3 ms·

Does the general crypto community even care about aesthetics? How are you maintaining security of consensus in a proof-of-stake model without fees / economic r

Does the general crypto community even care about aesthetics? How are you maintaining security of consensus in a proof-of-stake model without fees / economic rewards for stakers / validators?

sov0_custodian 4y ago
Excellent questions! 1. Do people care about aesthetics: - Our view is that for crypto-products, simplicity is actually quite functional as a form of commitment. If you want to build something that commits to doing exactly what it says, it's important to have it be as obvious as possible, since this makes it possible for user to just look at the product and understand that it does exactly what it says without having to trust the people running it. - If you look at Bitcoin: a lot of the attractiveness comes from the fact that it's an elegant self-contained payment platform that can commit to doing exactly what it does forever, and seems like it obviously works. Of course, it still has a lot of complexity that comes from being a payments platform, which is why we're trying to build something even simpler that's purely a store of value. 2. Security of consensus: this is a core novelty of SoV0's design: consensus is maintained directly by users, who are incentivized to do this since they must include the current state hash in order to transact. - For existing blockchains, consensus on the state (i.e. how many assets everyone has) roughly works like this: (A) some group of relatively centralized operators (e.g. validators/miners) run some protocol to update the state, and (B) some users who run full nodes who monitor them to make sure they didn't misbehave, typically out of pure. - SoV0 instead just makes (B) the main attraction. Users are required to know the current state hash if they want to sent a transaction, which motivates general monitoring of the state update process to ensure that nothing weird is going on. - SoV0 can only do this since it's slow enough that people can actually know the state (state updates once a week). Existing blockchains all operate too quickly to require the state hash as in input in the transaction itself.

Does the general crypto community even care about aesthetics? How are you maintaining security of consensus in a proof-of-stake model without fees / economic rewards for stakers / validators?

sov0_custodian 4y ago

Excellent questions! 1. Do people care about aesthetics: - Our view is that for crypto-products, simplicity is actually quite functional as a form of commitment. If you want to build something that commits to doing exactly what it says, it's important to have it be as obvious as possible, since this makes it possible for user to just look at the product and understand that it does exactly what it says without having to trust the people running it. - If you look at Bitcoin: a lot of the attractiveness comes from the fact that it's an elegant self-contained payment platform that can commit to doing exactly what it does forever, and seems like it obviously works. Of course, it still has a lot of complexity that comes from being a payments platform, which is why we're trying to build something even simpler that's purely a store of value. 2. Security of consensus: this is a core novelty of SoV0's design: consensus is maintained directly by users, who are incentivized to do this since they must include the current state hash in order to transact. - For existing blockchains, consensus on the state (i.e. how many assets everyone has) roughly works like this: (A) some group of relatively centralized operators (e.g. validators/miners) run some protocol to update the state, and (B) some users who run full nodes who monitor them to make sure they didn't misbehave, typically out of pure. - SoV0 instead just makes (B) the main attraction. Users are required to know the current state hash if they want to sent a transaction, which motivates general monitoring of the state update process to ensure that nothing weird is going on. - SoV0 can only do this since it's slow enough that people can actually know the state (state updates once a week). Existing blockchains all operate too quickly to require the state hash as in input in the transaction itself.