
Instead, to make (or verify a recent) transaction, the client simply asks for the latest (or otherwise relevant) block header, and verifies that it has been signed by a supermajority of the current committee. As long as no committee has had a dishonest supermajority, a client who verifies a chain of committee hand-off messages certifying the PoS election results, known as epoch messages, does not need to check each block or even the headers of each block. We observe that in order to verify the latest block header in BFT networks a client only needs the public keys of the current committee. (For this, cryptocurrencies like Mina have proposed recursive zero-knowledge proofs solutions that attest to all the state transition since genesis.) Plumo calls this ultra-light clients: The security guarantee is not as high as verifying every block since the beginning of time (the genesis). This is what Celo is doing with Plumo, but more generally any blockchain that uses a BFT consensus (Diem/Libra, Cosmos, Algorand, Dfinity, etc.) should be able to implement something like this. As such, Infura could very well give you this cryptographic proof to accompany a response to your request, and the problem would be fixed. Since each block is cryptographically certified by consensus participants, and no re-organization (or forks) can happen, the certification can be reused to provide a proof to the clients (the real ones). Now, what are the actual solutions that exist in the space?įirst, newer byzantine-fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols have straight-forward solutions to this problem.

Cryptocurrencies have come a long way since the advent of Bitcoin, and research has exploded in all directions. In some ways, cryptocurrency’s failure to scale beyond relatively nascent engineering is what makes it possible to consider the days “early,” since objectively it has already been a decade or more.ĭid you know that most of the web was not encrypted until recently? For example, Facebook defaulted to https in 2013. “It’s early days still” is the most common refrain I see from people in the web3 space when discussing matters like these. As such, the whole security of the blockchain is moot once you start interacting through a public node. This service can lie to you, and you wouldn't notice. Infura is one of them and has become quite "trusted" through being the backend behind Metamask, the most popular Ethereum wallet. The solution has been to just trust a public node. This is not realistic for most users, and even less so for mobile users. This takes a lot of time (sometimes days) and space.
#Moxier wallet download
To interact with the blockchain, you need to download its whole history with a program. In fact, even when you connect a wallet like MetaMask to a dApp, and the dApp interacts with the blockchain via your wallet, MetaMask is just making calls to Infura! Almost all dApps use either Infura or Alchemy in order to interact with the blockchain. At this point, there are basically two companies. As it happens, companies have emerged that sell API access to an ethereum node they run as a service, along with providing analytics, enhanced APIs they’ve built on top of the default ethereum APIs, and access to historical transactions.

So the only alternative is to interact with the blockchain via a node that’s running remotely on a server somewhere.Ī server! But, as we know, people don’t want to run their own servers. That’s not really possible to do from the client, though, since the blockchain can’t live on your mobile device (or in your desktop browser realistically). Let's look at his description of how most users interact with decentralized apps (dapps):įor example, whether it’s running on mobile or the web, a dApp like Autonomous Art or First Derivative needs to interact with the blockchain somehow – in order to modify or render state (the collectively produced work of art, the edit history for it, the NFT derivatives, etc).

While I do agree with his critics, I don't share his skepticism. If you've been wondering about web3, and want a non-bullshit and technical glance at what it is, I think this is a really good post. Moxie just wrote his first impressions on web3. In response to Moxie's doubts on web3, and about ultra light clients posted January 2022
