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Grab a beverage HN! This one might get a bit long: There is a saying that "Engineering is finding the best compromises". You know about the Crypto Trilemma: Se

by a1371 5y ago

Grab a beverage HN! This one might get a bit long: There is a saying that "Engineering is finding the best compromises". You know about the Crypto Trilemma: Secure (S), Fast (F), Decentralized (D). Think of it as you have 15 eggs (I show them with 0) and 3 baskets. For Bitcoin/ETH, it may look something like this: S: 00000 F: 00000 D: 00000 When we say Fast, think of it as "fast for the transaction fee you spend". So a cheaper network is somewhat considered a faster one too. Bitcoin Cash was not happy with the speed of BTC, so they went with: S: 00000 F: 0000000 D: 000 But not all these 3 are "perceived" equally. Usually people only see speed, so for a new blockchain to "look" impressive, it can do something like: S: 0 F: 0000000000000 D: 0 EOS and XRP are examples of this approach. Basically, AWS with extra steps (not very decentralized). For EOS, everyone votes for iirc 12 nodes to do all the transaction processing until the next election. Let's look at Solana's claim on "Proof Of History". Wondering why other networks did not do an update if it's a great idea. Looking at their dev docs, they introduce this concept of "Cluster", initiated by "Leaders" where "Validators" join them and and "Clients" send transactions to. > [clusters] simply ignore the existence of the other. Transactions sent to the wrong one are quietly rejected. So they are breaking down the blockchain into small Validator groups. You have to know which Cluster you want to contact. That's... a compromise. It's not even comparable with ETH or the internet where you have this massive pool of validators that all participate over the same network. But ok, let's go with the compromise. Then the issues start to emerge. When there are clusters, what happens to the network hash rate? is it divided up? then someone can easily come in and 51% the clusters one by one? Well, they have to work around that. Let's see. > Additional validators then register with any registered member of the cluster. Ok, so, if I have a cluster where I know all the Validators, I can collude with them to just ignore any new Validators from coming in? > A validator receives all entries from the leader and submits votes confirming those entries are valid... Clients send transactions to any validator's Transaction Processing Unit (TPU) port. If the node is in the validator role, it forwards the transaction to the designated leader. If I'm the leader, can I censor a transaction coming from a Validator? Or perhaps I see a transaction that will move the market, can I sneak in a transaction in my own benefit before broadcasting that one to my validators? This just kind of a bank. On a more humane note, I listened to Solana's podcast and I am annoyed that they were dunking on ETH and acted so egotistically "we are new like electric car... people say we are so smart". The blockchain speed/scale limitations are just hard to solve the right way, it's disingenuous to discredit truly brilliant people for your own tech. So maybe I'm dismissive of something that's lying underneath. For what it's worth, Vitalik recently has talked about many of these limitations. Still, good on Solana for providing legible documentation.

hanniabu 5y ago
Very well said, it's nice to start seeing others that understand this stuff on HN
megameter 5y ago
There's definitely a wave of late entrants trying to muscle their way into the PoS game, and I see Solana as one of those; one of the more credible ones, but with its distribution engineered to make it very controlled from the beginning. From a speculative standpoint these are good if you can sell into the hype cycle, but I've seen enough of them come and go that I wouldn't try to hold. Even a little bit of centralization sucks a lot of air out of the room.
anonymoushn 5y ago
> So they are breaking down the blockchain into small Validator groups. You have to know which Cluster you want to contact. That's... a compromise. It's not even comparable with ETH or the internet where you have this massive pool of validators that all participate over the same network. No, the thing you quoted just says that devnet validators ignore transactions intended for mainnet and testnet. > Ok, so, if I have a cluster where I know all the Validators, I can collude with them to just ignore any new Validators from coming in? Yes, but "a cluster" is "the whole blockchain." This is analogous to saying that you know every Bitcoin miner or every Ethereum node. > If I'm the leader, can I censor a transaction coming from a Validator? Or perhaps I see a transaction that will move the market, can I sneak in a transaction in my own benefit before broadcasting that one to my validators? If you are a leader, you can censor transactions, and there will be another leader 2 seconds later. This is similar to the situation in literally every blockchain. In Ethereum today, miners are inserting transactions to extract value from traders. You can read about this here: http://mev.wiki/ http://mev.wiki/
- a1371 5y ago
  Good comment on testnet. From what I understand, I don't think that's all the plan for the these clusters. Otherwise, why do they specify this? > When two clusters share a common genesis block, they attempt to converge. More importantly, the cluster is only 150 validators: > A Solana cluster is capable of subsecond confirmation for up to 150 nodes with plans to scale up to hundreds of thousands of nodes. This is not comparable to Mempool where it is in your best interest to broadcast a transaction across the network. Yes, everyone sees the mempool but it doesn't allow you to manipulate transaction order as long as the original sender has paid a high enough fee.

by a1371 5y ago

hanniabu 5y ago

Very well said, it's nice to start seeing others that understand this stuff on HN

megameter 5y ago

There's definitely a wave of late entrants trying to muscle their way into the PoS game, and I see Solana as one of those; one of the more credible ones, but with its distribution engineered to make it very controlled from the beginning. From a speculative standpoint these are good if you can sell into the hype cycle, but I've seen enough of them come and go that I wouldn't try to hold. Even a little bit of centralization sucks a lot of air out of the room.

anonymoushn 5y ago

> So they are breaking down the blockchain into small Validator groups. You have to know which Cluster you want to contact. That's... a compromise. It's not even comparable with ETH or the internet where you have this massive pool of validators that all participate over the same network. No, the thing you quoted just says that devnet validators ignore transactions intended for mainnet and testnet. > Ok, so, if I have a cluster where I know all the Validators, I can collude with them to just ignore any new Validators from coming in? Yes, but "a cluster" is "the whole blockchain." This is analogous to saying that you know every Bitcoin miner or every Ethereum node. > If I'm the leader, can I censor a transaction coming from a Validator? Or perhaps I see a transaction that will move the market, can I sneak in a transaction in my own benefit before broadcasting that one to my validators? If you are a leader, you can censor transactions, and there will be another leader 2 seconds later. This is similar to the situation in literally every blockchain. In Ethereum today, miners are inserting transactions to extract value from traders. You can read about this here: http://mev.wiki/ http://mev.wiki/

a1371 5y ago
Good comment on testnet. From what I understand, I don't think that's all the plan for the these clusters. Otherwise, why do they specify this? > When two clusters share a common genesis block, they attempt to converge. More importantly, the cluster is only 150 validators: > A Solana cluster is capable of subsecond confirmation for up to 150 nodes with plans to scale up to hundreds of thousands of nodes. This is not comparable to Mempool where it is in your best interest to broadcast a transaction across the network. Yes, everyone sees the mempool but it doesn't allow you to manipulate transaction order as long as the original sender has paid a high enough fee.