RE: The Ned's Hair Award winner: Aggroed, or How Aggroed Saved Steem
How is Steem-Engine not a sidechain?
Ah found a good old comment I made about what are sidechains(copy and pasting it)
You want to know how bad the definition of sidechain is?
Namecoin(yes the first altcoin) is the world "official" sidechain to Bitcoin based on Satoshi's(??) and the dev words...(thought this can be argued null but who knows what who talking lel)
As such merged mine=sidechains
Blockstream then made the term more popular by the use of pegged sidechain-a separate blockchain with an asset of an established one.
This was the merged mined papers.
Merged mine=sidechain still here
The Federation based sidechain paper came when finding and making a pegged asset "trustless" was found to be hard. It can be done at different costs see Drivechain.
This Federation where trusted or open parties make blocks but use an asset that pegged by the same Federation as the tx fee. This is used in Liquid.
At here is when Sidechain=merged mined ended and the essence came a blockchain that helps the original asset and favors it.
The next "generation" or new sidechain idea came when Extenstion blocks came during the great scaling wars. This would be an opt code in which some nodes can download and accept this "sidechain" like blockchain along with main chain and other nodes would only count main chain.
This idea was revived when Litecoin Foundation announced it was going to add Mimblewimble to Litecoin via extension blocks.
So at the root-the basic idea of sidechain is that as long the blockchain helps the original asset and is built on using the original asset as well.
Definitions in this space are hard....
Having only 1 unique node able to "produce" blocks -which are not written anywhere, they are produced on-the-fly from information taken from the Steem blockchain- means it is not a sidechain. I don't know any person who would be supporting it, if we remove who is behind the Steem-Engine project. And that's the only reason they are using it.
A sidechain is an independent blockchain, with its own nodes and block producers, which allows holders to switch tokens from one chain to the side-chain via some kind of transaction.
I am not able to create a transaction on my own node -no longer running it, though- and expect some other node to add it into the Steem-Engine chain. Nowadays, that node is always the one being run by Steem-Engine themselves. There is no decentralization.
Also, everything is happening on the Steem blockchain which means Steem-Engine is in fact an app looking like a sidechain. They, Steem-Engine, are providing a service which currently no other service is providing; but they are not a sidechain.
Hmm...
You do have some points.
Do you have any info on where it only 1 node making blocks?
Steem Engine is more of a metacoins a chain that stores data on the mainchain while storing the bulk of the data on its own system-nodes. Kinda like how Omni works.
However they do have this pegged asset that=1 steem. What is the pegging for?
They did say they make their own blocks while storing it own steem kinda like a hybrid between sidechain and metacoins.
I asked two times in the Steem-Engine Discord server. Team replied me on both times that there is still no consensus mechanism and that the only truth for them is the one Steem-Engine node creates.
Last time was a on last Monday on the general channel. I quote the reply I got from Harpagon:
"[]javirid there is still no consensus layer available , however, if you start a node you can compare the hashes provided by steem-engine to the ones your node produces"
I could be comparing hashes and, in case of any be different, I could report it to the Steem-Engine team for them to see if there is some bug. But, again, the only truth would come from hashes by Steem-Engine's node transactions.
Good point. A few days ago I was thinking on all of this. Then it came to my mind that someone could relate Steem-Engine to Omni. As I am always thinking that I could be wrong -I am more times that I would like- I started thinking about it. Knowing how it works on a low level basis, yeah. Omni and Steem-Engine are extremely similar. Both of them are writing information into one chain which only them are able to decipher and that information is related to tokens.
However, my main point in all of this -I already said I am not against Steem-Engine project as a whole- is that they are "selling" it to the public as being a sidechain. They are not. They, like Omni, are writing information in Steem blocks and that information can only be understood by Steem-Engine. It is not content publishing related, it will not be appearing as a post.
In the case of Omni, I could install omnid -the bitcoind equivalent for Omni Protocol layer transactions-, create a transaction and sign it. It would normally be mined and added into the bitcoin blockchain. That transaction was created from my own node and added to the bitcoin blockchain by some random miner -meaning it doesn't matter which one-. Then I could be exploring my wallet and see all my transactions and be sure what I see is "the truth".
That's not the case in Steem-Engine. In order to transact I must use their website -ok, the same as with OmniWallet- or send a message to certain account -that was working a few months ago, I am unsure if it is still the case-. If Steem-Engine node accepts it -in other words, if "their truth" allows the transaction to be added- then a new transaction is created and added into the Steem blockchain.
See the difference? In Steem-Engine they aren't worried about any other "truth" than the one they are seeing on their own fake side-chain data. Sure. Like any other application. In the case of Omni, any node will see the same, even OmniWallet. Because truth comes from data stored in the blockchain by whoever mined the block, not data stored in the Steem blockchain added by Steem-Engine.
Steem-Engine is an app, not a side-chain.
This is very concerning. Why have they not changed? Could even DAO(with ENG) it to give it more decentralization
As I said on other of my replies, yes. It is. I wouldn't be using any platform which are showing obvious clues that are fully centralized. I think one of those would be BearShares, where all witnesses are controlled by one unique entity.
That's no different to Steem-Engine. The only reason people are trusting them is because who are the developers behind it. And they are really trustfull people. Steem Keychain is the best thing ever happened to Steem since the Genesis Block.
But the fear is still over there. Sure. Just to say something possitve, I clamed yesterday my PAL tokens. And I will be using PALnet quite often, almost in a daily basis. But I don't like them to say they are what they are not.
Another interesting non-feature is that they don't allow for people to publish any smart contract. And that was a very smart decission. Steem-Engine contracts are written in JavaScript, which could be insecure. I am not saying that currently deployed Steem-Engine smart contracts are insecure.
Of course, an upgrade on the platform on the smart-contract side to facilitate the process to take decissions would help. But I don't see it helping in the decentralization..
What they could do is allowing any node to look for the consensus and, if it was the case, splitting the side-chain in case of differences on those blocks -the ones on the side-chain, which are just redundantly built from data stored on the Steem blockchain-.
That still leaves us with the centralization issue. That of course could be fixed by allowing any node to create the transaction which modifies the data on the Steem blockchain, and then, wait for the consensus between Steem-Engine nodes to arrive.
Until then, Steem-Engine is just a platform which stores data on th eSteem blockchain and allows other nodes to validate it without any possibility to stop trusting Steem-Engine side-chain node.