History of BitSong developments!

5 min readMay 11, 2019

Hello everyone and welcome to the BitSong Blockchain development update, May 2019.

Back in 2017, a small group of dreamy guys had the idea of designing a new music streaming portal, different from all the others, with the precise goal of changing the way people listen to music and the one in which the artists get the revenue from the created works. Practically completely change the music industry, through the functions and advantages that the Blockchain technology puts at our disposal.

For more than 20 months, our team of developers have been working hard to build the BitSong Ecosystem and now that we are really close to the launch of our first Testnet, we are writing this article to introduce you a little into the architecture and general logic of network operations and provide you with the reasons behind our choices in the past.

The first step we have taken has been to choose a Blockchain suited to our needs, on which to implement our ecosystem. Initially we launched on the idea of Ethereum, as at the time it enjoyed very high hype but it was also the most advanced Blockchain in terms of functions. However, after a few months and after talking to various industry experts, we realized that it did not fit our needs, as it does not have the speed we need, it uses the Proof of Work and the development is not exactly in line with our principles, but also the fact that the EVM has many bugs. Finally, we decided to leave Ethereum and continue the research.

At that point another option was Graphene, but the idea was immediately set aside, as graphene has not been updated for many months and it seemed almost as if the developers have abandoned the project. At that point we found Tendermint, with whom there was immediately “love”. It seemed that Tendermint was perfectly suited to what we had in mind and so we started working on it.

Tendermint

Based on the DLS protocol, it does not require any “active” mining — as is the case with Proof-of-Work — and can ensure the secure operation of the network provided there are more than two-thirds of “honest” actors.

Advantages:

The project was initially developed as a framework for blockchain networks
PoS consensus
Fast block times
High throughput
It takes one block for a transaction to be confirmed
Experienced dev team
Excellent documentation

Disadvantages:

When we started developing BitSong we were still far from the release of our framework and there could be high risks of failure.

From Tendermint we then landed on Cosmos SDK, which is the basis of the entire BitSong Ecosystem!

Cosmos is an ecosystem of blockchains that can scale and interoperate with each other. Before Cosmos, blockchains were siloed and unable to communicate with each other. They were hard to build and could only handle a small amount of transactions per second. Cosmos solves these problems with a new technical vision. In order to understand this vision we need to go back to the fundamentals of blockchain technology.

The vision of Cosmos is achieved through a set of open source tools like Tendermint, the Cosmos SDK and IBC designed to let people build custom, secure, scalable and interoperable blockchain applications quickly.

We inform you that today, May 11th of 2019, the BITSONG OFFICIAL BASE was born!!

The only functions currently active are the creation of a wallet and transactions.

As follows we present the roadmap of our Blockchain:

Staking module
Distribution module
Minting module
Governance module
Proposal module

The basic modules of our blockchain are those of being distributed and operating the mechanism of how BitSong will work. Once these steps are completed, the first official testnet will be launched, then the next modules will be created which will be dedicated to the artists.

The format of the bitsong address is bech32 and will start with the “bitsong” prefix.

BitSong is compatible with any Cosmos HUB application, in fact it is immediately available, the compatibility with Ledger Nano S.

As follows, we also present the application roadmap:

Block explorer
Wallet
API Console
Streaming Player

We also remind you that we will carry out all open source activities on Github, so we invite you to follow us on our github channel to be aware of all developments. Furthermore any kind of contribution, suggestion or idea is welcome and we will be happy to consider different scenarios together with our community.

The first Validators of our testnet, will decide through the “proposal” module, all the reward parameters, namely:

Annual inflation
Community Pool
Reward Pool
Network decisions

For those interested in becoming one of the BitSong validators, please log in to the discord group: https://discord.gg/qSFUps6, to get all the necessary information and be updated on trends.

We also inform you that we have also changed the decimals of our token BTSG, going from the initial 18 decimals to only 8.

1btsg = 100000000ubtsg

We hope you enjoyed this update and that you will continue to make your valuable contribution to BitSong. Together, we will change the music, starting right from the roots.

Good music to Everyone!

BLOCKCHAIN MUSIC STREAMING

Website: https://bitsong.io/en
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BitSongOfficial
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BitSongOfficial/
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/bitsong/
Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBVRgebGoly_zSPp7NWvhJQ/featured
Github: https://github.com/BitSongOfficial
Official Telegram Group: https://t.me/BitSongOfficial
Blog: https://medium.com/@BitSongOfficial
Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2850943.0
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bitsong_official/