An idea has been brewing in the mind of Derick Smith since he first heard about Bitcoin, and the technology underpinning it, Blockchain. After years in the telecommunications and payments industries, he immediately placed Blockchain into the context of data communications. In the summer of 2016 he started working with some very interesting people, who had previously built performance silicon chips for Bitcoin mining. Slowly the plan began to look feasible.
Blockchain uses some very fancy mathematics to launch a lottery among a large group of computers. There is only one winner of the lottery, and that winner gets to call the shots on the validity of a particular block of data. All the other computers then agree that is the correct block of data, before launching another lottery to see who gets to call the next block of data the “truth”.
Each block of data is linked cryptographically to the one before it, and so on, forming the so-called immutable chain of blocks – the Blockchain.
Thus a blockchain can be thought of as a ledger that cannot be fabricated, faked or gamed. It is an ideal place to store financial transactions that can be trusted by a very large group of people, who can read it at any time since it resides on the Internet. This is what Bitcoin, or any of the other dozens of cryptocurrencies are. A big ledger containing all the transactions ever performed using the native currency – Bitcoin tokens.
Derick had experienced, firsthand, the friction of conventional payments systems, both in the telecommunications space and the commerce space with Point of Sale devices and networks. He understood the appeal of a near-frictionless payments system with no fraud and no chargebacks. This was the stuff payments experts had been dreaming of for years.
The project began to gather steam. More specialists saw the vision and began to contribute. Lawyers like James Lanshe, a veteran of SEC compliance and the Luxembourg Fund Management industry became fascinated. Dr. Arjuna Sathiaseelan from the Networking for Development Lab at University of Cambridge joined the team, seeing how his dream of using mesh networking to get the Internet in the hands of the bottom half of society could be realized. He saw that the trick lies not in providing hand-outs, but in harnessing the natural entrepreneur in everyone. The marketplace aspect unlocks the potential.
The blockchain side of the innovation picked up speed when the chip designers suggested velocity rather than electricity consumption may be a solution to the power-hungry Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism employed by Bitcoin. It had been a goal to create a mechanism that allowed even smaller computing devices to become nodes, participants in the pool of blockchain computers.
Seeking validation for the Proof of Velocity protocol they developed, the team gained a goliath of the cryptography world, Professor Jean-Jacques Quisquater, emeritus professor of cryptography at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL), Belgium. The Professor not only validated the early designs, but poured his ideas into the project. Having built secure silicon and algorithms for decades, and the foundations of Blockchains, he found a team ripe for his ideas.
The publication of the Ammbr Whitepaper, and the upcoming token Crowdsale on 1 September, is all part of the plan to build the world’s first, sharing economy, mesh networking marketplace for fast Internet that will hook up the last 3 billion unconnected people.