This is kind of just a rationale to myself to be honest, but why not share it, why not build publicly.
I've always wanted to build a chain, I spun up Geth on my mac and played aroudn with dev nets, rebuilt little parts of it just for pointless fun really.
But I've never really had a reason to tryhard the build. Nobody needed another chain, another layer 2 that does the same exact thing as 73 others. Now with quantum computing on the edge of becoming a reality, I think we actually do need a new chain.
Because we need one that won't implode in 10 years when Shors algorithm breaks current blockchain encryption, and people derive secret keys from public addresses and empty dormant sleeping whales onto the open market. Bloodshed like we've never seen. It should use post-quantum signatures from day one.
https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography
We need one that has a lower barrier to entry for developers, one that's written from scratch in JavaScript end-to-end, becasuen you know, 22 million+ developers write JavaScript. Imagine what smart contracts could be capable of if they were written and executed natively in pure JavaScript? Guess how many active blockchain developers there are? 24k.
https://www.developerreport.com/developer-report
Current chains claim they are decentralized. In reality joining a chain as a validator is ruthlessly expensive and dominated by the same 3 massive validators. A new chain should make it easy for just anybody to become a meaningful validator, because it's good for the chain to be dispersed across as many locations and nodes as possible.
I'll go into more detail on each of these points seperately I think, but in short, over the coming weeks we'll build a smart contract compatible blockchain from scratch with JavaScript, and quantum-resistant Dilithium3 signatures, where users can download something simple that turns their home hardware into a meaningful, incentivized validator.
So naturally, I jsut got started. The first blocker was performance, which is why I guess people havn't released a blockchain built entirely from JavaScript, but it's 2026 and we have new things now, like libp2p. Which immidiately brings us to our first problem. I got started with that as a base framework, and obviously after 2 days of setting it up, it didn't work.
Because for some reason I thought nobody else had tried this before, and that I was gonna be the big brain that swung in out of nowhere and solved "JavaScript Blockchain"..
Not just gonna wrap it up there though, here it comes — HTTP polling. It's old school but thats one of the allures to it, it just works, so we're already kind of making comprimises but we might return to it later on during testnet but honestly if we can keep signature size down it shoulnd't have a problem or affect trasactions per second.
So with that, tomorrow I'll work on fleshing out a really simple framework that should get us a local ledger atleast running, essentially we jsut need to confirm that we can create and derive a secret key using the post-quantum Dilitium3, and sign a transaction with that Dilitium3 keypair, and a validator can verify that signature against it's own Dilitium3 keypair. That checks the boxes for our post-quantum signatures and accounts right off the bat.