Nervos Network Follow Jun 24
· 14 min read
Q6: Will there be a CKB flyclient in this upgrade? Also are there any official plans to develop a SPV? Jan: This upgrade will not add support for SPV, because SPV needs flyclient, as they are two different things.SPV needs to use flyclient to achieve the function of the wallet.
This time the upgrade will not include flyclient protocol.As I said earlier, we will first make some changes inside the block structure and add an extension to prepare for the next hard fork, which will add flyclient protocol.
So we are certain about plans to develop flyclient protocol this year.For the SPV, I prefer to see community members building a CKB SPV.
Maybe some other blockchains have done all kinds of things officially, but I think Nervos needs to be built by the community, and everyone should work together to do this.This is also related to our notion.
To us, open source and decentralization are critical at the beginning.
Q7: Are there any projects based on Nervos ready to be released after the mainnet upgrade? Jan: Should I answer yes or no?
In terms of time, yes.After the mainnet upgrade, there are new projects to go live, and some projects need to upgrade.
As I said earlier, the Major Protocol Upgrade is an upgrade on kernel, so applications need to make some adjustments to absorb the benefits of mainnet upgrade.
But logically speaking, it may not have much to do with the mainnet upgrade.It just happens to be a sequential order, and there is no necessary connection.
Q8: Will there be a hard fork? Will the upgrade affect the transactions of Mibao NFTs? Will it have an impact on mining efficiency? Jan: It will not affect the mining efficiency.The mining algorithm remains the same, so there will be no impact.
The upgrade itself will not affect NFT, but it mainly depends on Mibao’s plan.
Will there be a hard fork? Well, the Major Protocol Upgrade itself is a hard fork.It is not a hard fork like The DAO where the entire community is divided, but a hard fork that everyone has expected and agreed with.So after the hard fork, there won’t be two chains.
Only in a situation like The DAO, where the entire community is divided, will there be two chains after the hard fork, like ETH and ETC.This is very rare in blockchain history.
Q9: For the Major Protocol Upgrade, new cryptography standards have been updated to improve the efficiency and performance of Nervos Network.Nervos has always put security first.Does it sacrifice some security in exchange for better performance, or pursue better performance while ensuring security? In addition, some community members are not satisfied with the performance of Nervos Network.
Are ordinary users aware of the improvement in the performance after this Major Protocol Upgrade? Jan: For the user, I think the perception is very small, or even non-perceptual.
We have added 4 instructions of Risc-VB extension this time, and the instruction set at the level of VM cryptography for better performance.Cryptography is only a small part of the entire application.
As dApps, there is a front end, a CDN, a back end, a contract on the chain, and the user’s network environment.The performance of the system is determined by the whole links.After we launch the RVV instruction set, users may feel a performance improvement.
But this goes back to what I said earlier, dApps are made up of a long chain of links, it has many components.
Even if the performance of a certain group is increased by 10 times, the user may only feel a 10% improvement in overall application performance.
For users, the most obvious performance may be the processing speed of the blockchain, which is the processing time from initiating a transaction to transaction confirmation.But this performance is not what CKB pursues.I’ve been emphasizing that CKB is completely different from other public chains, with a different philosophy.
In this regard, I suggest you read Zhang Ren’s explanation of the consensus, which is simply described as that the bottleneck of public chain performance throughput is the average bandwidth of the global network.That’s the bottleneck.
Why is that? Because if you want a chain to process 10k transactions per second, assuming that 1 transaction is 200 bytes, then 10,000 transactions is 2 Mb, which means you need to provide at least an average of 2 Mb of network bandwidth per second.
100k must provide at least 20 MEgabits of bandwidth, and 1 million must provide at least 200 Megabits per second of network bandwidth.And this is just the theoretical limit without any losses.
However, you also have to spend some of the rest of the bandwidth, such as 30%, 40% of the bandwidth is spent on consensus messages.Since you can’t use all your bandwidth to deliver your transactions, there’s no consensus right? These are physical constraints.It’s not how you design consensus or how you write software, or how you design the blockchain to change, it’s the bottleneck of physical conditions.
