Solana

Not the BSV article I was going to post a week or so back (gotten lazy and haven’t finished it off). This is just a link to someone else’s work.

A couple weeks back I wrote ‘UTXO and Other Blockchains‘ and mainly expanded on the difference between UTXO and ‘State’ based blockchains, and touched on a couple more.

Basically all the blockchains in the world are either clones or forks of BitCoin, clones or forks of Ethereum or clones and forks of Monaro… or so I thought. One chain that I mentioned in the UTXO post was Solana, which among a few other observations I had this to say:

“There was lots of excitement about Solana just prior to the May crypto catastrophe, that prompted me to take a quick look at it. Firstly it is a ‘gossip database’ which although more effective than a simple state based machine like ETH, still requires centralised processors (that they refer to as towers) in order to maintain the network – which like most of these ponzi tokens is a simple POS model, meaning they are a security under the Howey Test.”

– Lord Stewie, smitter of W@ffle

Anyhow, I came across ‘Zeme Gaoson’s’ blog post which illuminated a few aspects of Solana that had previously been a bit hazy. It shone enough light on the coin that I thought it worth sharing for those interested in types of crypto.

Basically the TLDR observations of the article are:

1. Despite its claim of being ‘Proof of History’ PoH, Solana is really PoS, due to the fact that a ‘Leader’ must be elected (these are the ‘towers’ I mentioned, I think I erroneously used Cardano’s terminology) in order to provide the grounding hash for each PoH sequence that forms the basis of its blockchain . Basically election of a ‘leader’ = PoS
   
2. Solana does not use UTXO however it can still scale massively compared to ETH. Although it avoids the global account problem of Ethereum, it manages data using an account-based model, which is both advantageous and limiting. The benefit of ‘Proof of History’ is similar to UTXO in that it allows massive parallelization and therefore scaling, but this comes at a cost of difficulty in achieving a global state.

As I mentioned Solana is basically a gossip database, it ‘blockchains’ this database by introducing a chain called ‘proof of history’ which allows parallelization, like UTXO, however, unlike UTXO a Global State is NEVER achieved:

“The fact that Solana does not use UTXO has vastly important implications. First, it means that parallelization is not at the fundamental ‘asset’ level, but rather at a higher ‘transaction’ level. As a result, there is no intrinsic baseline truth in Solana as there is with Bitcoin blockchain. At a specific point of time…”

– Zeme Gaoson

This has significant implications for the ability to execute smart contracts, as well as the inter-operability of different sectors of the Solana network, without expending significant effort on synchronizing the network, something that appears to have been behind the destablising crashed I noted previously in the UTXO story.

Anyhow if this is something that interests you enough to read beyond my TLDR summary (which in itself was probably TLDR), then without further delay here is the link