Pre-Dev-Update Thread! Yay! :D

[upstate]

Yesterday I saw a tweet from Maidsafe stating something about tomorrow, but now I can’t find that tweet and it’s got me wondering if it was made in error.

Or I’m just missing the tweet.

[anon40006692]

The news are not that relevant its only a cooperation with google joke

[Nigel]

This one? https://twitter.com/maidsafe/status/998583532527202305?s=21

[anon40006692]

Why? What’s going on here today ? What news you are all talking about?

@Nigel Link is not working or is that intended?

[upstate]

So strange I can’t see that one.

[Dimitar]

[s3r610]

Where is the duck or goose tweet?? cant find it

[Josh]

@upstate

So strange I can’t see that one.

The Twitter scammers had a bunch of ETH giveaway tweets attached to it masquerading as MAIDSAFE.

I suspect it has something to do with the missing parts.

Scrap that… I still see it.

[upstate]

That would be the one!

[John]

blockchainers are a wee bit like the pointer sisters …
because only pointers to data (rather than the data itself)
can realistically be stored in a blockchain.

[Nigel]

Weird! It works for me but I can’t see the full thread. Sorry guys.

[upstate]

We don’t need to bother the folks working. We just have to all sit here and be good little SAFE Network stalkers.

[anon40790172]

Routing in the dev updates over the last few weeks. Read from top to bottom for chronological order.

@maidsafe

Routing & Crust

We are continuing with the work of figuring out an approach to deduce a consensus order of observed network events from a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) which was composed from the gossiped messages. We do have a solution that is not available as open source right now and we cannot use that exact algorithm. We have some test code in a private repository that we have working and will progress this to an open solution. We just published a blog post regarding this, you can read it here . So on to the good parts, this ordering consensus algorithm for intra section membership changes is nice and modular as well as mathematically proven. This means less code, less testnets (many testnets were to find all the rules regarding order, which have grown in complexity (although works)). We cannot say this is definitely the last unknown as we have not detailed network restarts after complete collapse or network managed upgrades amongst others, however this is a large step and one that allows us to much more clearly see the remainder of the features for a full-featured network, or in other words Beta. Much of the work (and there is an awful lot) is currently hidden here, but will be exposed very soon. We ask for a little patience with us in Routing for the next few days and possibly weeks. If this pans out then it will be very much worth it and you may find us able, at last, to give reasonable estimates of remaining development work. This does not mean detailed roadmap with timelines, but we will have a very clear route and make it clear which tests we wish to do, most of which will be in client APIs, language bindings and platforms.

and…

@maidsafe

The Routing team is currently split into 2 teams looking deeper at consensus ordering. One team is looking at an improvement to an algorithm we have for that and the other is integrating an ordering algorithm in Routing itself. This work is looking at node added/lost, section split, merge, chain management and purging as well as secure message transfer (inter section messaging). The teams are pretty motivated and seem to be enjoying the certainty of the results as well as the reduction in conditional statements and timers in the Routing codebase.

It is really comforting to see the simplification and easier to understand algorithms in Routing. For too long that crate has been too complex, proving difficult to get Engineers familiar with it all. This is quickly reducing a huge barrier to entry and that is great for us as MaidSafe but amazing for the project itself as we hope these advances will allow many more than MaidSafe Engineers to work on the core and this is important to us all.

and…

@maidsafe

Routing & Crust

The Routing team continues to be split in parallel tracks with one of the teams working to improve the vote ordering algorithm and the other focussed on integration of this into the Routing codebase. We mentioned recently that we expected it would be difficult to provide very detailed updates in the very short term as we work out the finer details and that has proven to be the case. We anticipate that over the course of the next few weeks we should be able to be much clearer about remaining development work once we have a clear path forward and we will make our next Routing update at that point.

And…

@maidsafe

The Routing team is currently following two parallel promising leads to solve the issue of eventual consistency in the network in a robust way, this is in addition to our existing approach which is being integrated into Routing by one of the teams. This is exciting as more and more timers are being replaced as the algorithms in Routing become much more asynchronous and natural. We are hoping that we can remove swathes of complex code very soon and that will be a great step and one that reduces the requirement for so many testnets as we previously mentioned.

And…

@maidsafe

Following up from last week’s dev update, the Routing team is still working on tackling Eventual Consistency.

