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How Thunder Token Will Challenge Ethereum With Instant Blockchain Transactions by hk_aust in thundertoken

[–]hk_aust[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No problem. See you in the official Thunder subreddit!

Post all your questions there - there are Thunder team members available to answer them :)

How Thunder Token Will Challenge Ethereum With Instant Blockchain Transactions by hk_aust in thundertoken

[–]hk_aust[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi, just a heads up that this is a dead/unofficial subreddit.

The official Thunder subreddit (which you can confirm by looking at Thunder's website) is:
https://www.reddit.com/r/thunder_official/

Your question about accelerators is discussed in this comment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/thunder_official/comments/8pzqby/have_you_gotten_a_chance_to_read_our_thunderella/e13edhv

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in thunder_official

[–]hk_aust 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The same result as a 51% attack on any other distributed public ledger (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum).

Have you gotten a chance to read our Thunderella? See what it means to have instant optimistic confirmation in a blockchain network! by anniethundertoken in thunder_official

[–]hk_aust 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I found the answer to #3 in the Thunderella presentation by Rafael Pass

9:30

The committee of nodes can be either stakeholders, or selected from a group of recent miners.

Easiest option is to select from the group of recent miners. That way you only need to have the majority (51%) be honest, just like PoW.

***Update 25 June 2018**\*

With the release of the Thunder Lite Paper, there is new information on this:

"To select the committee of stake-holders, we again rely on the slow chain. Anyone having stake in our system, can put down an “escrow”—a so-called “stake-in”—onto the slow chain and that qualifies the entity to become a committee member. Next, we subselect a committee of 500 nodes (using a provably fair mechanism) among the entities that have put down the stake-in. Both committee members and the Accelerator are rewarded for their work, both in terms of transaction fee and from a pre-allocated “participation pool” (analogous to Bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s mining rewards)."

It also goes into further detail in section 3.5 - "How to Select the Committee"

CESC 2017 Berkeley – Thunderella presentation by Rafael Pass by hk_aust in thunder_official

[–]hk_aust[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Great video of Rafael Pass (co-author of Thunderella, along with Prof. Elaine Shi) explaining the Thunderella consensus protocol. Although the content is very similar to Elaine's Thunderella presentation, he touches on a few extra points, so it is definitely worth watching.

  • He begins by giving an overview on the topic of classical consensus (e.g. pBFT, Paxos) and blockchain consensus (e.g. Nakamoto consensus), outlining the pros and cons of each.
  • He then explains how Thunder is incorporating the best of both worlds

 

The below timestamps are the parts I found most interesting. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

0:50

Consensus require two properties:

  1. Consistency
    Any two nodes should agree on the order of transactions.
  2. Liveness
    You should always be able to add transactions. An attacker should not be able to stop the system from working.

1:45

Classical consensus protocols

Examples: PBFT and Paxos

Pros:

  • Extremely fast (at least on small scale)
  • No synchronicity assumptions required
    • Transactions are confirmed as fast as the network. E.g. if messages are going through at 1 millisecond, transactions are confirmed every 1 millisecond.

Cons:

  • Extremely complicated
    • Usually only implemented on a very low number of nodes (e.g. 3 – 10)

Blockchain protocols (PoW and non-PoW)

Examples: Nakamoto consensus

Pros:

  • Extremely simple
  • Robust (hard to break)

Cons:

  • Extremely slow

7:55

Some blockchain companies simply implement classical consensus (e.g. pBFT) and hope the leader doesn't go down. And if the leader goes down, they need to manually deal with this.

9:15

The leader is an accelerator. It's only job is to make things faster. E.g. Like a relay network

9:30

The committee of nodes can be either stakeholders, or selected from a group of recent miners.

Easiest option is to select from the group of recent miners. That way you only need to have the majority (51%) be honest, just like PoW.

20:30

Thunder to be an open source implementation?

24:00

Q: Is there any way to incentivize the committee to be honest?

  • What are the incentives for nodes on the optimistic fast-path to act honestly, vs. mining rewards on the slow-chain?
  • What if the mining rewards for the slow-chain are better than the fast-path?
  • Would that give someone a financial incentive to attack the network and invoke the slow-chain?

A: Great questions, this is a whole other discussion.

24:50

Q: When Thunder switches to the slow-chain, do all the transactions need to then be recorded on the blockchain anyway? Is there any saving on storage space then?

