Birth of an Idea: BRAVO

Do your best ideas come from sitting down, focused with a pad of paper, and trying to come up with them? Or do they come spontaneously, when you least expect them to?

So where do great ideas come from? Great ideas are the product of processes. They are the product of what a person sees and gets in touch with every day that combines to influence thought.

Consider Uber, Uber came from a conversation between friends where they were complaining about how hard it was to find a decent taxi.

The idea for Airbnb came when the founders were struggling to pay rent and needed a way to earn some extra money.

The same way BRAVO was born. At the end of a hiking trip in Southern Utah, the founders of BRAVO found themselves out of cash to tip and thank their hiking guide. At that moment, they came up with a simple idea to pay or get paid anonymously, respecting the privacy of both parties.

Introduction to Bravo and challenges it will fix:

We are currently living in a cashless society where we no longer or carry limited cash and end up in a situation where we have no cash to tip hard-working artists, waiters, and other professionals.

BRAVO started development in 2014 and created a mobile-fiat payment platform to solve this problem and since the creation of the platform, it has processed millions of dollars and has hundreds of thousands of users from the U.S. After this successful undertaking, the team is now looking to strengthen the platform and introduce blockchain to its customers.

But why blockchain:

The current payment method lacks the protections and privacy of users. Here are the most popular cases :  

1. PayPal’s pal Venmo spaffs your pals’ payments and yours: Exposed by researcher Hang Do Thi Duc confirmed the weaknesses of the current system accessing public online data on 207,984,218 transactions of Venmo users (a Paypal company) identifying transactions by the user, name, behavior, and habits. To read more about this: link. 

2. Microtransactions scandal: Hackers broke the security wall of the bank system and had access to bank account information and took a tiny amount from each customer’s balance. Transactions were so small that most people wouldn’t notice. Repeated to millions of users and continued for four years without too much outcry. Yes, In these cases, out of 1.35 million fraudulent charges, only 78,724 people noticed and complained.  

3. Facebook data scandal: 50 million Facebook profiles were mined for data. The Facebook executive shared this with Cambridge Analytica, which allowed the firm to build a software solution to help influence choices in elections. The data sold to Cambridge Analytica was then used to develop “psychographic” profiles of people and deliver pro-Trump material to them online. To read more about this: link.

The data sold to Cambridge Analytica was then used to develop “psychographic” profiles of people and deliver pro-Trump material to them online. To read more about this: link.

These shortcomings of the traditional system gave rise to blockchain use which allowed people to privately and securely transact without a central authority controlling it.

With the implementation of blockchain in BRAVO platform, BRAVO will offer its users much needed privacy and security of payments and ensure the protection of personal data of users. In addition, BRAVO targets to solve slow blockchain adoption with a proven human-centric user interface.

BRAVO blockchain concept (technology | consensus mechanism) :

Current blockchain projects are slow and cumbersome due to their complexity and their encrypted, distributed nature, blockchain transactions can take a while to process. Bitcoin or ETH transactions take a long time to finalize, creates network congestion leading to transaction backlogs and rising fees.

BRAVO is creating a hybrid blockchain technology that consists of a public and private blockchain. The public blockchain is based on the Federated Byzantine Agreement consensus algorithm which we have seen implemented by Stellar and Ripple, while BRAVO’s private, ‘Incognito blockchain’ is based on Proof-of-Stake algorithm.

The BRAVO blockchain integrates these two technologies together giving end-users control/ choice over their transaction.

What is Federated Byzantine Agreement:

A collection of Byzantine generals circled a city with their respective divisions for an upcoming attack. However, in order for the siege to go swimmingly, they needed to come to a consensus regarding when to strike. If the generals didn’t coordinate successfully, the assault would fail.

Appropriately named the Byzantine Generals Problem (BGP), this classic dilemma alludes to a more popular type of consensus for cryptographic systems known as Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BTA) that calls upon a group of “generals”, or validators, to confirm that the information delivered to them is trustworthy.

Here’s the problem:
A thousand years ago, life was harder back then — the generals couldn’t schedule a conference call the night beforehand to finalize the strategy. A messenger would need to travel through the city and relay the message to each of the appropriate divisions.
But what if they are captured and the plans are read? Or tampered with? As it turns out, determining a way to ensure that the received message is trustworthy is quite problematic.

To know more about Bravo
Whitepaper | Website | Telegram