So in our opinion, the most efficient and efficient blockchain, or the ones with the best “performance”, is the blockchain that can use bandwidth most efficiently.
How much TPS can you do with 20 megabytes of bandwidth? That’s what we defined from the beginning.
Some blockchains claim that their TPS has reached tens of thousands.What is the test environment for them ? What are the hardware conditions of the test machine and test tools? What does it give up?
We can really get performance up, we need to give up decentralization.
It doesn’t matter, we can give up these things, we pursue a better user experience, we need 10k transactions per second.
What to keep and what to give up is the difference of ideas.Abandoning decentralization and security is not CKB’s philosophy.For example, Bitcoin does not do this, and Ethereum does not actually do this.Everyone has their own criteria, and CKB actually has its own choices.The premise of comparison is to clarify what a chain’s philosophy and conscious choice are.
Comparing chains that have made the same choice together is a reasonable comparison.
The positioning of CKB is Layer1, core, SoA, and it must ensure decentralization.CKB’s NC-Max implementation has the best performance.Nc-max is a very efficient consensus if you ask people to straighten out the premises.
NC-Max is a consensus algorithm that has been reviewed by scientific research methods and verified in the practice of the CKB Major Protocol network.
It just recently published a paper and has been recognized by NDSS, one of the four top conferences in the information security industry.
In contrast, some blockchain white papers appear to us to be nothing more than drafts on preprint websites that have not been tested on the actual network, nor have they been reviewed by any peers.
We can also pursue user experience, or give up something for user experience, but that may not be the path that Nervos or CKB want to choose.
The Crypto market is so big and all kinds of projects are blooming.It’s all good.If you appreciate that path, you can join it.I don’t think there is any problem in doing so.
Now there are a lot of public chain projects, and everyone has their own ideas and positioning.One of the things I think to avoid is, I like idea A, then I go to a team that is idea B, and I keep trying to convince the team that you should change idea to A.
Unless the team didn’t have a clear idea of what to do in the first place and went with the flow, it is possible to do so, but if the team’s thinking is clear, it is impossible to make such a change.Note that I’m talking about a change in the core idea, not a change in the surface experience.
Then again, although CKB pursues security and maximizes performance under this premise, this does not mean that the Nervos network is slow.This is because Nervos is a layered network, and performance is solved at layer 2 instead of layer 1.
The Godwoken we see now is an example, the experience it brings should be said to be improved, but it is not very high, which is why we still need Axon and so on.Therefore, you can see CKB, Godwoken, and Axon, which are different trade-offs between security, performance, and decentralization.(Note: Security, performance, and decentralization are the famous impossible triangles in the blockchain field.In the same component, if you want any two features to the extreme, you will definitely sacrifice the ability of the other feature.)
For Nervos, what needs to be presented is that no matter what trade-offs we make, you can find a corresponding solution to join the network:
You may choose to build on CKB if you really care about security and decentralization; You may choose to build on Axon if you really care about performance; You may choose to build on Godwoken if you want to find a balance in the trade-offs.This is the meaning of the whole layered network.
If you look at each component alone.It won’t be the one thing that satisfies all needs, but when these components are combined, there is one thing that does all of them.
Q10: What is the biggest difficulty in Major Protocol Upgrade?How did the team overcome it? How to make the market recognize the technical output of the project? What’s next for applications built on Nervos Network? Jan: What is the biggest difficulty in upgrading? I actually mentioned it earlier, that is, it is difficult to do these upgrades while still maintaining decentralization, SoV semantics, and all of these things.
How did you overcome it? I don’t think there is a way to overcome it, because it took a lot of time to study the plan and discuss it, and finally came up with a plan that will finally be implemented.
During the whole process, we were still trying to figure out how to do the right thing.
How to make the market recognize the technical output of the project? I think it’s important to be able to incorporate these changes into the application layer so that users can perceive them.
On the other hand, we need to do more technical explanations and technical propaganda, so as to pass on what we do.
