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15) This doesn't necessarily effect literal consensus that much--those players likely had most of the stakeweight anyway, because anyone with large stakeweight could easily get a machine to validate. But it does mean that a random user might not be able to call bullshit.
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16) You lose the sense of each person, practically speaking, validating their own transactions. ---------- Anyway, enough preamble. What could make a high throughput chain relatively more secure? There were basically two types of suggestions Vitalik had.
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17) The first was variants on "find some sub-unit and split validation on it". This is what sharding does. Some examples that might work on Solana: a) One huge shard plus lots of small shards. Basically, the 'main' shard would be what Solana is now.
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18) Smaller shards would limit themselves to ~1k TPS, and be designed so that a laptop could validate them. That way people really concerned with validating their own transactions could use smaller shards, and apps the require large usage or composability could use the large one
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19) b) Another ideas was to split the blockchain into "domains"; this could be e.g. addresses invoking calls, or tx number mod 20. Make it so that each validator is assigned to a domain and can only produce blocks for that one.
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20) This means that, no matter how large a validator is, it can only ever produce blocks for e.g. 5% of the ecosystem. That forces further decentralization of block production, and means that you need to get a more diverse set of validators on board with a timeline.
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21) There were some other ideas whose details I've forgotten -- "big blocks/small blocks", "some small validator that has some power"-- do you remember those? -- The other set of ideas were about storing state securely and efficiently.
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22) The goal here would be two-fold: make sure history can't be rewritten; and that it's easy for a low-powered validator to find out the state of the blockchain. One idea here is just writing the state to the ETH blockchain periodically. Then any ETH node could verify Solana.
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23) Another idea was to write ZK-proofs of a Merkle tree of the blockchain, or something like that. A third thing that Vitalik brought up: it would be great if each block header contained the full state of the blockchain, so at least verifying that was easy for a laptop.
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24) I'm probably missing a lot of his thoughts here, and probably misrepresented some too--sorry! But I found the conversation super interesting. There are sometimes tradeoffs between security and speed, but at least we can try to find a pareto maxima.
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Decentralization is multi faceted. The problem we are focusing on is censorship resistance.
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Brain dump on "number of nodes" and *Censorship Resistance*. PoW provides great Censorship Resistance over LOOOONG time periods for BLOCKS. A 4k ethereum classic rollback is a great example of the heaviest chain overcoming censorship. This is great for LOOONG term safety (cont) twitter.com/haydenzadams/sโ€ฆ
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