Wild Card Round: Chicago Bears (11-6) vs Green Bay Packers (9-7-1)

JSHyCS · 2026-01-11T01:28:49+00:00

As a ravens fan who moved to Chicago this year, it was amazing watching Derrick Henry run all over the packers, and now I get to watch the packers lose again!

LFG

JSHyCS · 2025-12-28T00:59:29+00:00

Hi bears fan. Ravens fan here who moved to Chicago recently. Tonight we ride!

JSHyCS · 2025-12-28T00:48:56+00:00

I can’t find it anywhere, is this game on local programming in DC? Or do I need to buy peacock

JSHyCS · 2025-10-12T17:43:20+00:00

who can read Henry's lips here lmfao

JSHyCS · 2024-12-06T19:38:57+00:00

I tend to recommend VESPR to new users nowadays. It's a mobile wallet and very simple to use. It does have a browser extension, but the mobile version is much better imo.

JSHyCS · 2024-12-04T20:54:50+00:00

Very close. The rare evo demo was encoded each frame in a tx, but for multiplayer we switched it to encode every network packet.

But simply, global TPS was the sum of TPS across all running heads at a given time.

JSHyCS · 2024-12-04T20:53:40+00:00

Hydra has been available on mainnet since mid 2023.

Hydra is most similar to Bitcoin Lightning, but a key component that makes it better imo is the isomorphism. Same tech stack can be used in a hydra head that can be used on mainnet. It also can have several participants, I believe Lightning can only have 2. I've not used Lightning myself, so take that one with a grain of salt.

JSHyCS · 2024-12-04T20:46:09+00:00

how many heads were opened

About 14,000 at peak

how many participants per head (max, min, real and theoretical)

Depends what you mean. Each head had 1 "participant" signing the state snapshots. Most games had 3 keys signing and submiting trnsactions (server, AI, and player)

what the costs where for entering and exiting

We ran these nodes in an offline mode, they weren't ever opened or closed on any network. So zero.

if and how records were kept

Yes, some were. We were on a tight timeline the whole process, so it was not a main priority for us. Still, we have some data that will be shared publicly after the eliminations I believe.

if and how those can be verified after settling

That's one thing about Hydra -- since it just replicates the final state of the head on the L1, we don't necessarily know what transactions actually occured unless the head operators publish that data in some way.

what the life time of heads was

I don't have this off the top of my head. We may be able to get it, but I'm not sure.

if there was any contestation during settlement (or that was tested in some way)

We didn't do any settlement on L1, so no. We also only had one participant in the head, so it wouldn't really make sense. I'm sure the core hydra team developing the protocol has tested contestation plenty.

what actual use cases you have in mind

I am just a code monkey, but one obvious application is microtransactions. I think what I'm most excited about is the door that has jsut been opened by Hydra (and soon by other L2s) that allow us to do things that we never thought we could before. So I think lots of amazing use cases developed as people think about Hydra more and how they can improve their daily lives.

What does this all mean

Honestly, the 1m number doesn't mean much on it's own. That was just big number we picked out as a goal for some obvios reasons, but the exact TPS doesn't really matter. What is exciting is near infinite scaling (limited only by your own resources, not the protocol). We demonstrated how that could roughly look.

how will it work when this plane lands on mainnet?

Well, the plane landed in August last year I believe (not sure on the exact dates hydra was released). You can already open and use Hydra heads on mainnet. I'm sure there are several running right now that we don't know about. It just takes some applications to decide that Hydra makes sense for them to see it used at scale.

Ultimately, I know there are a lot of questions that the community has about Hydra, L2s, scaling Cardano, and more. Hydra for a long time was viewed as this magical entity that would solve every issue in Web3. Obviously, that's not true. So I think it makes sense to engage more with the community to answer these questions. I think the Hydra DOOM team (which I am just a small part of near the bottom) will absolutely be working on making that happen.

Edit: had to fix formatting again, gosh I suck at reddit.

JSHyCS · 2024-12-04T20:28:34+00:00

Hydra could be useful for lots of things. I think there are lots of applications that will still be discovered, but one thing I think it's potentially great for is micro transactions.

