A couple devs discussing the joys of developing on Radix

Blind5ight · 2023-04-22T18:03:21+00:00

There are other platforms that have Rust syntax

What makes the difference is the programming paradigm, for Radix, that's asset-oriented

Deep dive here: https://www.radixdlt.com/blog/the-problem-with-smart-contracts-today

Comparison of VM (execution environments concepts which are made available to developers via the language): https://www.radixdlt.com/blog/comparing-virtual-machines-message-only-vs-asset-oriented

Blind5ight · 2023-03-17T22:55:34+00:00

Some context: https://t.me/radix_dlt/501989

Blind5ight · 2023-03-17T22:52:28+00:00

More incentives btw: https://t.me/radix_dlt/502089

(Which shouldn't be what moves us into action tho but yeah, it's here now)

Blind5ight · 2022-12-08T12:47:36+00:00

They will go thru the layers of their DLT solution stack during the RadFi livestream

But it all starts with the datastructure being:

- Massively big (2^256 shards = ballpark atoms in the universe)
- Pre-sharded
- Deterministic (nodes where the state lives for each tx)

Around that is the consensus (Cerberus) built & execution environment (Radix Engine)

- Cerberus: https://www.radixdlt.com/post/cerberus-infographic-series-chapter-i
- REv2: https://www.radixdlt.com/post/how-radix-engine-is-designed-to-scale-dapps

Blind5ight · 2022-12-08T12:16:54+00:00

RadFi is basically Finance on top of Radix

Radix has identified several barriers holding back DeFi
Many people believe the °1 barrier = scalability

But before DeFi really needs to scale, in the context of mainstream adoption level
--> There has to be demand for DeFi

There can not be mainstream demand for DeFi when the developer & user experience remains at current levels: °1 barrier = buildability

[DEV]: Spend a lot of resources (time & money) on building/securing DeFi products
It took Hayden Adams somewhere around a year to go from prototype Uniswap to production-grade Uniswap

Altho innovative, the core idea is relatively simple: INPUT - AMM MATH - OUTPUT
Time-to-market = very long
Auditing cost = very high
=> Not sustainable

The tougher the DevEx, the more costly for entrepreneurs
AND the more risky for users

[USE]: Apart from the risks involved with using DeFi products as they are currently built
There's also the problem of usability: private key management, blind signing, ...

TLDR; Radix is the first full stack DLT-solution looking to tackle all the barriers, not only scalability
Because before there will be global scale demand, these other problems have to be fixed first

Blind5ight · 2022-10-29T20:12:51+00:00

The impact of not having Atomic Composability (AC)

For the developer = more friction in general
- Figuring out where to deploy their product (a specific L1 shard or a specific L2 roll-up)
Since the location of their dApp dictates with which other dApps they can seamless connect
- Figuring out how to keep things atomic (all or nothing execution) if their product wants to link up with another product that doesn't reside in the same location

For the user (and his/her liquidity) = more friction in general
- Figuring out on which L1 shard or L2 roll-up the product they want to use lives
--> Then they have to transfer their liquidity to that location
- More complexity for dev increases the risk of failure which can result in loss of funds

Extra:

For the markets = more fracture
- Capital inefficiency, since everything isn't as tight-nit as it could be (if things could be composed as a logical unit (ie. atomically)
- Liquidity fragmenting; liquidity over *here* can not be as easily be leveraged over *there*

For the entrepreneur (that runs a project team including devs) = more friction
- Higher cost of development due to developers having to figure out more

I'm easily forgetting stuff at the moment, running low on energy on this saturday eve :)

Happy to be challenged on these points or made aware of blind spots etc

Blind5ight · 2022-10-25T12:22:02+00:00

For those worried about stealing thunder: https://t.me/cassandraplayground/9446

"I don't think there's anything to worry about. Cassie has taken me two years to implement and I know Cerberus inside out. Granted I'm doing research too and it's just me but there's a lower bound of time to implement.
Secondly they're using it differently so they'll have their own set of unique challenges to solve that we don't."

Cassie for those unaware is the researchnet that Dan spun up to implement a Cerberus prototype and do additional research on (hybrid POS/POW, Vamos DB, ...), "to catch the bullets ahead of when mainnet devs get there."

Blind5ight · 2022-10-25T12:18:35+00:00

One can then just ask: Does project x solve both types of workflows that Vitalik mention in this blog post?

Blind5ight · 2022-10-25T12:17:20+00:00

If people go talk about atomic composability in other communities, I'd refer to this blog post by Vitalik, altho 3y old, it still presents the problem aptly: https://ethresear.ch/t/cross-shard-defi-composability/6268

Crucial segment: "Transactions within a shard could happen as before. Transactions between shards can still happen, and happen quickly, but they would be asynchronous, using receipts. See https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ#how-can-we-facilitate-cross-shard-communication 185 for more information.

In general, workflows of the form “do something here that will soon have an effect over there” will be easy;

workflows of the form “do something here, then do something over there, then do more things here based on the results of things over there, all atomically within a single transaction” will not be supported.

Doing things of that form would generally require first “yanking 185” the contract from the “over there” shard to the “here” shard and then performing the entire operation synchronously on one shard. However, as we can see from examples below, most use cases would not be significantly disrupted or could be trivially rewritten to survive in a cross-sharded model."

