Hi! I’m new to this forum, new to this field, and only recently discovered Holochain, but I find it very very exciting. Recently I stumbled upon “Lightchain” as I was trying to find more reading on Holochain and I’m curious to know if anyone thinks of that project as legitimate competition to Holo? Despite my layness I can’t find many mechanical differences in the two whitepapers (philosophically Holochain seems way more sophisticated) – but my sense is that the Lightchain project is quite far behind Holochain in terms of development, as mentioned in the conversation linked below…
Can anyone offer an informed opinion on this? Are they as similar as they seem to be? Thanks!!
[Cornell working on something similar to Holochain?]:
Well, first of all the paper says Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey. So not Cornell. Not that it necessarily matters, but just because something is published on Arxiv doesn’t mean it is by Cornell. Arxiv is just a distribution service provided by Cornell.
I’m also not a tech person, so take my analysis with a teaspoon of salt, but after skimming the abstract, it sounds like the only similarity really is that they use a DHT for information sharing between peers, but otherwise it sounds like a conventional blockchain designed for tokenization/transactions only, not for general purpose p2p applications, and not for agent-centric design. Also it said something about “deterministic fork-resolving strategy,” which suggests a very different intention than Holochain, where there can be forking and re-merging, if I understand correctly.
Yes, I do enjoy looking into these alternatives as well, but Holochain has more than held it’s own despite being delayed a bit these past couple of years. I wouldn’t be ashamed to switch to a different project if someone had a better vision, plan, and technology, but I haven’t seen it.
