No one can deny the Ethereum blockchain wears many hats these days. Although it will always be used to process network transactions, a lot of new projects are being built on top of this protocol to serve other functions. eChing is one of the more unusual concepts out there, as it focuses on providing a fortune telling service on the Ethereum blockchain. While this is not necessarily something with scientific value, it is still an intriguing Dapp to keep an eye on.

eChing is not Your Average Ethereum dApp

Although there are dozens of decentralized applications (aka Dapps) in the Ethereum ecosystem, not all of them provide something most people are interested in. eChing may not necessarily be all that appealing either, but rest assured a lot of people will be giving it a try. After all, the project aims to predict the future by using the Ethereum blockchain and a self-developed user interface.  It is already available as a MetaMask plugin for Chrome right now, which is pretty impressive.

Fortune telling will always be a concept subject to a lot of speculation, misconceptions, and ignorance, for obvious reasons. A lot of people don’t take this “art” too seriously, even though it remains to be seen if this form of divination is indeed a sham or not. It has to be said, a whole lot of fortune tellers out there are trying to scam people into believing whatever they are interested in telling them. However, with a Dapp in place, this ancient art will undergo a technological revolution of sorts.

As it happens, the eChing app uses the Ethereum World Computer to retrieve magical “wisdom” from the metaphysical ether. This is not to be confused with Ether the currency, mind you, as there is a big difference between the two. This Dapp uses MetaMask and the Web3 framework to access the Ethereum blockchain. Once that is done, the project will “work its magic” and generate a divinatory result in a visual manner that anyone can interpret.

The I Ching divination is a traditional method of predicting the future using 64 different hexagrams. Every single hexagram is determined by more or less random numbers, and every hexagram represents a psychological archetype. Four different types of lines can be used to build a hexagram, which means there are plenty of possible variations. Calculating lines is often done by flipping three coins, but that is not necessarily the best way to go about things.

What eChing does is take a more traditional approach to generating said lines. The way in which it does so should result in a more authentic distribution of line likelihood to determine the output. This goes to show the concept of fortune telling is a lot more complicated and technical than most people might assume at first. The results generated by this Dapp should be easy enough to interpret while still prove a proper result without any form of trickery involved.

In the future, the eChing developer hopes to run this Dapp on the IPFS protocol. This would ensure the new Dapp could run indefinitely, which is certainly something to look forward to. It may even become its very own application in the future, as a standalone future is certainly an opportunity worth exploring moving forward. All of this goes to show there are some interesting concepts in the world of Ethereum which have yet to be explored to their full potential.