admit that it is a tons of information and it is new. Blockchain-free cryptocurrencies is also interesting. I had read about 'Directed Acyclic Graphs' in my engineering university. Now i'm deep diving into what is the tech behind IOTA, DAGCoin.

Would love to get on board with something like this. I'm a big fan of the Tangle but can see Hashgraph has its own advantages.

If I understand well, every node has its own hasgraph of transactions and time later they share his knowledge of transactions in a random way asynchronously.
My question is how to prevent double spending, because two nodes could have different transactions of the same coin. I can't see it on the whitepaper.

Thank you @heiditravels to share with us all these new coins.

Nice weather at Lisbon! I didn't knew about DAGs so there are always things to learn and improve and I thank you for the info!

Thanks for the info. Great job like always.

Hi Heidi,

Conor here from Hashgraph. This post got lots of love on the Hashgraph team chat, and we're sharing it on Hashgraph's official social channels.

Happy to give you more info you need, and share future posts you make. I've been talking with the founders and they want to share some behind-the-scenes footage with you for your future posts

Let me know if this sounds good!

Feel free to reach out to me at conor at hashgraph dot com

I have been waiting for news of this to come out.
It will work out so much better with internet 3.0

I just stumbled upon Swirlds Hashgraph and imidiatly went to check what Steemit thinks of it. Very interesting indeed but that patent seems a bit worrisome to me. One thing that caught my was the claim that it's way faster than any current blockchain, funny that Steem was missing from their examples, no? Anyway, thanks for yet another informative post.

I simply love your articles, what great content and quality of posting you offer the community here on Steemit and abroad.

Thanks a lot :)

As always, great stuff, Heidi. I've been binging on hashgraph videos, rereading the Swirlds whitepaper, thinking out loud about it on Twitter, so I'm glad you covered this. Thank you. My mind is truly blown by how this tech works. I definitely thinks the future will include combinations of blockchains, hashgraphs, and DAGS.

Crypto is an amazing rabbit hole. Makes the Internet exciting again.

sorry, I did a video :D

heiditravels, spectacular post, It seems very good information and knowledgement you have about it, thanks teach us this value information, I really have learned with you about it, espectacular post !!!

Hashgraph is like a classical blockchain protocol but the node's state synchronisation is asynchronous which means that nodes can sync at any time with any other nodes.

All nodes doesn't need to be sync with all nodes. It's a kind of "lazy" blockchain.

thanks for this video, i have special interest on blockchain and crypto, your ideas on DAG are really good, i will check more info on this subject.

nice work...

Awesome post, I really like your content

Is DAG and Hashgraph the same?

Great video @heiditravels! There's another DAG chain cryptocurrency coming soon that's worth a look at: Yobicash.

Yobicash is a cryptocurrency based on DAG chain so doesn't have the scalability issues associated with blockchains.

Yobicash is a cryptocurrency built to secure the storage and sharing of data by ensuring the main properties of information security: confidentiality, integrity and availability. To enforce these properties, Yobicash employs cryptographic protocols, data replication, economic incentives and a DAG chain of transactions.

The cryptographic primitives and design are described by project designer Christian Nyumbayire in the Yobicash whitepaper first published in October 2017: https://yobicash.org/whitepaper.pdf

In summary, Yobicash reinforces:

privacy through zero-knowledge proof and encryption
data integrity through cryptographic authentication
data availability through replication

To find out more, join the Yobicash chat: https://t.me/joinchat/AdtOLUQpI9uUG5bH326S2w

@heiditravels, Hashgraph was launched yesterday in New York. Most people in the Telegram group is pissed about the fact that they included in their mission "inform governments". Moreover, it is Centralized, Not Open-source, you can invest during the "pre-sale" just if you are an "accredited investor" (already rich)