And…

@maidsafe

It’s been a huge week here in Routing. It’s one of those weeks that stands out in the history of the development of the project and one that will go down as being a key milestone by the time we reach Beta.

These ones are the most interesting IMO:

This work is looking at node added/lost, section split, merge, chain management and purging as well as secure message transfer (inter section messaging).

So on to the good parts, this ordering consensus algorithm for intra section membership changes is nice and modular as well as mathematically proven. This means less code, less testnets (many testnets were to find all the rules regarding order, which have grown in complexity (although works)).

But we’ll see on Thursday. It is great news though, and if you read the last few quoted lines you probably understand why this news is bigger than Alpha 3.

[draw]

Another interesting part of the dev updates:

@maidsafe

TRIVIAL

In a comment on last week’s dev update, @Antifragile linked a recent paper: “Byzantine Agreement, Made Trivial” from Silvio Micali, one of the authors of Algorand.
This paper describes a way to obtain Synchronous Binary Byzantine agreement without the need for a Common Coin. They replace it with a “Concrete Coin” which is a function that will behave like a Common Coin probabilistically often (~ 2/3 of the times).
They then split the decision process into rounds composed of three steps so that imperfect Concrete Coin is enough for reaching binary consensus.

The paper in itself presents, as advertised a rather trivial algorithm; partly because creating a Concrete Coin in a synchronous setting is indeed very easy, and partly because the three steps algorithm needed to converge with a weaker coin is also quite straightforward in a synchronous setting where we can simply wait to hear every node’s voice at each step.

For our asynchronous usecase, it is slightly less trivial, but we think it is possible and actually less difficult than getting a fully asynchronous Distributed Key Generation scheme to work for our decentralized use case. On a side note, we would like to thank @mav for his contributions to the DKG discussions.

We have spent some of the last few days devising an asynchronous Concrete Coin that we call: “gradient leadership based Concrete Coin”. We think that it exhibits all the properties needed for a Concrete Coin, but we removed all the synchrony assumptions from the process of obtaining it. We are in the process of formulating our suggestion precisely in our RFC, with associated mathematical proofs.

We are now tackling the second main challenge of mapping the ideas from “Byzantine Agreement, Made Trivial” to asynchronous consensus: integrating the Concrete Coin in the main protocol in place of a Common Coin.
We only started focusing our energy on this recently but are already seeing some promising leads.

While all this progress is being made on the algorithmic front, we are also continuing with our efforts of producing an RFC to explain the complete idea as clearly as possible, along with visual illustrations that should help convey our points more easily.

If and when we find a fully proven solution for the second challenge explained above, we will focus all our efforts into finalising the wording for the RFC and share it with the community.

We refer to this new adaptation of BOA as: Total Record of Incidents Via Interconnected Agreement Lattice (TRIVIAL) as an acknowledgement to the paper: “Byzantine Agreement, Made Trivial” that gave us the idea of trying to solve the problem without the need for a Common Coin.

[sam1]

https://twitter.com/maidsafe/status/999214049027153920

[Zoki]

The consensus mechanism the world deserves… put that tweet, others like it and some recent snapshots and videos of privacy issues in the news, face book etc… to the dark night theme tune and you will have a winning promo.

Anyone got the media skills?

Is it asking too much to have it ready by Thursday?

#realHerosDontNeedCapes

[Josh]

Blockchain markets tumble…

As the SafeNetwork announces that they are on the home straight!!
People found celebrating accross the globe.

!

#OurTimeIsNow

[neo]

Hey guys & gals its thursday here and I am about to go off to sleep. I still have to wait 30 hours to see the news.

I am going to be the killjoy here and say Please don’t go into over expectation and be prepared for any announcement to not meet your expectations. By the sounds of it, it is BIG, so I am suggesting caution in your expectations.

Heres to the big announcement

[sam1]

Can somebody explain asynchronous consensus and why it matters? I find it hard to wrap my head around it

[dirvine]

Agreement of several nodes/computers who are all sending and receiving messages at wildly different times. Async means there is no stopping to agree one thing at a time, everyone keeps messaging/voting at their fastest speed. Consensus/agreement will happen when the slowest of the required nodes vote.

Plenty info coming on how and why over the next wee while.