If you remember, a few weeks ago I talked about the coordicide of IOTA and how far the project had come.
With the elimination of the coordicide, the IOTA project becomes totally decentralized.
In order to be able to do this we will move to IOTA 2.0 the evolutionary step of IOTA without intermediaries.
Disclaimer: The topic is quite complex and articulated, so in order not to make the reading too heavy I will try to be as simple as possible and I will divide it into 2 the second part is for Sunday!
The Evolution
As specified in the previous article, the coordinator is about to be turned off, however, first a delegation of reliable nodes must be established that can become "stepping stones" and have the trust of the network, in order to validate all transactions.
In parallel to this, the IOTA 2.0 project will have to be activated in order to ensure the robustness of the Trilemma (scalability, security and decentralization).
Protection of the network.
Both the PoW and PoS validation methods, have a network protection that prevents any user from registering multiple times until they obtain an active majority and can thus manipulate the DLT.
This type of protection is called Sybil and prevents the creation of multiple identities.
Since implementing a node in IOTA's Tangle is very simple ereally inexpensive, a control was established in the network called MANA.
Basically, when a transaction is processed, a quantity (as a percentage) is promised to a node ID chosen by the token holder. The quantity is corresponding to a percentage of the amount of tokens transferred with the transaction.
This amount is transcribed as a register extension and also carries the recipient node ID.
This donation very much ravishes a Sybil type of protection; mana is used in 3 modules that are part of the evolution of the project.
Autopeering: The mana (both access and consent) prevents a malicious user from filling lists of potential peers with its fake nodes, comnsenting nodes to easily find honest peers.
Access Tangle: The access mana held by a node determines how many messages it can issue relative to network throughput; preventing a "malicious" node from monopolizing the network
Consensus forms:
- CVT votes are weighted by consensus mana.
- A committee of high consensus mana nodes issues random numbers in the dRNG
- Consensus mana is used to calculate the finality of a message: a message is final when it is indirectly referenced by a sufficient number of nodes, weighted by their mana.
New message layout.
Messages are the beating heart of IOTA, in fact they are the messages that fulfill the Tangle, and they connect the nodes to each other by confirming their trustworthiness
Let's see below what data the header contains (obviously the body contains all the transaction information.
Version number: the IOTA protocol will be constantly evolving and improving, and thus will be subject to a strict version control system to manage updates.
Parents: nodes will contain the hash of many other messages called parents, endowing the tangle with a DAG structure. Each message will have 2 to 8 parents.
Timestamp: this field indicates the approximate time the message was sent and will not be falsifiable: see here for more information.
Issuing node ID: each message contains the public key of the issuing node, which will allow the congestion control algorithm to determine when it should be gossiped about.
Each message contains a nonce, which is the solution to the PoW adaptive cryptographic puzzle .
Autopeering
As mentioned, IOTA is a peer-to-peer network, this means that a good number of neighboring nodes are needed to be able to confirm transactions, and most importantly, the neighboring nodes must be trusted. How is this possible?
Through autopeering an algorithm decides whether neighboring nodes can be trusted.
In order to perform this verification, here is where mana plays a very important role; in fact, through Mana Rank, one is able to give a hierarchical order to neighboring nodes to be trusted.
This autopeering protocol is valid for all nodes so there are millions of queries that are launched between nodes both incoming and outgoing.
I think that for today is enough. See you on Sunday with the last part!