A Decentralised Social Media

I have started my project on the 23rd of December and the goals for past two weeks were to conduct research on my topic which is decentralized social media and to learn about Clojure.

As I have chosen to use blockchain to implement my project idea, I had to decide on which blockchain to use. After conducting research, I have decided to build my decentralized application (dApp) on top of Ethereum as it is one of the largest blockchains and it supports smart contracts. Although bitcoin also supports smart contracts, it was built with the intention of being an alternative to national currencies. Whereas for Ethereum, it was built for the purpose of facilitating programmatic contracts and applications, as according to Investopedia. As such, Ethereum has a stronger and more mature foundation on smart contracts.

In addition, it is expected that Ethereum will receive an upgrade in 2022 which will reduce energy consumption by as much as 99.9% as well as raise the number of transactions per second.

In term of the research on Clojure, I have decided to use ClojureScript. With ClojureScript, the source code is compiled into JavaScript which runs on the browser or Node.js.

To facilitate the coding process, I have found several possible tools which includes Leiningen, figwheel, and shadowcljs. And thus one of my goals for upcoming week is to learn more about these tools.