Corda - First Impressions

Today I was lucky enough to attend my first day of training on Corda, an "an open-source distributed ledger platform designed to record, manage and automate legal agreements between businesses".

Roger Willis and Richard Green did a fantastic job and I walked away excited for the 2nd day of training tomorrow. Between then and now I've got a whole load of thoughts/questions on my mind...

Corda isn't a traditional blockchain

Corda doesn't have the concepts of blocks or mining that you will find in Bitcoin and Ethereum. Transactions are purely point-to-point and validated individually in Corda. This stands opposed to the others which group up transactions and calculates a hash for all of them together (turning them into a block).

Immutability

What is there to stop the transaction history being modified? Well transactions are digitally signed and assuming all parties keep their private key safe, no one can realistically change history. On top of this, the ledger isn't reliant on mining and is designed to be immutable. This means that the only change parties expect to see is on current state.

Data Privacy

Transactions aren't broadcast globally to the entire network and only sent on a need-to-know basis. This protects against data leakage as parties in the network don't have free access to monitor who everyone is interacting with. Keeping the data contained also limits the damage if your private key is somehow compromised because your encrypted data isn't freely available to a potential attacker.

BattleStrats Vs Aksis - A Strategy Refined

Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

As per the BattleStrats mantra, we have been honing our Aksis Phase 2 strategy. Collectively we have now got a very firm grasp of the fight and we can knock the Normal mode fight in one go!

BattleStrats Aksis Phase 2 - Strategy Overview & Kill

The most important points to consider here are:

• Jordy had NEVER even attempted this fight before
• We made a handful of mistakes but still succeeded
• Explaining the strategy and killing Aksis took us less than 20 minutes

Practice (or rather deliberate/perfect practice) has been the secret to our success. Let's look at how exactly we practiced...

Aksis vs. BattleStrats - A Retrospective

Introduction

BattleStrats has conquered Aksis. He tested the abilities of each of our players and the effectiveness of our team's communication. We passed this test but there is still much to learn. Our three main areas of focus are:

1. What did we do well?
2. Where did we stumble?
3. How can we improve for the future?

The Plus Points

The biggest takeaway is that the clan is improving. We managed to kill Aksis on our first try with 5 players in the team had never killed Aksis before!

BattleStrats Aksis Kill - Black Spindle FTW! 

The main takeaways from that final successful run are:

• We communicated empowerment really well
• Everyone had the right gear/abilities to take down Captains
• We had consistent slams on Aksis (which maybe a function of us not being tired)
• Team DPS was solid enough for us to clutch us through missing a damage phase
• People stayed alive