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The Hedera Consensus Service (HCS)

I started this leg of my journey by going over the Hedera Consensus Service white paper. After going through it a couple of times, I decided I needed more information. Though informative, the information is a bit too brief for my purposes. I’m looking at this from a developer’s utility viewpoint, and while there is interesting content in the white paper, and the basic facts about the HCS are present, there’s not enough solid “here’s how” or even “here’s why” content to get me going. I ended up finding a better resource. Before I write about that, though, I think it prudent to go over briefly what I found in the white paper. What is the HCS? The HCS provides the timestamping and ordering of all events on Hedera. Using the hashgraph consensus algorithm, it guarantees fast, inexpensive, secure and disinterested consensus. There is (at this writing) a main network of 27 decentralized nodes that actively participate in the consensus (the mainnet). Augmenting ma...
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Hedera Token Service

  The Hedera Token Service I continue this series with a brief examination of the Hedera Token Service (HTS). As I noted in my documentation overview , my base source of truth on HTS is the Hedera Tokenization Whitepaper . The whitepaper lays out the objectives and strategy for token management in the Hedera ecosystem. It establishes a few definitions, and discusses how tokens are deployed on Hedera. It then describes the Hedera Consensus Service's role in token management. The benefits of both the HTS and HCS are touched upon, and examples are provided. Let’s look into it it more detail. Four Key Concepts The whitepaper reviews four key concepts: tokens, token contracts, token state, and token accounts. Let's look at all four of these briefly. Tokens I couldn't be brief about tokens, since e verything revolves around tokens and token management. So I went into tokens in depth in my previous posting . That surely won't be the end of the story on tokens; w...
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Hedera Tokens

Before I Begin, a Quick Word When you approach new technology as a tech writer, you take it for granted that you’re going to get some things wrong at the beginning. There will be great gaps in your understanding that you hope to fill along the way. Depending on your ultimate purpose -- a user guide, a cookbook article, a tutorial, or whatever -- some areas of the technology will always be uncertain to you. That’s not a problem, as you often don’t need perfect and complete knowledge to achieve your purpose. Add to this the fact that technology evolves. As a tech writer of new technology, I know that today’s truths may be tomorrow’s falsehoods. Ask any tech writer about the frustration of having to unravel several months’ worth of work to bring draft docs back into usefulness due to a new discovery or last minute development by the engineering teams. So as I begin this series of posts where I dig deeper into Hedera, I accept the fact that I may be making errant assumptions early on. Ov...
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I've Settled on Which Hedera Resources I'll Focus On

I've spent the past couple of weeks digging in a little more deeply to the resources I identified with my initial survey of whatever Hedera content that I could find.  If you recall, I'm looking at this from the standpoint of content a developer can use. If I were to specify in terms of a Job To Be Done (JTBD) framework, I'd have something like: As an experienced developer who is new to Hedera, I need to identify the content resources that will get me started with Hedera most quickly. Because there is a lot of content churn out there (for example, in the past two weeks, Hedera updated its web site, and it also reorganized its Discord server), it was tempting to get distracted and misdirected. But I managed to persevere, and have come up with the following set. I'm going to dig very deeply into just these resources for the next few weeks and make a plan for a barebones getting started document.  1. Main Website  https://hedera.com/     The website is the centra...
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Results of My Survey of Hedera Information

Most developers don't want to allocate too much time to background information -- they pick up what they need along the way. There's not a ton of information about Hedera out there, but there's always enough cruft to distract you. So I spent a couple of days searching around for high-quality sources of truth for information about Hedera, focusing on the things that a developer would to need to read or use to get started. This survey was just to try and identify sources of truth -- I only went deep enough to judge the quality and purpose of the content. I looked for content that would be useful for ramping up and for ongoing development. Background information is okay, but as I didn't want to get lost in rabbit holes, I only considered content that is core to the technology. Something you'd read once or twice at most to figure out where the technology fits in your technological world. I came up with the following resources. I'll be reading/familiarizing myself wi...
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Welcome to the I'm Learning Hedera blog.

My project for 2023 is to research and try to understand the Hedera Hashgraph technology. I know almost nothing about it today, and I want to learn as much as possible as I can about it, write about what I learn, and become a useful member of the community by the end of the year. I plan to document my process of discovery in blog posts here (as needed, at least 2-3x a week) and sum those up in weekly posts on medium.com. Why Hedera? I've chosen Hedera Hashgraph because it strikes me as an evolutionary advancement in blockchain technology. It appears to have solid funding and founding and has a decent sized multi-national community. So I don't think I'll be wasting my efforts on something really cool but destined for the shelf. By the end of the year, I'll know whether I'm on target with that impression or not. I'll also know whether I want to continue working with it in 2024. How Will I Proceed? For no more than the first couple of weeks, I'm going to spend ...
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Location: Seattle, WA, USA
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