Just like I am here today doing an AMA (thank you Yixiu for organizing it).I think these must be done, and then everyone if attention, can also be noticed that recently we also wrote many blogs, spent a lot of energy to write the article explain the CKB technical details, we hope that we can let more people see the things we do, can attract more developers to study CKB, to do things at Nervos.
The Nervos Foundation does a lot , and the Developer Relations team is constantly attending various developer conferences.Although the epidemic will have some impact on the whole thing.I think I will attend these meetings more often in 2022, more people will attend these conferences.
I believe that you have also seen the recent conferences on Nervos official Twitter recently.(In addition, Nervos will hold several Hackthons in 2022,and a few more are underway or coming soon,attracting developers to Nervos with one Hackthon after another.)
Q11: What are the next actions for application? Jan: There are two key points, both on Layer 2
Generally speaking, you can assume that Nervos will have an upgrade from bottom to top, from layer 1 to layer 2 in 2022, the hard fork of CKB is probably a start,followed by Godwoken V0 to V1 Upgrade, which is also a very big upgrade.
There are plenty of changes, and one of the core goals of these changes is to make Godwoken more compatible with Ethereum as a whole.For compatibility, we may have achieved 95% before, and the remaining 5% is not well done.This time, we want to fix all these problems together.
(Godwoken V0 version) the remaining 5% is not done because it is a bit difficult because we are on a new PoW chain and there are some challenges in doing compatibility on UTXO model.
But this time we think it will get a big improvement, and this year’s exosystem development may appear more on Godwoken V1, not on CKB.
Because I just said, CKB is the kernel, and it’s far from the application.You need some pretty hardcore skills to be able to write on CKB, because you may use Rust, you have to understand the programming model of CKB, syscalls, etc.,but on Godwoken, because it’s fully compatible with Ethereum, there is already a whole set of tools out-of-the-box and you’ll be much easier to do it.
Currently it is relatively easy to develop on Godwoken, and V1 will further lower the development threshold.
On the whole, we need to explore new paths and be compatible with Ethereum,at least attracting the developers we can currently attract, and gradually guiding more developers to Layer 1 through the Layer 2 boom.
Once the developers are familiar with Layer 2, it is inevitable that they have to contact some concepts of Layer 1, the concept of CKB, and the technology stack of CKB.
Start with a large group of Layer 2 developers, then gradually select some developers who are interested in Layer 1, and finally attract them to delve deeper and deeper.
Just like when you’re doing App development, you write an iOS APP, you write and write your app becomes 10 million users, you’re probably inevitably thinking about the internal design of iOS, how does it work underneath? You can’t care about these things in the first place, because when you’re only serving 100 users, you only need to care about the app itself, which is a very low barrier.
So, at this stage, I think the ecosystem of Godwoken will grow faster.
On Layer 1, there are also some very hardcore teams, such as .bit (previously DAS), UniPass , Kollect , Mibao , who face even greater challenges, Or on the other hand, Layer 1 will give them greater challenges, but these projects can also more directly utilize the benefits of CKB’s features, both pros and cons.In general, the ecosystem on the Layer 1 side will develop slower.
Another point is that Axon may be launched in the second half of the year, depending on whether there are projects to use it.
Axon is characterized by good performance, which is probably better than any chain today.
(Note: As Nervos’ Layer 2 solution, Axon can easily achieve thousands of TPS by using Overlord, a high-performance consensus algorithm.This provides another option for Nervos dApp developers.Godawake is ideal for low throughput high-volume and high-value situations, such as DeFi, where security is often more important than speed.
Axon offers the best performance when it comes to consumer-facing applications like decentralized gaming or social networking.)
The nice thing about Layer 2 is that it doesn’t have to have the same performance and Layer 1 concerns as other chains, so it’s pretty middle-of-the-road.Since it’s Layer 2, you can optimize it for performance.
If Axon goes online, the ecosystem should grow faster as Axon is also fully compatible with EVM.We learned a lot from the development of Godwoken V0, and these lessons were incorporated into the design thinking of Godwoken V1 and Axon.
