Farcaster Devs

Technowatermelon. Elder Millenial. Building Farcaster. 

nf.td/varun

@v, @sanjay how will the mempool be implemented?

More specifically, will it be a mempool shared by all hubs (not just "write")? Will I be able to submit my messages to my (read) hub in order to add them to the mempool?

Dad, geek, conversation liquidity provider. vrypan.net (home), /weatherxm (work), @l--o--l (fun). Also https://paragraph.xyz/@purplesubmarine

We’re working on the full technical design right now. But yes, in this model it would be important to have a public mempool. Either via public RPCs or by read hubs publishing to the same shared mempool.

My concern: If we are required to connect to one of 10 or 20 write hubs to submit messages, then it's trivial for a country can block this at the IP level through their ISPs.

Yeah, good point. Being able to write to the mempool via gossip should avoid that, as you point out.

It seems to me that the additional requirements to convert a read hub to a write hub may not be very high. If this is the case (I'm not sure), would you consider an algorand-style consensus mechanism where every (or at least any interested) hub can also be a writer?

Just rumbling, this is a very exciting topic for me to wait for the specs 🤣

I don't think that would be possible without introducing crytpoeconomic incentives for security. I think we can move to a more open system for hubs eventually, with just staking eth.

Yes, we could do something like that. But it doesn't have to happen at the block level. It could happen once a month/quarter/year etc. With fids voting (as you imply it has issues, need sybil resistance) for the set of fids running a write hub.

Another mechanism we discussed briefly is that we could allow users to pay a small fee and pin which block producer you want to messages to be included in. e.g. if you are worried about collusion among write hub operators and being censored. Ideally we just need one honest hub, but something to think about.

Maybe there are other incentives or mechanisms or types of capital (social?). I'm stuck with this idea that somehow, users (or apps) could vote on who will be the next write-node (or who to throw out?) For example, it would be easy to include the node id (or fid) in every message, and say that a block must be produced by a node with this fid, and the resulting block will prove it by including enough "votes". (I can see the problems with this, but it may be a primitive that can be used somehow.)

Just throwing half-baked ideas.