Page Comparison

Breakout Session Topics

Day 1 : Location

3 -

Block formats, types and messaging (Greg, Chris, Griff

, Vlad,

Michael,

Dan,

Navneet)

• What hashes are there, and what do they look like?

• What data is common to all blocks?

  • Are there types of blocks, if so, how many types, and what is the specification of each type?

• What is the size of a block? Can block sizes vary?

• Are there "light blocks" constructable for "light clients".

•  Chris Kirkwood-Watts: Document messaging & communications requirements
•  Griff McClellan (Unlicensed): Document storage requirements
•  Michael Birch (Unlicensed): Document Consensus requirements → see Political Capital + Casper

Day 1: Location 2: Compiler Design & Economics (Mike, Kent, Eitan, Timm, Joe, Kyle)

• Limiting the resources that a contract can consume at compile time - how will we achive this if not via static analysis?
• If we choose to implement static analysis, what can we commit to delivering?  What is the MVP?
• Do we need Tuplespace (delimited continuations and Radix Tree/ Trie data structure) for Mercury?
• What powers the Rev wallet contract?  Does Rev have to pay for itself?

Day 1: Location 4 - Namespaces (Greg, Kent, Joe, Ian, Nash, Dan, Kyle)

• 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?

•  Michael Stay (Unlicensed): Create a document about Namespaces that captures our current understanding, what they will look like, open questions and problems that still need to be figured out.
  •  2017-11-29 Namespace Discussion notes

Day 2 Location 2: Rholang Lab (Greg, Timm, Ian, Navneet, Eitan, Kyle)

• TBD

Day 2: Location 3: CASPER (Vlad, Mike, Chris, Joe, Michael, Dan, Kent, Griff)

• 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?

•  Michael Birch (Unlicensed) - Please look at the above questions and address as part of your documentation and work.
  •  Political Capital + Casper

Day 2 Location 4: Business Requirements (Ed, Lawrence, Nash, Medha, Rolland)

• 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)
• What is not part of Mercury?
• What of Ethereum's road map? Do we address any of the items in Mercury?

•  Medha Parlikar (Unlicensed): Work with folks to gain clarity and document.

Day 3: Location 2: Marketing Strategy (Ed, Lawrence, Nash, Medha, Rolland, Ian)

• How will we reach our target Market?
• What is the message?
• What are we doing to create buzz?
• What is the value prop?

Action Items:

•  Lawrence & Navneet: Provide a list of conferences that are targeted, dates and expected outcome
•  Lawrence: Timeline for blog posts that are needed from Development
•  Medha Parlikar (Unlicensed): Publish this information to the wiki

Day 3: Location 3 -

Blockchain, Consensus, Cryptography and Networking (Chris, Griff, Mike, Vlad,

Timm,

Eitan,

Michael)

• 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?
• Cryptography:
  • Identification of nodes by public key (or hash of public key (or hash of hash of . . .))
  • Exchange of keys at handshake time
  • Signing of messages

•  Timm Schäuble: Capture requirements for Crypto op code(s) for VM (work with Kyle)
•  Kyle Butt: Specify the Crypto that RChain will use. 

Day 3: Location 4 - Verticals, Industries and Applications (Medha, Lawrence, Ed, Rolland, Navneet)

• Which industries are expressing interest & we should target?
• What are the use cases that are the most compelling for these industries?
• Which markets are we going to go after in these industries (Enterprise, mid-market, SMB, VSB)
• What is the TAM (Total Addressable Market) 
• What is the story we can tell if these industries solve the use cases with blockchain?
• What are the applications do we see evolving as a result

•  Medha Parlikar (Unlicensed): work with Lawrence, Ed and Rolland to document.

Day 4: Location 2: Rholang Lab (Greg, Chris, Griff, Michael, Dan, Vlad) 

• TBD

Day 4: Location 3: Documentation (Timm, Mike, Joe, Kent, Navneet, Eitan, Kyle)

• Who will need documentation
• What portions of the system need documentation
• Who will complete the documentation, what is the timeline.

Action Items:

•  Michael Stay (Unlicensed): Compile the list of documents
•  Medha Parlikar (Unlicensed): Assign out documentation tasks & create timeline

Day 4: Location 4: Release Management and Open Source Software Relations (Nash, Ian, Rolland, Medha)

• Communicating releases to the Open Source Software Community

Action items:

•  Daniel Grachanin (Unlicensed): Design developer.rchain.coop site, including content.
•  Medha Parlikar (Unlicensed): finalize getting started page & provide to Dan (done in Github in Contributing.MD)