Regarding the development of the ecosystem, I know the Nervos Foundation developer relations team.They have been very active recently and have been looking for a lot of projects to talk about, but I don’t know the specific projects.
Q12: Can you tell us the upgrade plan for Godwoken V1? Jan: I estimate that the Godwoken v1 testnet will come out in mid-May, and after the testnet comes out, many projects will start to develop and test on the testnet; it is expected that the testnet phase will be about a month.
If there are no major problems during a month, the mainnet will be launched.So the launch date is expected to be in June.
Q13: Are there any popular dApps which are difficult to be built on Ethereum or other public chains, but very easy to do on Nervos Network? Can you give us some examples for explanation? Jan: I will explain in two aspects: theory and practice.
First of all, most new public chains can realize anything in theory, because they are basically quasi-Turing complete.
But in fact, each public chain has its own specialties and its own persitioning.
For example, Ethereum is easier to build DeFi applications, which is very obvious, because the design of its contract model is very suitable for DeFi.It keeps accounts, it has accounts, and the accounts have balances, which is very suitable for the financial system.
There are also applications appropriate to be built on CKB, such as NFTs, which are very suitable for the UTXO model.In essence, each UTXO is an NFT.For example, when you transfer an NFT minted on CKB, you do not need to pay extra gas fees.If I give you my NFT, you can also transfer it directly to others.
In this case, you do not need to have any knowledge about CKB.You don’t need to realize that the gas fee is prepaid.All you can see is the NFT, which is actually very friendly to users.
In another case, I give you an NFT — a football card, and you think this card is excellent, so you give it to your friend as a birthday present for her.At this moment, if I say to you: “Wait, you can’t transfer yet.You have to buy some ETH, otherwise you have no money to pay the gas fee!” In this case, the user experience is very poor.
Have you noticed the difference in the above two cases? You probably don’t realize it because you’re already used to the gas fee rules that Ethereum has set for you.
But if you are thinking with First Principles, or if you come from the Internet world, you will find it very awkward.
The Internet is not like this, nor in reality.When I give you a greeting card as a gift, the Fed won’t come out and say: “Come on, you need to pay me $1 for the transaction fee.” So that is a very strange model.
If NFT is very suitable for the CKB model, I think an interesting direction is that we can make a cell model chain on layer 2.As we have limited time now, we can only give priority to the account model on layer 2.
If there is more time, we can actually build UTXO or the cell model on layer 2, and then build the account model on top of the layer 2 cell model.All of these are achievable, and different designs may have the same benefits.
Let’s take another example.
As the cell model is very similar to the UTXO model of Bitcoin, failed transactions of CKB and Bitcoin will not be written on the chain.But if you use a dApp on Ethereum and the transaction fails, it will still be written on the chain and you will get charged for the gas fee.
This is not the case with Bitcoin and CKB.Failed transactions will not be chained, and you do not have to pay extra fees for your failed transactions.
From the perspective of a natural person, the design of Ethereum is unreasonable.If your bank told you today, “Uh, sorry, I failed to open a bank account for you, but I still have to charge you a handling fee of $10”.Or “I’m sorry, the financial product you want to buy is sold out, the money will be refunded to you, but I will deduct 1% of the handling fee from it.”
Do you think it’s reasonable? You must feel unreasonable! The real world won’t do that.
But Ethereum has its reasons for doing this.It is difficult to safely implement the execution analysis on account models before going on the chain.
If the failed transaction is not allowed to be written on the chain, there will be a risk of DoS.So from a technical point of view, it is reasonable; but for the user experience, it is unreasonable.
The above are some interesting points about developing applications on Nervos CKB.In general, when you redesign a completely different system based on a very different principle, it’s difficult to answer the question — “what is impossible or very difficult to implement on other chains but very easy on CKB”.
For example, if one system goes to the left and the other goes to the right, they must have many different details and different capabilities at the upper level.The above example of NFT was told to me by Frank Lou, founder of UniPass.
So I hope we can discover more examples together.
Our community is committed to building and exploring.We don’t know what we will figure out.The only thing that is certain is that we are clearly taking a different path!.
