Parachains & Environmental issues
Topic: Parachains & Environmental issues
Source: Polkadot etc.
MLA Citation:“
“Polkadot Launch: Parachain Rollout.” Polkadot Network, polkadot.network/launch-parachains/.
https://polkadot.network/launch-parachains/
https://wiki.polkadot.network/docs/learn-parachains
Analysis:
As blockchain-based companies started to gain attraction and popularity, the issue of scalability became more and more prominent. One of these main companies happened to be one of the most popular and the very first Blockchain-based companies - Bitcoin. Satoshi Natomoko, an unidentified person, was a genius who developed an idea/theory that would change the world. But one thing he had forgotten to consider was scalability. As more and more used Bitcoin, because every single node did every single activity - the increased number of people made the process of transferring and exchanging money slow. Additionally, prior to this many people had always criticized blockchain-based companies including bitcoin for negatively impacting the environment. Therefore, people were unhappy that they were impacting the environment so drastically, but they weren't getting the benefits of quick transfers. In this evidence of learning I will be explaining the parachain and the viewpoints environmentalists have on the bitcoin and blockchain-based companies.
To start, in order to keep the the blockchain system running many people have use the system ( explained in EOL #5). Additionally, the more people that join the system the more people who are needed to join the mining process. Unfortunately because running the software and making profits off of mining take a lot of computing power. Many big companies such as Riot Blockchain Inc, set up huge Bitcoin Mining farms, where thousands of Megawatts of energy everyday. Therefore many environmentalists like Tesla, Elon Musk have decided to not support Blockchain and Bitcoin. ALthough Ideas of implementing renewable energy have been tested, it is still being worked on.
The second main issue with major blockchain companies such as Bitcoin is the problem with the lack of scalability. The original white paper for blockchain, written, had a system of consensus in that every single node had to do every single action and store all information. Although this does work, it's not very scalable because as soon as many people use the system and store information it makes the system extremely slow. A temporary solution to this problem is creating or having more miners, this works , however many environmentally conscious people are extremely unhappy with this idea. Because this means more non-renewable energy is being used at high speeds.
Like how our 26th president Theodoer Rosevelt built and preserved national parks, making both parties the conservatives and environmentalists happy. Similarly the Parachains from Polkadot and Solanas chainlink( will go over in a later EOL). Essentially parachain utilizes the idea of many parachain being connected to one main chain,the main one does the main actions as the transactions themselves and the parachains do the specific actions. This also saves energy because not as much electricity is needed to make the process happen. Making both parties happy. Although Parachain might not be the solution needed, I strongly believe this concept will revolutionize the way blockchain goes forward.
As of now I have looked into many companies in this sector including Parachain, Etherium 2.0, and Aavalunch.Next week I would like to adventure and look into what Solona is and how Chainlink works. I would like to learn more about how it differs from other companies and how it impacts the world. I love the way this technology works and can't wait till the next Evidence of learning.
Annotations
For information on how to participate in the crowdloan and parachain auction testing on Rococo, please see the Rococo Contenton the parachain development guide.
A parachain is an application-specific data structure that is globally coherent and validatable by the validators of the Relay Chain. They take their name from the concept of parallelized chains that run parallel to the Relay Chain. Most commonly, a parachain will take the form of a blockchain, but there is no specific need for them to be actual blockchains.
One parachain
Due to their parallel nature, they are able to parallelize transaction processing and achieve scalability of the Polkadot system. They share in the security of the entire network and can communicate with other parachains through the XCM format.
Parachains are maintained by a network maintainer known as a collator. The role of the collator node is to maintain a full node of the parachain, retain all necessary information of the parachain, and produce new block candidates to pass to the Relay Chain validators for verification and inclusion in the shared state of Polkadot . The incentivization of a collator node is an implementation detail of the parachain. // exp;ainiation on how it worksThey are not required to be staked on the Relay Chain or own the native token unless stipulated by the parachain implementation.
The Polkadot Host (PH) requires that the state transitions performed on parachains be specified as a Wasm executable. Proofs of new state transitions that occur on a parachain must be validated against the registered state transition function (STF) that is stored on the Relay Chain by the validators before Polkadot acknowledges a state transition has occurred on a parachain.// system of the proofing is very different The key constraint regarding the logic of a parachain is that it must be verifiable by the Relay Chain validators. Verification most commonly takes the form of a bundled proof of a state transition known as a Proof-of-Verification (PoV) block, which is submitted to the validators from one or more of the parachain collators to be checked.
