Notes from RSK Scientific Moments: Blockchain Engineering Economics and Resource Pricing

Hi Community!

Did you miss the interesting and informative technical session presented by Shreemoy Mishra, Senior Researcher at IOV Labs, during yesterday’s scientific moments titled: Blockchain Engineering Economics and Resource Pricing?

Here are a few points that I took notice of.

  • Reasons why the blockchain is processing fewer transactions per second, when compared to VISA and Mastercard.

    • Ethereum processes about 15 to 25 transactions per second
    • VISA and Mastercard processes tens of thousands per second
  • Transaction types and cost:

    • Cryptocurrency transfer transactions
    • Token transfer transactions
    • Smart contract interaction transactions
    • The gas that users are charged when doing transactions is really reflecting the underlying engineering and economic costs of operating the blockchain
  • Block limits

    • Ethereum has a maximum possible block limit of 20 million gas
    • On RSK, it is 6.8 million gas.
  • The relationship between the amount of gas paid for a transaction and the resources used is justified by the time.

    • Users pay about 2100 amount of gas for sending Ether or RBTC from one account to another
    • Sending ERC20 token costs about twice as much (40k gas)
  • Types of resources used in the blockchain

    • Computing resource
    • Network resource
    • Storage resource
    • The main resource problem is the storage resource
  • Steps that every node must go through:

    • Storing, verifying, and relaying transactions received to its peers on the network.
    • They use computation, network bandwidth, and storage resources for this.
    • Only miners (or shakers in PoS systems) are being paid for these costs, they earn rewards.
    • What is really proving challenging in the blockchain space for all network is storage
  • There are two kinds of storage requirements in the blockchain space

    • Storage of historical data - blocks and transactions. Stores history of pro transactions, so they can be verified
    • Blockchain state - balances, contract/dApp data (code)
  • Money is a different kind of memory

    • anything that we can do with money, can be replicated with memory
    • Money is a primitive form of memory
  • How the EVM stores state (balances, smart contract codes)

    • This state information in Ethereum and RSK is stored in a data structure called trie, where each node can have up to 16 child nodes.
    • RSK uses Binary trie, and not hexary-trie as in Ethereum
  • Bane of Ethereum - Merkel Patricia trie

  • TPS for different drives

  • Engineering Economics impactful solutions to the main resource (storage) problem facing the blockchain space

    • EVM opcode re-pricing
    • Storage Rent
    • Offload transactions to Layer 2 Rollups
    • IOV Labs is working on this areas for RSK

Here is a link to the presentation on Youtube.

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