Atlas Etherisc - Another New Kid On The Blockchain

Thanks for sharing your experience with Blockchain. would like to know the process as to what happens behind the scenes, waiting for transaction to be mined - i guess the miner needs to be determined so that it can be validated/written to a distributed ledger/db?

@RamdasNarayanan: I guess so, too. And your guess is as good as mine! Ironically, Blockchain is supposed to be open, transparent and all that, but we're still just guessing:)

Hi Ketharaman,

Christoph here, I'm co-founder of Etherisc.

I'm happy to provide you some background infos on what has happend. First of all, we are sorry that it did not work out as expected for you, and that you lost some time waiting for the system to respond! Hopefully, we can compensate a bit by giving you a full report on the issue!

Long story short, you've landed on our test system, which is connected to the so-called "Ropsten" test blockchain. If you entered your credit card, it hasn't been charged, so no worrys, your funds are safe!

There are several test chains in the Ethereum space, and they work exactly like the original, except that the test-ether have no value. But many projects use this public test chain as an environment to demo their projects - just like us. It was our mistake that there hasn't been a clear message on the page indicating in which environment you've landed.

Why did you end up in the test environment? We had a limited production version of FlightDelay running on two occasions last year; the one was intended for participants of DEVCON3 - the biggest Ethereum developer conference - and D1Conf, the first conference for Decentralized Insurance, both in Cancun, Mexico at the beginning of November last year; the second was the TokenSummit Conference in San Francisco some weeks later. This production version was limitied to the time from mid october to mid december, after this, we switched the frontend to the test system - but we missed to notify our users of this change. Sorry for that.

As you noted, there was another issue with the frontend: we did not clearly communicate the legal entity which you were engaging with.
We will improve that for sure, but I will at least give you the missing information now.
The mission of Etherisc is to build a decentralized insurance platform, fully licensed and regulated.
We worked the whole last year on a feasible model to establish a licensed insurance business, and explored many different options.
Finally we found a structure which fits perfectly to our demand: on the small island of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea, which is an independent state and member of the European Community, there exists a special legal structure called "PCC - Protected Cell Company". Basically, this structure consists of a "Core" - an full-fledged insurance company - and possible many "Cells" - which form segregated insurance business units sharing capital, license and other services with the central "Core", which acts as "Insurance as a Service" - provider. The cells are "protected" - if some big claims hit the core ore a cell, the other cells are not affected. This structure is the blueprint for our coming decentralized insurance platform, and we aim to establish a similar structure so anybody with an insurance product or a customer base can very quickly establish a cell and start the business.

But because we are operating in one of the strongest regulated businesses, this will be an ambitious task.
Luckily, we found an existing structure in Malta which was very supportive and help us to find the right way - Atlas Insurance PCC Ltd, a PCC Company which is in the business for many years and which have much experience on the one side, and also much ambition to explore new technologies on the other side. We are very happy that Atlas provided us with the legal framework that we could start our first two pilot programs. That's the reason why Atlas is mentioned on the FlightDelay site - actually, all customers
are engaging in an insurance policy issued by Atlas.

In 2018, we hope to establish our own cell in the Atlas environment, and then we will be able to issue the policies in our own cell's name.

But thanks to your feedback, we will add a clarifying note on the site, so future customers will not be confused to whom they talk.

Last but not least, why did you see that annoying "Waiting for transaction to be mined"?
As mentioned, you have been interacting with the Ropsten Testnet, which was very slow at the time you made your experiment.
Technically, you apply for an insurance policy on the blockchain with a special transaction carrying the premium and additional data like the flight number, date of departure and so on. Our frontend sends this transaction to the blockchain, where it is stored in a pool of waiting transactions. Then some miner has to include this transaction in one of the next blocks.
Depending on the overall transaction volume and the transaction fee which you send with the transaction, this can take seconds, but also minutes up to hours. As you know, scalability is one of the big issues in the whole blockchain space, and the best people are working in solutions. On the Ethereum Blockchain, there are some proposals to solve this issue, e.g. by executing most of transactions off-chain. Scalability will be a key feature for mass adoption, and together with many projects we are waiting for the proposals to become implemented, but this will take some time. Up till then, we need to invent some clever workarounds - letting customers wait is no solution for sure. We have some ideas and hope to implement them in the near
future.

I hope I could at least explain the issues you experienced, and invite you to watch our progress!
We have a public telegram channel https://t.me/etherisc_community where we always share the latest news and answer questions - looking forward to see you there!

Best regards,

Christoph

@ChristophMussenbrock:

TY for your detailed response.

I tried another transaction today on your dApp: BOM-MUC (maybe to meet you in Munich!). I saw a message to the extent that I was using a demo version on the Ropsten testnet. This message wasn't there during my earlier experiment. However, the test credit card # was there before. I'd tried it and it hadn't worked. Only then I'd entered my real credit card details.

Re. the time taken to mine the transaction: I agree with you that making a customer wait for even a few minutes, let alone hours, is a NO-NO. But taking the transaction "off-chain" - which I perceive as "central server" - may go against the basic ethos of Blockchain of being decentralized.

My $0.02: Execute the transaction "on-chain" but release the user as soon as they hit the Apply button; send them an email later whenever the transaction is executed i.e. written to the Blockchain. I've seen this practice used by many traditional apps / websites for long-lead time actions e.g. Create Archive of Tweets in Twitter, Batch Image Recognition (on some website whose name I now don't remember) and I think it will work for your dApp as well.

As for missing info on your website, that's not a problem: Of the very few dApps I've been able to try so far, yours has the best UX! 

Overall, am I right in understanding that Atlas Etherisc is NOT available on Production as of now?

Thank @Chris for the detailed write up, providing insight to what the process looks like behind the scenes. I agree with @ketharaman on the approach to handling transactions that take time without going off chain, i think this would be crucial part of the design for blockchain.

Thank you

With "Off-chain" I do not mean "centralized" - but I mean using so called "state-channels" for transactions. Still an early field of research, these state channels provide means to perform task off-chain while keeping everything completely decentralized and safe. One promising example on ethereum is the Raiden Network https://raiden.network/. Good Idea with the approach, sending an e-mail after Tx has been mind. We will take this in consideration. Thanks for the appreciation for the UX! Still room to improve! 
As you mention correctly, the actual insurance product is currently not in production. We are preparing the next level together with Atlas, and hope we can offer BOM-MUC soon! Just to be clear, Atlas and Etherisc are two separate entities; currently the issuer of the policies is Atlas Insurance PCC Ltd. in Malta, and we - Etherisc - are doing the complete technical processing. Soon, we hope to act as a Protected Cell of Atlas.

And yes, we are currently reworking the front end and add some clarifying messages, so users don't get confused.

I looked up Raiden Network. It sounds interesting but it seems to be focused only on payments. Would it be useful for executing Smart Contracts off-chain, which is the requirement for Etherisc? 

One more $0.02 on UX: Now that you've confirmed that your actual insurance product is currently not in production, you might want to explore the option of prepopulating the credit card fields on the current Ropsten testnet with the test card so that people don't unnecessarily disclose their real credit card info.

I also looked up your Telegram Channel. You might see me there soon!