News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Web3 Is Not Decentralization. Parent comment

Re:Web3 Is Not Decentralization by rauljordan2020 on Thursday December 09, 2021 @12:13AM (#29494064)
Disclaimer: I work on Ethereum core development. One of the coolest things happening that will be available to everyone over the coming year is something called a light client, which is essentially a very light, validating node that tracks the head of the chain with certainty, and can be used as an alternative to services such as Unfura. In the future, Metamask will probably be a light client that actually tracks the head of the chain and can validate proofs of user account state. Source: https://github.com/ethereum/consensus-specs/blob/dev/specs/a...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Web3 Is Not Decentralization by littlestymaar on Thursday December 09, 2021 @02:27AM (#29494787)
> light client, which is essentially a very light, validating node that tracks the head of the chain with certainty

How does that work?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Web3 Is Not Decentralization by kamray23 on Thursday December 09, 2021 @03:47AM (#29495221)
Skip over verifying everything and only verify a subset of all things you care about. Use alternative root nodes you trust instead of verifying. Stuff like that. They have a spec: https://eth.wiki/concepts/light-client-protocol
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Web3 Is Not Decentralization by keymone on Thursday December 09, 2021 @01:21PM (#29500965)
It works by surrendering any pretense of eth being a decentralized cryptocurrency and turning every node into a glorified and bloated transport/identity layer.

If you’re not validating transactions - you’re trusting a third party. There are no light clients that avoid this problem. It remains to be seen if they are even possible.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Web3 Is Not Decentralization by rauljordan2020 on Sunday December 12, 2021 @08:56PM (#29535698)
Sorry it took me ages to clarify this. It's actually a pretty cool mechanism! What I mean by "tracking the head of the chain with certainty" means that you don't have any trust assumptions on the head block. If you track the latest head block, that means you can verify Merkle proofs of the chain state (as the state root is a field embedded in a block). This is neat because a light client, using low resource requirements, can tell verify a proof of some state data you present it.

The way it works is that there is a committee of validators in the consensus protocol that is required to sign the head of the chain. We use cryptography known as BLS signatures to perform signature aggregation, meaning you can verify a single signature to ensure that whole committee is correct. The state of the chain can be represented as a Merkle trie, and we can obtain the actual committee as a branch of this tree which can be used during the verification process.

https://medium.com/chainsafe-systems/lodestar-releases-light...

It's really neat and there are working prototypes out there today.

[ Parent | on HN ]