Captain McAteer
@firn
i realized here people actually read what I write. just to explain what I'm working on: Firn is a privacy service which evades certain inefficiencies our competitors (read: Aztec) face. it's able to do this because it uses completely different cryptography (it's account-based privacy, instead of UTXO-based privacy).
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Captain McAteer
@firn
with Firn, you can "synchronize" (i.e., determine your own account state, and in particular your account balance) in O(1) time and O(1) bandwidth. i.e. a small constant, independent of - the total state size of the system - the time elapsed / transactions posted since you last sync'd. same drill for proof-generation.
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Captain McAteer
@firn
in fact, Firn never "syncs" at all, in the sense that the Firn browser client never even caches state on the device. you can use Firn on a completely fresh—and even untrusted—device with no performance or security implications whatsoever. you can even use Firn through Tor.
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Captain McAteer
@firn
moroever, Firn's front-end only "talks to" the blockchain _through_ your wallet, and doesn't initiate any "backdoor" connections to Firn-specific services during sync/proofgen. this gives you full control over which RPC provider you use (i.e., you can select this at will in your wallet). you can even use your own node.
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Captain McAteer
@firn
the exception is when you actually kick off a private withdrawal/transfer. for privacy reasons, this _must_ be gasless. since we don't have account abstraction yet, we must implement this using the Firn Relay: an ultra-lightweight transaction forwarding service. all it does is receive your ZKP and pay the gas.
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Captain McAteer
@firn
that's it. and no IP tracking. thus Firn's liveness and efficiency guarantees have _no_ reliance on heavy off-chain infrastructure, i.e. a bundling or indexing service (euphemistically called a "roll-up"). you can generate proofs in well under a second, using your browser alone, and by talking through your RPC alone.
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✳️ dcposch on daimo
@dcposch.eth
This sounds like an excellent project, looking forward to see it! One nit; I would not call rollups a euphemism. Current rollups have training wheels but the concept is sound.
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Captain McAteer
@firn
i actually mean the term "euphemistically" literally here—not in the sense of "derogatively", but literally as "calling it something more pleasant than it is". i.e., Aztec's indexer barely deserves the title "roll-up" (since it's really an indexer / proof bundler). so i'm not knocking roll-ups; actually the opposite.
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