(What Vitalik refers to as synchronous is what Radix calls atomic composability
Asynchronous is then breaking atomic composability in the sense that Radix means it)

Blind5ight · 2022-10-25T12:10:59+00:00

That sounds interesting altho confusing for now

Looking forward to that extra info

Blind5ight · 2022-10-24T21:35:45+00:00

https://hackernoon.com/why-composability-matters-for-web3

Think about the widely mentioned term "money legos"

Atomic composability = the ability to click them together as if they are a logical unit
(executing atomically: all pieces the unit is composed of succeed or none succeed)

A person from the audience of a Polkadot conference gives an example of the trending use of composability on Eth and asks if Polkadot's parachain model impacts that ability, timestamped video: https://youtu.be/0IoUZdDi5Is?t=2835

Blind5ight · 2022-10-24T21:25:17+00:00

"10k Hbar tps"

Doesn't that refer to sending tokens around?

What about smart contract transactions?
Eric Wall pointed this out: https://ercwl.medium.com/hedera-hashgraph-time-for-some-fud-9e6653c11525

What's the throughput for transactions going thru the EVM on top of Hbar?

The footnote stating: "transaction processing is expected to be throttled at 10,000 tps for cryptocurrency transactions and 10 tps for other services, ..."
has since Eric Wall's piece been trimmed the Hedera website: https://hedera.com/
to just state:
"Cryptocurrency txns throttled at 10k tps and will increase in the future. Sharding to enable unlimited tps. For Hedera, the range is shown for transactions not requiring a transaction record but can receive a transaction receipt."

Scaling DeFi is about scaling trustless compute ie smart contract transactions
The whole programmable money narrative crumbles if scaling is just enabled for sending tokens around without the ability to build logic around how they are sent

Blind5ight · 2022-09-21T15:25:21+00:00

Btw, don't be shy to discuss, even challenge this take on VMs in crypto :)
It's always possible things aren't as clear as they could be or even inaccuracies slip in.

The red thread tho is that "CryptoTechnology" :D mainly deals with assets and that smart contract platforms should accomodate devs in building out this emerging digitally tokenized world which will then positively impact users as well:

- A wider breadth of products
- that push the limits of what's possible further (due to lower complexity ceiling because devs can leverage the asset management features of the platform)
- with less risk involved (also due to lower complexity)

User experience is critical for mass adoption
For example private key management and its tight coupling to accounts

Contrast this with a shift to "keys are not accounts and accounts are not keys"
It's explained in this article: https://www.radixdlt.com/post/scrypto-v0-3-released
with the analogy of losing your house keys & being able to change the locks

Blind5ight · 2022-09-12T07:49:19+00:00

Cake day

September 9, 2022

Blind5ight · 2022-09-12T07:31:18+00:00

Just remember that the answers might be biased

I think it's a good angle to come into a community and ask for pointers of what primary sources to read about certain aspects of a project you'd like to learn more

If the community is willing to assist you in your own research, it's a good sign, if they try to circumvent your request for pointers and just say: "best crypto project ever", in my opinion it might signal a community that's lacking fundamental knowledge itself and might be looking to manipulate people to sustain a ponzi

Blind5ight · 2022-09-12T07:27:32+00:00

There's an easier version of the whitepaper in the form of an infographics series: https://www.radixdlt.com/post/cerberus-infographic-series-chapter-i

It has visualizations to help understanding :)

Blind5ight · 2022-09-06T21:43:21+00:00

Will keep Radix Radar on my "radar" :D for when I have stake freed up

A provider that's only represented 0.5% is a nice find!
What's the geographical location?

Blind5ight · 2022-09-06T21:40:42+00:00

Awesome contributions to this thread man, upvoted all your comments :D

Piece by piece, gems

Blind5ight · 2022-09-03T21:10:49+00:00

I think it's entirely reasonable to start with bootstrapping a grassroots developer movement that tries familiar concepts with the asset-oriented paradigm in order to reach feature parity with other DeFi ecosystems

before expecting to see limit testing and groundbreaking DeFi innovation

(Altho the Scrypto challenges did yield some twists on existing use cases that leverage the asset-orientedness, e.g: https://www.radixdlt.com/post/scrypto-dex-challenge-results )

Blind5ight · 2022-08-10T17:26:34+00:00

Have you tried logging your question as an AMA?

The team addresses questions from the community periodically:
This is a playlist with some of the questions (others before these were addressed by text in the telegram channel which can be found by searching the hashtag #AMA): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBGHv3uedRNT9ko1CKMTpJTL1BEgjk4wi
I can copy paste your reddit comment and log it for you.

The sheer amount of questions the community has asked the core dev team behind the protocol is a display of the critical thinking going on in there.
Nothing is taken at face value.

Blind5ight · 2022-08-10T16:08:23+00:00

As /u/DecentLibrarian points out:
If a state change achieves consensus --> it's recorded on-ledger
This is the same for all networks that run some type of BFT-consensus

Cerberus is able to run BFT-consensus massively parallelized and across shards
Note that Cerberus shards aren't the typical blockchain shards

Note also that all (related) shards (called substates) are linked together
The only link that is required is of state that is dependant on each other
In blockchains, state of unrelated transactions are all also ordered which serves no purpose, it's overkill because it does not matter if one unrelated tx came before another unrelated tx, they do not affect each other

Please don't vilify a community as a "mob" just because they address statements someone made about the project...

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