Trias Talents Opinion丨Four Questions to Help You Better Understand the Blockchain
Wang Jiashuai
Leviatom core developer;
The back-end technology manager of OCTA.
Wang Jiashuai Worked in China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), Soufun headquarters. He has rich development experience in the fields of mobile Internet finance, big data, high concurrency web server, and blockchain.
He was involved in the research and optimization of blockchain consensus communication and digital assets at the underlying of DASO private chain & consortium chain, enabling it to reach 100,000 TPS. He is familiar with the wallet and account implementation methods of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyperledger, and another major blockchain, and has completed DASO’s independent and controllable blockchain account system with asset sovereignty.
With the digital currency market fluctuates dramatically, the blockchain technology is concerned continuously by many people. Today, Mr. Wang Jiashuai will share his views on the application of blockchain and the existing security issues that people are most concerned.
What issues should public chain solve first?
Q: We know that the public chain technology has its unique characteristics, and some aspects are beyond the reach of traditional technology solutions. At the same time, with the development of the digital currency market, blockchain project has also been widely concerned. In the field of the blockchain, competition is very fierce, but each has its defects. In your opinion, at the level of the public chain, what is the highest priority to solve? Trading rate? Marketing? Data security? Or something else?
A: At present, the blockchain is in an ‘evolution period’. Except for several typical blockchain 1.0 projects such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, none of the blockchain 2.0, 3.0 and even the so-called 4.0 projects have shown a particular obvious trend of ‘dominating’ the industry.
I think the first two issues to be addressed are security and scalability, which are two crucial aspects of the ‘impossible triangle’ theory of blockchain. As long as you can do both, you can have a place in the business. Trias, through the combination of DAG and trusted computing, can do both.
In my opinion, DAG will become an increasingly important direction of the blockchain. DAG upgrades the blockchain from a one-dimensional single-point write to a three-dimensional multi-point work in parallel, with a theoretical transaction of billions per second. How to implement DAG in an existing solution? We can use DAG as a cache to access the system and receive transaction data from the DAG cache, and then extract data from the DAG cache regularly by the main chain, or push the data from the DAG cache periodically to the main chain. It is important to note that the DAG is used only as a cache for transactions and is not responsible for verifying the validity of the transaction, which is proved by the main chain. But based on the trusted computing technology of heterogeneous TEE, in simple terms, TEE can not only provide a guarantee, but also offer computing conditions when calculating the security of nodes, and finally determine the rights and interests of consensus.
Vitalik and EOS, which one do you prefer?
Q: We know that the DPOS mechanism adopted by EOS improves the efficiency of consensus by selecting 21 super nodes. However, from the perspective of Vitalik there may be implicit cooperation among the 21 super nodes of EOS, which will naturally lead to oligarchy. What is your opinion?
A: This issue can be solved with the ‘impossible triangle’ theory I mentioned earlier. To some extent, the 21 super nodes of EOS do take care of two parts of the triangle, sacrificing part of security but bringing a qualitative change of consensus speed. In my opinion, there is no problem with the DPOS consensus mechanism itself, but it is the human factors that EOS can control the election strategy of super nodes, which directly leads to its more unstable pseudo-centralization. EOS super nodes must be transparent, open, and fair to be considered a basic DPOS consensus.
To be open and transparent, we introduced the concept of ‘sky ladder’. By calculating the nodes of ‘sky ladder’ and taking into account the computing power, rights and interests, TEE value and random value, this open and fair mechanism enables no one to obtain the update time and ranking of the next sky ladder, so that the consensus process will not be tampered with.
Blockchain, is it secure or not?
Q: When blockchain was born, people thought it was secure because its ledger is distributed. However, several big blockchain projects have had accidents. For example, attackers once created 1840 billion Bitcoins by exploiting flaws in Bitcoin itself, Ethereum once had the DAG event, and EOS was also exposed by 360 as a security vulnerability. How do you think the blockchain projects should enhance their security?
A: No project is perfect; some defects are caused by the ability and physical strength of the developers. It is almost impossible to develop an ideal product under intense work. A professional team, including development, testing, and production, can only reduce the number of bugs as much as possible, thus eliminating as many serious errors as possible.
How to enhance the security performance of blockchain? One is open source, inviting fans around the world to help you find bugs; The second is the security of individual contracts. Since not everyone focuses on the project, it is likely to be exploited by criminals if defects occur. We can only test any possible latitude to find and resolve these vulnerabilities.
When will blockchain projects have an explosion?
Q: In recent years, more and more famous universities around the world have opened courses or research topics related to the blockchain. When do you think the blockchain industry will outbreak?
A: For now, much of the focus on blockchain is on speculation. Bitcoin’s halving, I think, is a good thing. In my opinion, as speculators move away from blockchain, the rest are people who care about the technology. When we start to think about the convenience that distributed storage can bring to our life, it is the best time for the development of blockchain.
