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Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 4 years ago
DERO is a new blockchain protocol and smart contract platform, using an account model with homomorphically encrypted balances. This means that tokens issued by smart contracts inherit all the privacy and fungibility properties of the native DERO token. Because it has an account model, wallets synchronize instantly, and nodes can run in "light" mode, pruning their history.

It is a proof-of-work chain, using a variant of the BWT algorithm for hashing, which is bottlenecked by cache/memory bandwidth, which helps to minimize the performance difference between different device types. Together with the fact that each node can act as a mining pool, this helps to increase egalitarianism and decentralization of supply, access, and control.

Finally, the DERO blockchain is implemented as a directed acyclic graph, rather than a pure chain. Transactions can be included in multiple blocks (which induces the graph structure), without being counted twice. These "side blocks" help to increase the network throughput: on test net, the DERO DAG has achieved >750 transactions per second.

Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
I asked the devs, and apparently "proof generation won't affect general read/write performance". But I guess this is the kind of thing where benchmarks might be useful, and there don't seem to be any public yet.
Comment · 6 years ago
I think the key differentiating feature of Graviton is the tree of authenticated proofs of data consistency. (AFAICT this is particularly important for scalably updating and verifying a large blockchain history.)
Comment · 6 years ago
There's a brief comparison with RocksDB and LevelDB in the README file, which concludes: "If you require a high random write throughput or you need to use spinning disks then LevelDB could be a good choice unless there are requirements of versioning, authenticated proofs or other features of Graviton database."
Comment · 6 years ago
I checked with the devs and they say writing is only safe from a single process, but reading is multiprocess safe. So I think this confirms your thought.
Comment · 6 years ago
It seems to be intended as the backend database for the Dero blockchain smart contract platform: https://medium.com/deroproject/graviton-zfs-for-key-value-st...

The post claims: "The features included in Graviton provide the missing functionality that prevented Stargate RC1 from reaching deployment on our mainnet."

I'm not sure, but I guess that this checksumming is relevant for storing the Merkle trees encoding the blockchain. I don't know why the previous choice of database wasn't suitable.

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