Thread by @0x1Mert

1/In the previous thread tinyurl.com/ye6fc3b4
I talked about the data availability problem to make you familiarize with the concept so we can understand why @CelestiaOrg is important.Let’s now see how data availability is relevant in different ways of scaling the blockchain.👇

2/First Scaling solution is to increase the size of each block, well this is not a good approach because once we increase the block size, the cost of running a full Node increases. This leads less full nodes in the network, thus the network starts losing its decentralization. 👇

3/ On top of that more participants start running light nodes which are less secure. So adding fraud-proof is a vital concept here, but again we face the data availability problem we discussed in the first thread.👇

4/Second scaling solution is sharding. In a nutshell, we split the blockchain into multiple chains called shards. These shards have their own block producers. In this scheme instead, all block producers execute all transactions ..... 👇

5/...... they distribute the workload needed to process all transactions into different shards.

Hmm, What if the block producers in a shard become malicious and start accepting invalid transactions? 👇

6/ This is a possible attack in the sharding scheme since there are fewer block producers in each shard. So to be sure that if any shard has accepted an invalid transaction or not, we must make all the data in that shard available.👇

7/ This way we can check if everything is valid or not via Fraud Proofs.

It might be a bit confusing, but here I am not trying to teach the details of sharding. What I want you to understand is how important data availability is from scaling and security perspectives. 👇

8/Third way of scaling is Rollups, I have talked about rollups in my Metis thread, but let’s see how rollups are actually relevant for our data availability problem. 👇

9/Here again we have block producers and side chains like shards but this time they are called rollups. Rollups do all the execution themselves.

The question is what if the block producers cheat and produce blocks that include invalid transactions? 👇

10/We can again use Fraud proofs, but we must have all the data available in these blocks. They have to post all of their blocks onto the Layer1 chain. So we can also say rollups use layer 1 as a Data Availability layer.👇

11/Let’s stop here for a moment, We talked about Increasing Block Size, Sharding, Rollups. We saw that data availability is concerned with the problem that all data that should have been published is actually published and available. 👇

12/This is so vital otherwise we can not use fraud proofs. Also in the first thread, we saw that light clients are particularly vulnerable since they only download a little data, they rely on a full-nodes to trust the blockchain. 👇

13/ A potential solution to this problem was proposed by Mustafa Al-Bassam (CEO of @CelestiaOrg ), Alberto Sonnino, and Vitalik Buterin in the form of data availability proofs.👇

14/Their proposed data availability scheme is based on Reed-Solomon erasure coding, wherein very basic form the light clients request random shares of data and all data associated with the Merkle root is available. 👇

15/How the scheme works is pretty deep and technical. If you want to learn more about the solution, I highly encourage you to read through it. The paper is packed with so much interesting and quality information. 👇arxiv.org/pdf/1809.09044…

16/ From their own words: Celestia is a “lazy” blockchain that only does the two core things that a blockchain needs to do — order transactions and makes them available, in a scalable way. This makes it useful as a minimal “pluggable” component for systems such as rollups.👇

17/Since @CelestiaOrg provides the consensus, and data availability, any execution can be plugged into the infrastructure, therefore you can run any virtual machine on top such as EVM, Cosmos SDK, Substrate, etc. 👇

18/The secret sauce relies on data availability proofs, The main net is planned to be launched in 2022. We will see if the proposed solution will change the game. I personally think this is a novel idea. But always DYOR. 👇

19/ I hope, I could explain all you need to know well. See you in the next threads 👀