Early and OftenSynaptic Health Alliance
Why the Alliance: The Synaptic Health Alliance is a unique collaboration between industry-leading companies with various roles between vendor/client, provider/network, and competitors within the healthcare ecosystem. The alliance is committed to build a framework to solve widespread data management issues within the healthcare ecosystem through the use of blockchain technology. The Problem The Synaptic Health Alliance was formed by Humana, MultiPlan, Optum, Quest Diagnostics, and United Healt...
Early and OftenEarly and Often: The Daily 56/ Taxes
SubscribeOne thing I learned today: Why is filing taxes so complicated? It’s hard not to think about how blockchain could not solve this aged problem. Using a DLT system you could easily track every single transaction and tax in real time. For example, on February 1 when you file your taxes, every single transaction and investment that you made would be on the public ledger. Therefore, all you would have to do is press “File” and the software would extract all your pay slips to create your w-...
Early and OftenEarly and Often: The Daily 61/ PartyRoom
One thing I learned today: PartyRoom is a way for users in web3 to create a monetized group chat. It’s built on base and it launched about 5 hours ago. It’s actually pretty cool because the more members that join the more expensive it is for the next mint. Also, it operates like a DAO where proposals can be made on NFTs or trades for the group wallet. Will be interesting to see how it goes. This is not financial advice. This is just a review of an app on the Base blockchain. Any readers shoul...
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Early and OftenSynaptic Health Alliance
Why the Alliance: The Synaptic Health Alliance is a unique collaboration between industry-leading companies with various roles between vendor/client, provider/network, and competitors within the healthcare ecosystem. The alliance is committed to build a framework to solve widespread data management issues within the healthcare ecosystem through the use of blockchain technology. The Problem The Synaptic Health Alliance was formed by Humana, MultiPlan, Optum, Quest Diagnostics, and United Healt...
Early and OftenEarly and Often: The Daily 56/ Taxes
SubscribeOne thing I learned today: Why is filing taxes so complicated? It’s hard not to think about how blockchain could not solve this aged problem. Using a DLT system you could easily track every single transaction and tax in real time. For example, on February 1 when you file your taxes, every single transaction and investment that you made would be on the public ledger. Therefore, all you would have to do is press “File” and the software would extract all your pay slips to create your w-...
Early and OftenEarly and Often: The Daily 61/ PartyRoom
One thing I learned today: PartyRoom is a way for users in web3 to create a monetized group chat. It’s built on base and it launched about 5 hours ago. It’s actually pretty cool because the more members that join the more expensive it is for the next mint. Also, it operates like a DAO where proposals can be made on NFTs or trades for the group wallet. Will be interesting to see how it goes. This is not financial advice. This is just a review of an app on the Base blockchain. Any readers shoul...
Share Dialog
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One Thing I learned today:
Single-Slot Finality:
The process of blocks being proposed and finalized within the same slot
What is Finality?
Today I’m going to focus on the problem of block finality on the Ethereum blockchain network. Block finality is the time it takes for 2/3 of validators to “attest” the block and for other validators to process that the block has been “attested” by 2/3 of the validators.
Finality is important because it ensures that a block cannot be altered after reaching finality status without compromising at least 33% of the total staked ETH. As of today that would ~$28.67 Billion. Soooo, yeah. Finality is an extremely important component of ETH’s consensus mechanism and security.
Basic ETH Consensus Mechanism Background:
32 ETH stake minimum to be a validator: Why? To promote decentralization by having a significant “skin-in-the-game” cost to be a validator. ~$90k today to be a validator. If the cost was lower then entities could have multiple validator operations running and further centralize the network.
15 minutes to reach block finality:* *Why? Gives time for validators running on home computers to process the attestations. Again, this promotes decentralization by allowing a normal person like myself to be a validator. If it took too much computational power to be a validator then only entities with large operations would be able to do it.
Problem of Finality being 15 Minutes:
Users want the 15 minutes to finality to be reduced to be instantaneous. Why? It would allow applications to process transactions at a higher speed and enable more throughput on the network.
However, under the current consensus mechanism a few sacrifices would have to be made to reduce the finality time.
Reduce the number of validators on the network (creates more centralization by increasing minimum ETH staked)
Increase the hardware requirements to have higher computational power methods (creates more centralization as it becomes more expensive for the average Joe to be a validator)
How to get to SSF?
