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vrypan |--o--|
@vrypan.eth
The snap chain design is cool, but its weak point is validator election. My concern is that once we move to system where 10 or 20 people or entities have the power to censor the network, it will eventually happen. Once we get there it will only be a matter of time, for someone to suggest that validators must censor topic A or fid B, and use social, legal or regulatory pressure to do so. I even guess that from day 1, there will be some geographies that implicitly or explicitly won't be able to host validators. China? Russia? Does the EU live up to the standards of the 10 voters? Do we really think that the 6 validators (even if they are not located in the US) will not comply with a decision of a US court or regulator that asks them to censor any FID associated somehow with an OFAC-sanctioned wallet? And do we want them to have to fight this fight? I have huge respect for the people that worked on the design, this is not an attack, but we have to have this discussion. I want to be convinced that I'm wrong.
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Sanjay
@sanjay
OFAC only applies to financial transactions. At least in the US, I don't think validators can be legally compelled to censor speech. That said, we do take this attack vector seriously, and have some ideas on how we can address it. 1. Simplest version is a vote to replace the validator that's rejecting/skipping valid blocks. 2. Second simplest is increase geographic distribution. We can scale to ~50-100 nodes per shard if required with only slight impact on block times. 3. Allow the user to pick the shard. Validator sets will eventually be unique per shard. This is not possible for every user, but users that need it can register their shard preference in a smart contract which is respected by the protocol. 4. A variation of eth's inclusion lists to force validators to include messages 5. Finally, you could post merkle roots/messages to a smart contract and force inclusion to read nodes. Does not scale, but works for users at extreme risk of censorship. I don't think we'll need to go beyond 1 and 2 though.
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vrypan |--o--|
@vrypan.eth
But doesn't it all come down to the 10 voters? If you give me this power, will I vote for a validator based in China or Iran? No. Do I want a Farcaster where someone has the this power? No :-) BTW, what do you think about this alternative? Have you had the chance to read it? https://gist.github.com/vrypan/1ae6a60ecb3741ab031b5b06c974acab
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Sanjay
@sanjay
The 10 is just to start with. I do think all active fids should have a say eventually. But not sure exactly what that looks like. I looked at an earlier version, but not recently. Will take another look.
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