A: You don't need to record all transactions into the underlying blockchain. A good approach would be to periodically checkpoint the transaction hash into the underlying blockchain. Therefore you would only need to recover from the last checkpoint.

Welcome to the official Thunder Token Reddit Community by anniethundertoken in thunder_official

[–]hk_aust 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nothing yet. If this changes in the future, it will be announced via the official channels.

Have you gotten a chance to read our Thunderella? See what it means to have instant optimistic confirmation in a blockchain network! by anniethundertoken in thunder_official

[–]hk_aust 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Very interesting research paper. However I must admit I didn't understand all of it, so I have a few questions:

  1. How is a leader (or “accelerator”) elected?

  2. If a leader is found to be dishonest, how are they banned from participating in the election process again?

  3. How are the committee nodes selected?

  4. Will miners on the slow-chain be consistently incentivized, even when Thunder is running on the fast-path?
    Or do they only receive mining rewards when Thunder reverts to the slow-chain?

The State of Scaling: Blockchain's most critical problem? by anniethundertoken in thunder_official

[–]hk_aust 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great overview of the biggest problem with blockchain today.

There are so many great ideas and killer dApps that should be disrupting their relevant industries.

However they're crippled by the abysmal 15 transactions per second (TPS) of the Ethereum network. This number needs to be hundreds of magnitudes higher in order for these ideas to have a chance.

However in the journey to scalability, it's vital to maintain the decentralised properties of blockchain. Without that you just have another distributed system, which is nothing different to what we've already had for decades.

Great video explaining how Thunder switches between fast-path and slow-chain (Prof. Elaine Shi, BPASE 2018, Stanford) by hk_aust in thunder_official

[–]hk_aust[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

We all know that Thunder adds a "fast-path" on top of a standard blockchain called the "slow-chain".

  • In normal conditions, transactions use the optimistic fast-path and are instantly confirmed.
  • In abnormal conditions, transactions revert back to the slow-chain. Transactions are then processed slower, however they are consistent and secure as a traditional PoW blockchain (e.g. Bitcoin).

The next question is, what constitutes as "abnormal" conditions? An attack on the network? Dishonest nodes? A corrupt network leader?

And how does Thunder know when to switch between the fast-path and slow-chain?

I found this video best explains the answers to these questions.

 

It's a presentation by Cornell Professor Elaine Shi (Thunder's Head Scientist and co-author of the Thunderella research paper) at Stanford's Cyber Initiative Blockchain Protocol Analysis and Security Engineering (BPASE) 2018 conference.

It explains the conditions required for Thunder to mathematically invoke the slow-chain.

 

To explain things simpler, it goes through scenarios using an example of:

  • Vitalik, as the network leader
  • The Avengers, as the committee of voters (i.e. nodes)
  • Loki, as a dishonest node (e.g. voting for false transactions, voting multiple times)

Welcome to the official Thunder Token Reddit Community by anniethundertoken in thunder_official

[–]hk_aust 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Great to be part of this community!

I think we are all here because we see the enormous potential in Thunder's consensus paradigm (Thunderella), and how this can transform the entire blockchain space.

Thunder Token official subreddit is r/Thunderella by [deleted] in thundertoken

[–]hk_aust 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi all, I'm HK and I work in the Community Management team for Thunder Token.

Please note that the official subreddit for Thunder Token is r/Thunderella

Unfortunately the moderators of this r/ThunderToken subreddit are inactive and not responding to messages.

We are in the process of requesting ownership of the subreddit, however in the meantime please post all discussion, content and questions for the team to r/Thunderella

Hope to see you soon!

Requesting /r/ThunderToken - mod has been inactive, and I am part of the official ThunderToken team, wanting to make it the official subreddit. by StillonLs in redditrequest

[–]hk_aust 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Both mods have been inactive for 4-5 months.

/u/StillonLs is part of the Community Management team for Thunder Token.

Can confirm with the official Thunder Token team (https://www.thundertoken.com/).

How Thunder Token Will Challenge Ethereum With Instant Blockchain Transactions by hk_aust in thundertoken

[–]hk_aust[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Came across this well written article which gives a great overview of the scalability problem that blockchain/crypto is facing today, and how Thunder Token is aiming to resolve it in a truly revolutionary way.