L9 - Tezos Basics Flashcards
motivation of Tezos
Overcoming the overarching problems of the first generation blockchains like Bitcoin.
By design, Tezos embraces long-term upgradability, open participation, collaboration, and smart contract safety.
Three main solutions Tezos offers
- On-chain governance
- Verifiable smart contract
- self-amendment process
What is Tezos’ Sybil control mechanism?
Liquid Proof-of-Stake (LPoS)
What are the benefits of LPoS?
- low up-front investment required
- participation through delegation
How are the validators called in Tezos?
bakers. There is one block proposer baker and there are a proportion of bakers that are also selected as validators at each block
baking
act of signing and publishing blocks to Tezos.
min tez for baker?
6000
How is a baker selected?
Randomly selected to propose new block proportionally to their stake.
What happens in case of misbehaviour of a baker?
Their stakes get slashed.
What do participants of the network do that don’t want to become bakers?
Delegate their coins to bakers. In return they delegators get shares of the bakers’ earned revenue.
Are consensus protocols the same as Sybil control mechanisms?
No. Sybil control mechanism protect the consensus protocol.
What does the consensus protocol deal with?
With reaching an agreement regarding the common version of the truth.
How can nodes in the network determine the right chain?
Consensus protocols
Main two types of consensus protocols
- Nakamoto Consensus: picks the longest, heaviest chain e.g. Bitcoin (50% validation is sufficient)
- -> liveness first as the network never stops operating
- Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) Consensus: picks the block which has more than 2/3 of the validators signatures
- -> deterministic finality
- > safety first as the network only operates when there is full synchrony between the nodes
How is the consensus protocol called in Tezos?
Tenderbake
What type of consensus does Tenderbake have?
BFT-style with deterministic finality. Finality is reached after two blocks (1 min)
What does Tenderbake ensure?
No parallel block production that can eventually revert transactions.
What happens in an asynchronous period?
When the bakers cannot sync their action, the network degrades until the issue is fixed
What does Michelson do?
Michelson is a functional language to execute formal verifications on smart contracts. Utilizes mathematical proofs. The certified compiler helps to compare the human-readable version of a smart contract with the deployed version.
Three properties of Michelson
- statically typed stack language (no variables, but high-level primitives such as maps, sets)
- efficient calculation of gas costs and fast contract execution
- readability through the expressive representation of a smart contract on the blockchain.
Two most popular smart contract development languages in Tezos?
LIGO and SmartPy.
What happens when a contract written in LIGO is compiled?
Then we have a Michelson file. The certified compiler can be used by third parties who want to ensure that compiled versions of the high-level code match the low-level code deployed on the blockchain.
Where does the governance process take place in Ethereum
off-chain (changes are then achieved through forks)
What are the issues of forks?
- issues regarding coordination in a decentralized ecosystem and favoring decisions based on herd behavior (loud minortiy)
