Sharding and RChain - President Lucius Gregory Meredith shows RChains' sharding architecture
0:00:04 Greg Meredith
Okay, so we're just going to talk a little bit about RChain sharding. So that people, you know, aren't laboring with a lot of misconceptions. What's really important to understand is that without sharding, you can't get to global scale networks. It just isn't going to happen, there are computational limitations that with classical computing is they're going to be really, really hard to overcome without tons and tons and tons of effort.
0:00:38 Greg Meredith
The RChain mainnet is a full network in and of itself, as we contemplate somewhere between 100 and 1000 nodes in this network. You'v e already seen, if you have seen Theo's demos, that even with existing 0.13 Alpha three code, that is fast enough to upload video to any any shard and stream the video from the shard. However, if you get the entire internet, treating our team main net as if it were YouTube, well, anyone who's used used to been uploads videos, so YouTube knows that with all the resources that Google throws at YouTube, and they are considerable, it still takes quite a long time to get videos up to YouTube. And that network is devoted entirely to that problem. And so if you were also to try to put financial transactions, for example, just simple REV transfers through that network, they would all be stuck behind, you know, millions of videos being uploaded every day.
0:02:04
And that's not that's not sustainable. But it's not reasonable. Google doesn't route all of the YouTube video requests through the Gmail network. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't route all the YouTube video requests through through its Google Maps network, it doesn't work that way. That would be silly. Instead, each of those services has a dedicated network of servers that are serving up those services. That's how the Internet scales today. And that's how blockchain has to scale. So however, it doesn't mean that REV is going to be devalued or not useful, or anything like that. So with a network like RPC, which is devoted to a variety of digital assets, those assets can be shunted to this network, and not involve RChain main net, except in certain cases. Right?
0:03:20
So this is what we want to talk about is those cases. So I'll just use these but then I'm going to add some additional cases. So RChain has spent some time to make sure that there are at least two active shards. And this is a part of our promise to the community that RChain - the 1.0 release - would support sharding. Right?
0:03:46 Greg Meredith
So we have to deliver actual shards and show that sharding works. That's a part of what we promised the community, and that's why one of the reasons that we're doing it. There are also important economic reasons. But now, when someone is just involved in the manipulation of digital assets, it is possibly the case that all of those transactions would remain here. But if you're talking about real world use cases. So for example, a marketplace that is utilizing RPC as a storage network. Almost certainly, that market network wants to defray costs of using RPC by using advertisement.
0:04:46 Greg Meredith
So a user request then goes into the marketplace. And that marketplace ultimately needs to hit the storage network where the digital assets are, right? This costs the marketplace staking token - costs some resources to get down here. So they want to defray the cost of that, right? Because it would be ridiculous to for every data transaction that this does on behalf of the user to go back to the user and say: "Hey, pony up..., cough up some more. Okay, cough up some more. Sorry. Now, number one more, one more page of data requests, you got to cough up some more." Right? That would be a terrible user experience. So what's going to happen in realistic applications is that the user is going to be presented with a variety of sponsored content, which subsidizes their use of the marketplace. Where's that sponsored content coming from? That's coming from over here.
0:06:09 Greg Meredith
So when RPC serves up responses to the data requests, they're also pulling sponsored content from over here. So that means that any realistic user request is actually hitting two shards. And when it's hitting two shards, and those transactions need to be coordinated, that means they have to go through RChain mainnet. That means that every user request to this marketplace has to use REV. Now as we add more and more shards, and there's more and more interesting capabilities. So for example, let's say, air transport, or hospitality, like, you know, air b&b or hotels or things like that, or ground transport. Now let's imagine that we have a user who's talking to a travel service. So a user who is booking a realistic request, at a travel service is going to hit not just one shard, but all three of these shards. And that needs to be a coordinated transaction......go to www.blog.rchain.coop/sharding for the complete transcript