Radix Technical AMA #8

00:00 Intro
01:52 Q by cryptocactus
1) What are your thoughts on using the Radix way of sharding in the non-crypto space for regular centralized databases? Might the design of many small shards with unique shard-ids provided by the SHA256 hash function have usecases there?

11:52
2) How crucial is the near-uniquess property of the SHA256 hash function for the Radix ledger? Is it a necessity to make the combination of shardiång + consensus work, or is it there because it gives good performance (e.g. in parallellization)? Would it be possible to use a simpler hash-function that maps substates into buckets, or would that break the whole design?

15:59 Q by FR05T8YTE
On Xi’an will there be a minimum stake? If no, how will the network resist a sybil like attack where the network is flooded with malicious validators? If yes, how will the minimum be set so it is high enough that a sybil like attack would not work, but low enough that enough validators can join to provide scalability? Could a dynamic minimum stake based on average TPS be used?
On Xi’an, if low stake validators are grouped with other low stake validators and high stake validators grouped with other high stake validators, would this not lead to the value of stake to network security being diluted? If this is a problem, would it be possible to split validators into multiple equally sized virtual validators which would have the side effect of forcing larger stakers to provide more scalability?

25:40 Q by Che.Stuart
I am ultimately wondering if Radix would allow individual clients, such as a smartphone, to interact with the blockchain as a node itself, but obviously I don't understand enough to know how that affects staking. Nevertheless, if Radix's approach to POS (again, assuming I have understood all these terms well enough) balances the ratio of clients/servers, I think I would be permanently sold.

28:48 Q by Che.Stuart
Writing a novel but I have a second question, much more general? Is there something about Radix that makes it specifically oriented to DeFi? If not, why market as the ultimate DeFi solution? Why not just market as the ultimate blockchain solution?

42:08 Q by Ciprian
1. What happens with substates when Alice transfers 25 XRD to BOB.
Will Bob's new substate be linked to both Alice and his previous substate, or is this a single link (like a chain)?
In this line of thought, getting the history of all the transaction made by Alice for example you would first search for the active transaction made by her and then go backwards through all the shut down nodes since they are all connected through the logical clock mechanism?
2. How do you search for the active transaction inside a shard? Are the active transactions inside a hashmap so that you can search for them faster, on in a tree-like structure?
3. What is the maximum amount of data that can be contained in a ledger entry (substate)?
4. Is there a pruning mechanism so that shards don't become too large?
From what I understand shards only operate on active transactions (brought up), those that are "shut down" are only there for history. Are the old transactions somehow pruned from a shard so that it can operate faster on the active ones?
5. Based on what metric do you decide that a transaction should go to a different shard?
6. What happens if you want to move a transaction to a new shard but you don't have enough nodes to validate it?

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[charlesbunn]

As always I really appreciate how well you keep the community informed about your progress and the technology behind the curtain. Radix is such a breath of fresh air when compared to so many other crypto technology firms. Radix has real ideas on how to solve some very complex issues that everyone else just seems to brush under the table...

[scottwhite]

Kicking goals lads. Keep up the good work.