A few months ago I talked in depth about IOTA's validation method; partly because it's fundamentally brilliant, partly because it was in the eye of the storm in that IOTA's philosophy is 100% decentralized, but with a coordinator having the power to decide whether or not to validate transactions, we all fully understand that we are in a totally centralized system.
In this regard, it is only fair to see a little bit where the work is at, also because as you have had a chance to see crypto projects there are, but the basics are not really good.
A little review
As you remember the genius of IOTA validation lies in the use of a particular mathematical scheme called a directed acyclic graph.
Source: https://iotaitalia.com/about
Basically any user can be node and to validate a transaction, they must first validate 2 previous transactions.
In this way it is clear that the more users there are, the more transactions can be validated.
We have basically solved the 2 biggest weaknesses of the blockchain: security and scalability.
The Tangle solves both: regarding security, a 51% attack is not possible because there are no mining pools (there is no miner either!), secondly, scalability increases as the number of nodes increases.
However.
Well, yes, even in such an ingenious project, there is a small flaw: until the community is very substantial, the tangle does not have the right veracity; that is why a coordinator was established.
This coordinator is in charge of checking whether the validated transactions are correct or not.
We have basically fallen back to a centralized system.
The team, however, scient of this mole, is operating in such a way that this coordinator will disappear.
Coordicide
With a rather quaint name, he called this operation to remove the coordinator (sounds more like murder! Ahahaha).
Efforts have been underway for several years to remove this source of centralization, but the results are still not satisfactory to the team: removing the coordinator would mean putting the network down!
How do we proceed then?
A Decentralized Validation Committee has been established for this purpose. This means that the placement of milestones (confirmed valid transactions that can be used to validate subsequent ones) no longer depends on a single entity (the Coordinator), which in turn depends on the IOTA foundation (and thus centralized).
Multiple validators form a committee together using an off-chain Bizantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus mechanism to determine the placement of the next milestone by having each validator propose parents to rely on in the milestone.
The advantages of the maneuver are immediately apparent: the absence of a single machine/entity is a point in favor of NO censorship. Even if some servers are down, there are always others left to keep watch and confirm the validity of transactions.
These are updates from a couple of weeks ago, so they are very recent. The team is preparing and sending out requests to companies and universities in order to form the first decentralized validation committee.
The committee will consist of 10, and at least 7 are needed for validation.
However, it is understood that the validation committee is temporary until IOTA 2.0 is activated (kind of like what happened with Ethereum's Beacon blockchain) which will bring some nice innovations to this very unique blockchain.
However, we will talk about this in another post!
Bye until next time!!!