SAFE Network Dev Update - January 30, 2020

[JoeSmithJr]

@maidsafe

CRDTs offer eventual consistency between replicas (Elders in our case) without the performance hit that comes with requiring that all nodes see data in the same order, e.g. via PARSEC consensus. However, most CRDTs do not enable us to enforce a rule such as balance >= 0 . To this end, we’ve started looking at the Bounded Counter , a little known type that does enable enforcing such rules, at the cost that each replica must serialise operations internally, e.g. by keeping a hash-chain of updates. Research is ongoing, but the approach seems to have promise.

I suggested a global counter a while ago that may be somewhat related:

Eventually consistent global counter ("SafeTime")

EDIT/NOTE Can we avoid mixing this idea with NTP and Real Time and other ways that require to connect the Safe Network to external sources? The very essence of this idea is to avoid that. UPDATE I ran a simulation with over a million nodes for this method. The summary is in the 18th post. UPDATE #2 Code for the simulation can be found here: SafeTime simulation - 6acd2429 I searched the forum about this topic and it seems Safe doesn’t know about time. However, it is trivial to add an event…

It was about a counter that’s maintained by each node:

• Its current value is sent in each network message.
• It’s incremented once almost all neighbors caught up.

I expect (though can’t prove) that these simple rules would result in a global point of reference whose value would be within a small margin across the entire network.

I’m not sure if this is really connected to the question at hand but I thought it may be useful to bring it up again in case it can help. It’s also simple enough to run some test on if somebody is interested.