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)
What can happen with a hard fork?
Replay attacks can occur
How are changes decided on with on-chain governance?
Decided based on votes of the stakeholders (token holders)
- changes can automatically be activated by all nodes in the network
- proposals can be evaluated based on merit rather than herd behavior.
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)
How long does one amendment cycle take?
1 month and 5 days
What are the five periods in the amendment process?
- Proposal period
- Exploration vote period
- Cooldown period
- Promotion vote period
- Adoption period
What is the amendment process?
On-chain governance is implemented in an amendment process
What happens in the exploration period?
- bakers vote on the most voted proposal from the proposal period
- they can vote “YAY”, “Nay”, or “Pass”
- if more than 80% of the bakers vote “yay” and a dynamically determined quorum is met, then the proposal continues to the cooldown period. If not then the amendment process reverts to the beginning
How long does one amendment cycle take?
1 month and 5 days
What are the five periods in the amendment process?
- Proposal period
- Exploration vote period
- Cooldown period
- Promotion vote period
- Adoption period
What happens in the proposal period?
- bakers submit proposals that contain the hash of the source code of an amendment and vote proportional to their stake
- each baker can submit 20
- -> most voted on proposal continues to the exploration period.
What is the quorum?
Qt+1 = quorum required in prev voting period0.8 + participation in prev voting period.2
Qt+1 = .8 * Qt + .2* qt
Qt = quorum in t qt = actual participation in t
Cooldown period
the community analyzes and discusses finer points of the proposal and developers perform additional tests
Did Tezos always have BFT consensus?
No, before they had Nakamoto consensus
Adoption period
buffer for bakers and developers to adopt new protocol version
How many amendments where there in Tezos?
9
Did Tezos always have BFT consensus?
No, before they had Nakamoto consensus
Name improvement proposal standard in Tezos?
TZIP
- toke agnostic
use cases of tezos
- DeFi
- NFTs
- DAO
- SSI
Drawbacks of Tezos
- fierce competition with other smart-contract enabled platforms
- no widespread commercial adoption
