Hello steemian!
Happy Wednesday 4 July 2018. We meet again, how are you today? May we stay healthy.
SteemWhale Demo Video
What is this (wh)all(e) about?
The "Steem" Whale is a recently deployed fountain in the form of a life-size spermwhale, as part of the 11fountains project in the province of Friesland in the North of the Netherlands. I've hooked up the whalefountain to the Steem blockchain to demonstrate the power and speed of this decentralised platform. Now anyone can donate some Steem or Steem Based Dollar and get an instant fountain spray burst in return.
You are mentioning Steem, what is it?
Steem is a blockchain dedicated to multimedia applications and a social network too. On the Steem blockchain anyone can get an account and post and curate content. The key features of the Steem blockchain are:
- There is no corporate ownership. All users together are the owners of (part of) the Steem blockchain.
- Due to it's decentralised nature, access to the content is virtually impossible to be blocked.
- There is 100% freedom of speech. You are responsible for the stuff you publish. There is no censorship.
- All value created within the Steem blockchain is returned to it's users and maintainers by distributing rewards for created content and curated content. There is not a corporation owning your data, mining it and making a profit out of it.
The Steem blockchain ecosystem is very versatile. It all started with 1 blogging platform interface Steemit.com which resembles Medium meets Reddit, but has over the course of 2 years grown to 100's of apps, for example a decentralised youtube called D.tube, decentralised Soundcloud, called Dsound, Producthunt called Steemhunt, a decentralised Instagram, called Steepshot and many many more.
About the SteemWhale
The whale is huge. Really big. Wow. 18 meters (60 feet). Fixed in concrete on poles. The whale partly submerges with rising tide but continues to spray during the day. At night the whale is sleeping :) Only deployed for a couple of weeks now, especially during the summer the whale has become a tourist attraction on its own. Many people go there for a stroll and wait for a spray :)
What will you do with the donations?
The donations will be used to partly cover the maintenance costs of the whale and partly go to an ocean preservation cause.
How was SteemWhale made?
Basically the fountain is being controlled by a microcomputer which in its turn controls several relays. Inside the belly of the whale is a pressurized cannister and a water tank. By controlling the valves via the electronic relays through hydraulic switches a spray occures. We have added several nozzles on the whalefountain which it will randomly pick. The blockchain part is being controlled from a third party server which continuously monitors the '@whalefountain'-account on the Steem-chain and processes new donations in real time as they appear in blocks. If you want to see more about the work in progress, please visit my Steepshot account for pictures.
Who made this?
The SteemWhale is a joint effort and result of the hard work by many people. I had a humble job to code the whale's spray sequences and thought it would be fun to hook it up to the Steem blockchain. My name is @roelandp and I am a (blockchain) developer and event organiser.
Website : https://steemwhale.io/.
Thanks @roelandp.
Thanks for reading.