Blockchain Web Services (BWS) network Testnet now available

The Blockchain Web Services (BWS) network is now functioning and available in Testnet at https://portal.bws.xyz/explorer

Like Bitcoin, the BWS block explorer allows anyone to publicly view the contents of the BWS blockchain in real time. The top three panels on the explorer give information about the general state of the blockchain: the total number of blocks currently comprising the blockchain, the hash rate — which roughly correlates to the number of contributors to the network — and the difficulty, a parameter that automatically adjusts to on-chain activity to stabilize the rate of production of new blocks.

The two lower panels of the explorer contain exhaustive lists of the actual blocks (left) and the transactions within them (right). Like with Bitcoin, each block on the BWS blockchain packs a set of pending transactions. When generating — or “mining” — a new block, miners choose numbers at random until they find a value that falls within a range defined by the network. This lucky number, or “nonce,” is used to seal the block, after which it is sent off to the peer-to-peer network.

The difference between Bitcoin and BWS mining is that, with BWS, lucky nonces that are used to seal, sign, and deliver blocks can’t simply be chosen at random, but are rather verifiably tied to real machine learning computations requested by users.

More features, like the ability to view the contents of individual blocks, and the details of individual transactions (some of which are special transactions which represent the submission of a machine learning task), are coming soon. Check back often for new updates!