BLS (Boneh-Lynn-Schacham) signature scheme is the process of aggregating multiple signatures and proving those signature with one. This signing scheme is a lot more advanced than what was determined before. Yet, this scheme could be used to verify the signatures of millions of nodes to attest for a block to be finalized.
Also, as computers advance in computational speed, this process will become more efficient.
Super committees could also be made of validators that could attest blocks and make the process quicker. However, this would sacrifice centralization, so more research is needed to enable such a process to ensure the decentralization and security of the ETH network.
Conclusion:
There are a lot of current issues that would need to be resolved before implementing Single-Slot-Finality and lowering the finality time in general. With the growing number of validators it creates complexity of aggregation layers even with sing BLS. Right now, we could merge or limit validators but that would sacrifice decentralization.
Single-Slot finality is still in research phase. Here is Vitalik’s notes on Single-Slot-Finality if you’d like to read more.
Affirmations:
I will run the 2024 NYC Marathon under 4:00:00 while exceeding my fundraising goal
I will grow my blog by 10% every month using web3 tools
Gratitude:
Grateful I get to research this stuff. It is really hard to understand but by writing these articles I’ve increased my knowledge of Ethereum substantially.
Morning Miracle:
Read: yes
Meditate: yes
Workout: Yes (run and walk)
Make my bed: yes
Affirmations: yes
Gratitude: yes
One Thing I learned today:
Single-Slot Finality:
The process of blocks being proposed and finalized within the same slot
What is Finality?
Today I’m going to focus on the problem of block finality on the Ethereum blockchain network. Block finality is the time it takes for 2/3 of validators to “attest” the block and for other validators to process that the block has been “attested” by 2/3 of the validators.
Finality is important because it ensures that a block cannot be altered after reaching finality status without compromising at least 33% of the total staked ETH. As of today that would ~$28.67 Billion. Soooo, yeah. Finality is an extremely important component of ETH’s consensus mechanism and security.
Basic ETH Consensus Mechanism Background:
32 ETH stake minimum to be a validator: Why? To promote decentralization by having a significant “skin-in-the-game” cost to be a validator. ~$90k today to be a validator. If the cost was lower then entities could have multiple validator operations running and further centralize the network.
15 minutes to reach block finality:* *Why? Gives time for validators running on home computers to process the attestations. Again, this promotes decentralization by allowing a normal person like myself to be a validator. If it took too much computational power to be a validator then only entities with large operations would be able to do it.
Problem of Finality being 15 Minutes:
Users want the 15 minutes to finality to be reduced to be instantaneous. Why? It would allow applications to process transactions at a higher speed and enable more throughput on the network.
However, under the current consensus mechanism a few sacrifices would have to be made to reduce the finality time.
Reduce the number of validators on the network (creates more centralization by increasing minimum ETH staked)
Increase the hardware requirements to have higher computational power methods (creates more centralization as it becomes more expensive for the average Joe to be a validator)
How to get to SSF?
BLS (Boneh-Lynn-Schacham) signature scheme is the process of aggregating multiple signatures and proving those signature with one. This signing scheme is a lot more advanced than what was determined before. Yet, this scheme could be used to verify the signatures of millions of nodes to attest for a block to be finalized.
Also, as computers advance in computational speed, this process will become more efficient.
Super committees could also be made of validators that could attest blocks and make the process quicker. However, this would sacrifice centralization, so more research is needed to enable such a process to ensure the decentralization and security of the ETH network.
Conclusion:
There are a lot of current issues that would need to be resolved before implementing Single-Slot-Finality and lowering the finality time in general. With the growing number of validators it creates complexity of aggregation layers even with sing BLS. Right now, we could merge or limit validators but that would sacrifice decentralization.
Single-Slot finality is still in research phase. Here is Vitalik’s notes on Single-Slot-Finality if you’d like to read more.
Affirmations:
I will run the 2024 NYC Marathon under 4:00:00 while exceeding my fundraising goal
I will grow my blog by 10% every month using web3 tools
Gratitude:
Grateful I get to research this stuff. It is really hard to understand but by writing these articles I’ve increased my knowledge of Ethereum substantially.
Morning Miracle:
Read: yes
Meditate: yes
Workout: Yes (run and walk)
Make my bed: yes
Affirmations: yes
Gratitude: yes
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