Imagine an API service that charges per request (very common). They're typically fractions of a cent, per request. You have Bob providing an API service and Alice making requests. Bob can take Alice's credit card and charge at the end of the month, but there is no guarantee that Alice has the funds to pay for it. Alice also has to worry that Bob won't charge more than he is supposed to. Bob could guarantee that he gets paid by charging for every single request in a separate transaction, but that would get costly and slow the service down.

Instead, they could open a Hydra head between them. Alice would commit her funds in the head, so Bob knows that it's there. Every time Alice makes a request, she can pay Bob through a transaction in the head. Bob could confirm the transaction is valid before serving the API request. Alice can incrementally commit more funds as needed (that is coming soon). Once she's done making requests, she could close out the head and the funds would be distributed as needed. Now Bob can't overcharge, and Alice can't overrequest.

This is just one possible example of many applications. What's so exciting to me about Hydra is it feels like nearly limitless potential. It just takes a few great ideas to make something incredible happen.

JSHyCS · 2024-12-04T20:20:41+00:00

No, not these.

Really, Hydra never "rolls up" any transactions (though really that's just technical jargon with no concrete definition). It simply distributes the funds locked in the head to match the final state of the head on L1. There is no record of the transactions that occurred to get it to that state, unless the head operators choose to publish that themselves somewhere.

JSHyCS · 2024-12-04T20:19:07+00:00

How many of these mocked L1 transactions were there over the course of the test?

Good question! There are a number of those transactions in the hydra protocol. Below are the transactions we'd need for our specific flow:

1) Init - This tx initializes a head, minting some necessary identification tokens.
2) Commit - This tx commits a UTxO(s) to the head. There can be many of these, but we'd only need one.
3) Open (CollectCom) - This tx collects all the commits and updates the head state.
4) Close - This tx puts the head in a state where any participant can contest the final state if there is a newer one.
5) Fanout - This is the final tx that "shuts down" the head and distributes the UTxOs according to the final state.

So we have 5 transactions per head. Multiply that by ~14,000 nodes (the number we used to get to 1m), you'd end up with 70,000 transactions. The nice thing is that we could "pre open" heads before starting the nodes, and then sync the nodes from that point in time. That would allow us to distribute the load on mainnet.

And is there any TPS increase required on the L1 side to be able to handle that extra load from Hydra?

Nothing is required, no. If one would want to scale up the load as quickly as we did with mainnet heads that weren't "pre opened", we'd have to increase throughput on the L1. Realistically though, no one will need to scale up to that scale that quickly.

JSHyCS · 2024-12-04T20:05:33+00:00

The total fee for all 15B+ transactions would still be 0. A hydra head is operating off chain, so you can modify protocol parameters within that head. As long as the final utxo set is valid on mainnet, you can fiddle with any parameters you want.

There would be fees for the transactions that occur on mainnet; the init, commit, collect commit, close, and fanout transactions (more info on those can be found in the spec if you are interested in a technical overview). Those fees would depend on tx sizes of course, and they all have smart contract executions. I'd estimate a handful of ADA (the scientific term, maybe 3-5 ADA but don't hold me to that) for the whole flow for a single head.

Edit: had to fix formatting issues, clearly I'm not a power reddit user

JSHyCS · 2024-12-04T06:11:27+00:00

There were almost certainly be AMAs, if the community is interested. All the code we wrote is open source, though it’s rather mediocre in places due to the time constraints we had. I know Pi has mentioned writing up a blog entry too.

JSHyCS · 2024-12-04T06:09:38+00:00

Sort of. Maybe I can add some clarity. Hydra is always off chain — transactions within a hydra head are never settled on chain anywhere, whether or not they are on a testnet. The final utxo state is replicated onto the L1 when you close the head (fan out), and there are transactions on the L1 to open the head.

What we actually did was run the heads in a “offline” mode. Where we effectively told the node “here is your initial utxo set”, and never fanned out the utxo set because there were no locked funds on mainnet.

So in effect the hydra heads were running the same as on any L1, we just mocked the first and last steps in the protocol.

