Here’s a dilemma: you create some tech that’s a complete game-changer for your industry, but you also need to reassure users they won’t notice much different. That’s what it’s like to release Teranode, the BSV blockchain’s new scaling superpower. It’s secure, super-fast, and will process any amount of data you throw at it. But otherwise, it’s still the same Bitcoin as before.
Members of BSV Association’s Teranode development team have put together a video highlighting the discussion’s key points, addressing the most critical questions. What does it mean for app developers, miners, and ordinary users? What’s its true potential? Does it have limits or risks?
You can watch the whole thing here, and we promise it packs a lot of information (and reassurance) into its short 22-minute run. The speakers are: BSV Association Chief Technology Officer Siggi Óskarsson; his brother Oli (Network Integrity); Connor Murray (Standards and Stewardship); his brother Dylan (Software Delivery); and Darren Kellenschwiler (Distributed Applications).
It’s all about the way Teranode does things
Teranode is impressive, but it isn’t mysterious or magical. At least, it isn’t to the people who built it. However, there’s still a lot that needs to be cleared up and explained for the average user. For example, Siggi responds to the first question, which is “What exactly is Teranode?” by pointing out that it’s just a new implementation of the (existing protocol software) SV Node. It’s not separate from Bitcoin; it’s not a layer or a plug-in. Miners use it to connect to the network, hash/process transactions, and create blocks.
Oli digs deeper, noting that SV Node and Teranode operate on different P2P layers, but there’s a bridge between them so they can both still communicate with each other. “We needed that (new P2P layer) to be able to scale to infinity,” he adds.
“It doesn’t break the Bitcoin protocol, it doesn’t (re-)define the white paper, or anything like that.”
“I want to highlight and repeat that,” Siggi says. “It’s not changing the protocol at all. The transactions are exactly the same, the blocks are exactly the same.”
The next question asks if Teranode, in its current form, truly represents unbounded/horizontal scaling, i.e., can it process more than 5 million transactions per second (TPS), or would that require another redesign? Siggi explains that mostly scales horizontally—that is, it scales simply by adding more hardware to the network. There are, however, some bottlenecks in the block assembly process at the 5-6 million txps mark. Scaling beyond that would require either more advanced hardware or a re-architecting of just that particular piece.
Dylan says Teranode’s P2P communications between nodes are “to me, not even incredibly novel, but it’s really scalable.” Teranode handles the unbounded growth of block sizes by constantly passing around data via HTTP as the block is being built. It passes sub-trees (groups of transactions, or pieces of the block) around so that it’s always assembling a block.
Previously, SV Node would build up a mempool of transactions that nodes keep in constant sync, whereas Teranode is always passing information around. So when one of the miners “solves” the block, all other nodes on the network already have 99.9% of the data they need, and can instantly move on to the next block.
The sub-trees concept “is one of the coolest things about Teranode,” Oli says. All the sub-trees still “hash up” to the same Merkle Root—or in layman’s terms, all the transactions in a processed block are still provably valid, no matter how the block was built.
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Teranode won’t have a steep learning curve for app developers or miners
We don’t expect application developers to interact with Teranode directly, Siggi says. They’ll do it through “overlays” (smaller nodes that contain a subset of the whole network of data). Apps will send transactions to, and receive transaction information from, the overlay.
Developers won’t even find many new things to notice in Teranode, Darren says. They will notice the improved stability and lack of a scale ceiling. If your app was previously broadcasting transactions in huge numbers, you might have needed to consider pacing them more carefully to ensure they all went through. That’s no longer a concern. Developers will also be able to get a lot more information from the sub-trees—although it’s not a confirmation per se, it’s a much stronger signal.
The previous (SV Node) was a piece of “monolithic node software that inherited a whole bunch of technical debt,” says Connor. It tried to do everything at once. Teranode breaks everything into smaller, specialized microservices that can scale independently.
Teranode won’t have a steep learning curve for miners either, Oli says, but it depends on how deeply they want to understand it. “We tried to follow the best practices of what other software is doing, and make sure it’s as easy, or as hard, as you want it to be.” All information is readily available.
If you’re doing a million transactions per second, “there’s a lot of money in there,” and you’ll probably also have the resources to have a team of 10 DevOps guys monitoring it, he adds.
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IPv6 ‘could be a key part of scaling’
The topic of IPv6 has been discussed frequently in past BSV conversations, and it remains a persistent issue. IPv6 has been “built into Teranode from day one,” says Siggi, at all layers. He highlights IPv6 multicast as something particularly important. Send a transaction via multicast, and it will be sent to all mining nodes simultaneously and processed at the same time.
While there’s still resistance to IPv6 adoption from various ISPs around the world, this may present hurdles for some. However, there has also been a noticeable improvement on that front in recent years. Yes, IPv6 is necessary for real scalability, and it will unlock new use cases for blockchain applications.
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Does Teranode come with any risks?
Another question for the team is whether the average user will face any risks under Teranode, or if there is any danger of losing coins if you don’t keep your own records of transactions.
Darren notes that even under existing conditions, the risk is non-zero. Bitcoin is free software and by nature doesn’t come with any service agreements. However, Teranode itself doesn’t introduce any new risks. In fact, it is closer to the description of SPV (Simplified Payment Verification) for transactions, as described in Bitcoin’s original white paper.
Connor says no, you won’t see “apps falling apart like they do on other blockchains” after protocol upgrades, and that’s because Teranode isn’t changing any of the underlying rules that make Bitcoin work. The only thing you’ll notice is that everything’s a lot more scalable.
The team has been developing Teranode for 2.5 years now, and the plan going forward is to “stabilize and harden it” even further, Siggi says. There are numerous complexities and many new ideas. Teranode will run alongside SV Node for some time yet, as the development team continues to optimize its performance. “It’s all about quality and making sure it’s doing the right thing.”
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Watch: Teranode is the digital backbone of Bitcoin
Source: https://coingeek.com/understanding-bsv-superpower-developers-explain-what-teranode-is/
