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.
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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
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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
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Block limits
- Ethereum has a maximum possible block limit of 20 million gas
- On RSK, it is 6.8 million gas.
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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)
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Types of resources used in the blockchain
- Computing resource
- Network resource
- Storage resource
- The main resource problem is the storage resource
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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
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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)
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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
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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
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Bane of Ethereum - Merkel Patricia trie
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TPS for different drives
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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