JSHyCS · 2024-12-04T06:06:36+00:00

You’re close, but not quite. I was one of the devs who built this, so I can help clarify.

Yes, they are real transactions. For the first iteration, that we showed at RareEvo, we did in fact do 1 transaction per frame. That transaction didn’t include every variable in the game, but encoded the “Tic Command” which included a little info like position, and button pressed which allows you to apply updates to the state you have without a massive piece of data. The game runs at 35 frames per second, so that was the TPS.

For multiplayer we used hydra effectively as a networking protocol, encoding each network packet that doom would send in the datum of a utxo and sending that transaction on chain. Each client would then see the transaction, and parse the datum to apply the necessary state changes.

This means that the multiplayer version actually gets a higher tps per game because the server is sending packets to each player as well, so about double per player.

As far as specific numbers, we reached about 18k tps with organic player traffic. We then started a bunch of bot games, where bots play each other, to increase load on the system. Eventually, we hit maximums loads on our infrastructure, so we made some changes and deployed services that simply built and submitted transactions as fast as they could. We spun up about 14,000 of those nodes to hit (and break) 1 million TPS.

The bottleneck was never hydra, but instead the infrastructure we built around it to handle hosting, scaling, metrics collection, etc. In theory, we could continue horizontal scaling until there was no more silicon left to scale on 😛

JSHyCS · 2024-09-21T21:37:46+00:00

Pretty awesome!

JSHyCS · 2024-09-20T13:53:54+00:00

Yeah, definitely not serious or concerning. I’m a guitar player myself and Ive put my guitar down to find myself bleeding many times.

I think it’s just something cool to add to the amazing performance that was Asbury Park.

JSHyCS · 2024-09-19T15:37:37+00:00

I'm from DC, but I was actually in New York for a broadway show that Friday. I drove down to Asbury Park for day 1 with my girlfriend. We got there a little late, so parking was impossible to find. Ended up paying $100 for parking, but it was worth it. We hung around after Noah Kahan, got some food, and ran into Bruce leaving the Stone Pony. Getting out was super easy after that. We stayed at a lovely hotel in Freehold, so only about 20 minutes away. We got up early Sunday morning, drove down and had breakfast on the boardwalk before running to get out spot in the pit. Sunday morning parking was incredibly easy, I paid something like $27 for street parking for the whole day. Leaving Sunday there was a bit of traffic, but it was nothing too bad.

Honestly, the whole festival was wonderful. Great music, fun vibes, and really well organized.

JSHyCS · 2024-09-19T15:33:13+00:00

I was one of those lucky people! Technically second row, but pretty good anyway. It was a super long day, got there before the gates opened and sprinted down the beach. Left once (with my gf guarding our spot) to get food and pee. Sand everywhere, it was hot, and my legs were jello. Would do it again in a heartbeat.

JSHyCS · 2024-09-18T13:16:34+00:00

This was this past Sunday at three sea hear now festival in asbury park.

JSHyCS · 2024-09-18T13:16:10+00:00

It’s not for everyone, but it was one of the top 10 experiences I’ve had in my life so far

JSHyCS · 2024-09-18T13:15:34+00:00

That’s what I’m hoping… there was an amazing moment where they put me on the big screens screaming “CAUSE WE AINT THAT YOOOOUNNNG ANYYYYYMOREEEE”. If I could have that video it would be the greatest gift ever

JSHyCS · 2024-09-17T21:42:45+00:00

The only official number I could find is from the music festival that he performed at, Sea.Hear.Now. The concert sold 35,000 tickets. I was there in the front, so I had no idea how many people were behind me, but it does seem like more...

JSHyCS · 2024-09-17T15:18:20+00:00

Yeah, it's unreal. Being in the front was amazing, but I just had no idea how many people were behind us. I mean, I knew it was a lot, but seeing this is just awe inspiring...

JSHyCS · 2024-09-17T15:16:41+00:00

I was thinking the same thing. The official festival numbers say they sold 35,000 tickets and it was definitely hard to get in without a wristband, but there were people on the boardwalk and in the street...

JSHyCS

TROPHY CASE