Parachain Economies
Parachains may have their own economies with their own native tokens. Schemes such as Proof-of-Stake are usually used to select the validator set to handle validation and finalization; //parachains will not be required to do either of those things. However, since Polkadot is not overly particular about what the parachain can implement, it may be the choice of the parachain to implement a staking token, but it's not generally necessary.
Collators may be incentivized through inflation of a native parachain token. There may be other ways to incentivize the collator nodes that do not involve inflating the native parachain token.
Transaction fees in a native parachain token can also be an implementation choice of parachains. Polkadot makes no hard and fast rules for how the parachains decide on original validity of transactions. For example, a parachain may be implemented so that transactions must pay a minimum fee to collators to be valid. The Relay Chain will enforce this validity. Similarly, a parachain could not include that in their implementation, and Polkadot would still enforce its validity.
Parachains are not required to have their own token. If they do, is up to the parachain to make the economic case for their token, not Polkadot.
Parachain Hubs
While Polkadot enables crosschain functionality amongst the parachains, it necessitates that there is some latency between the dispatch of a message from one parachain until the destination parachain receives the message. In the optimistic scenario, the latency for this message should be at least two blocks - one block for the message to be dispatched and one block for the receiving parachain to process and produce a block that acts upon the message.// intresting However, in some cases, we may see that the latency for messages is higher if many messages are in queue to be processed or if no nodes are running both of the parachain networks that can quickly gossip the message across the networks.
Due to the necessary latency involved in sending crosschain messages, some parachains plan to become hubs for an entire industry. For example, a parachain project Acala is planning to become a hub for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. Many DeFi applications take advantage of a property known as composability which means that functions of one application can be synergistically composed with others to create new applications. One example of this includes flash loans, which borrow funds to execute some on-chain logic as long as the loan is repaid at the end of the transaction.// can be used in oregninal work
An issue with crosschain latency means that composability property weakens among parachains compared to a single blockchain. This implication is common to all sharded blockchain designs, including Polkadot, Eth2.0, and others. The solution to this is the introduction of parachain hubs, which maintain the stronger property of single block composability.
Parachain Slot Acquisition
Polkadot supports a limited number of parachains, currently estimated to be about 100. As the number of slots is limited, there are several ways to allocate them:
Governance granted parachains, or "common good" parachains
Auction granted parachains
Parathreads
"Common Good" parachains are allocated by Polkadot's on-chain governance system, and are deemed as a "common good" for the network, such as bridges to other networks or chains. They are usually considered system-level chains or public utility chains. These typically do not have an economic model and help remove transactions from the Relay Chain, allowing for more efficient parachain processing.
Auction granted parachains are granted in a permissionless auction. Parachain teams can either bid with their own DOT tokens, or source them from the community using the crowdloan functionality .
Parathreads have the same API as parachains, but are scheduled for execution on a pay-as-you-go basis with an auction for each block.
Slot Expiration
When a parachain wins an auction, the tokens that it bids get reserved until the lease's end. Reserved balances are non-transferrable and cannot be used for staking. At the end of the lease, the tokens are unreserved. Parachains that have not secured a new lease to extend their slot will automatically become parathreads.
Common Good Parachains
"Common Good" parachains are parachain slots reserved for functionality that benefits the the ecosystem as a whole. By allocating a subset of parachain slots to common good chains, the entire network can realize the benefit of valuable parachains that would otherwise be underfunded due to the free-rider problem. They are not allocated via the parachain auction process but by the on-chain governance system. Generally, a common good parachain's lease would not expire; it would only be removed via governance.
See the Polkadot blog article and the common good parachains page for more information.
Examples
Some examples of parachains:
Encrypted Consortium Chains: These are possibly private chains that do not leak any information to the public, but still can be interacted with trustlessly due to the nature of the XCMP protocol.
High-Frequency Chains: These are chains that can compute many transactions in a short amount of time by taking certain trade-offs or making optimizations.
Privacy Chains: These are chains that do not leak any information to the public through use of novel cryptography.
Smart Contract Chains: These are chains that can have additional logic implemented on them through the deployment of code known as smart contracts.
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