Goals
- Common understanding of Mercury and its requirements. Every one of us should be able to answer "what about... " questions with respect to Mercury if cornered.
- Identify major gaps in Documentation and make sure someone is assigned to resolve it.
- Do some coding together in Rholang. Write contracts.
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Day 1:Location 1 -Blockchain, Consensus and Networking (Chris, Griff, Mike, Vlad, Timm, Eitan)
- Support for transactions taking place between contracts in different namespaces
- How is the ledger maintained? reference: Blockmumble
- What are the canonical set of blocks that a validator has to download?
- CASPER - When do expect to have working code?
- What is the data structure.
- What are the networking requirements for the protocol?
- Is there a critical mass of validators that is required in order for a contract to be viable?
- Can a smart contract operate with a single validator?
- Do bounties need to be implemented in order to entice validators to come online?
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Day 1: Location 3 - Namespaces (Greg, Kent, Joe, Ian, Nash, Eitan)
- Lay out namespacing, How is the set of the namespaces going to be defined
- Who gets to say what a valid url is
- Is there a registry, what does it look like, when do we need to have it in place, how is it maintained
- Can we specify statically the form of name in a namespace, so we can check it at compile time
- How do we introduce new formats for names? urls are great but dont cover everything we might want
- How do we allow nodes to define their own grammar for names?
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- Are there special requirements for the wallet application for Mercury?
- Do we need MULTI-SIG support for Mercury
- Based on the industries and applications from Day 1 - define business requirements for the applications.
- Why do we want to integrate with BTC and ETH in time for Mercury (source: ECDSA Secp256k1 curve for BTC and ETH from WBS)
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- Addressing shell games that amount to finding consensus assuming you have already got consensus...
- Betting requires fungibility between forks. How do we solve this in POS Consensus - what is the asset external to the system to create consensus?
- If we define consensus inductively, there is a time window over which a network split absolutely cannot happen. There is no value for this time window that makes network splits not happen.
- What happens when a validator leaves for several months and then returns - how is trust re-established without opening the network to attack?
- How do we address the problem with the first induction window, in which you cannot possibly have bonded validators, and you must fall back to centralized selection.
- Will increasing the induction time to 7 days resolve the problem.
- Do we have a solution to the Prisoner's dilemma? reference:
- Transaction receipts (in lieu of every validator validating every shard that shares cross-shard state) create a Prisoner’s dilemma. It doesn’t matter if you model the self-referential consensus-by-betting with the Pi calculus, because such a process model does not model such economically driven externalities.
- How does one identify the list of validators at any given time? (It's not clear to it will work as described, may simply need clarification)
How do we address double spend?
For the Mercury release do we plan to have our staking token implemented "natively" - specifically, such that we can do the equivalent of msg.sender.send(amount) in Ethereum? Or are we just going to use the token.rho contract for our staking tokens too?
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