Under the hood of Bitcoin: this is how Teranode works

[ad_1]

By now you’ve probably heard the word “Teranode” over and over; especially if you have attended or watched the latest CoinGeek conferences where Steve Shadders, the CTO of the Bitcoin SV Infrastructure team, gave frequent updates on Teranode infrastructure and how it will improve Bitcoin.

Until recently, many people only had a high level understanding of Teranode, but thanks to the new “whiteboard sessions” created by Murray Distributed Technologies, we are slowly learning more about Teranode and how it works under the hood. .

“This is the very moment that we really spoke in earnest outside of nChain about how [Teranode] is structured and architected in-house, ”Shadders said before telling Connor and Dylan Murray that he’d like to break his explanation of Teranode into a multi-part series rather than telling the audience everything about Teranode in one go.

The first in a series of deep dives on how Teranode works under the hood. I’ll do more, if you have any questions you’d like to answer on a future podcast send them to @Bitcoin_Beyond https://t.co/QONBQPOnul

– Shadders (@ shadders333) December 2, 2021

Validating transactions in Teranode

The first episode of “Whiteboard Sessions with Steve Shadders” focused on how transactions are validated in Teranode as well as its architectural philosophy. To better explain how it works, Shadders pulls out his whiteboard and shows the audience diagrams and schematics to complement his explanation of systems architecture.

“One of the key concepts of Teranode is sharding; and when I say sharding, I’m not talking about the same thing Vitalik is talking about when he talks about sharding and dividing the work between many unreliable parties. [Instead,] we’re talking within the confines of Teranode, where everything is trusted, ”Shadders said as he began to write on his whiteboard.

“A very simple partitioning scheme would be to say that I have two possible boxes [cluster nodes] who could handle this transaction, and we’re looking at its transaction ID, and if its first four bits are 0-7 then it’s sent to box one, if its first four bits are 8-15 then it’s sent to box two .

“Because we’re doing all of this splitting of work based on a partition key, which in this example is the transaction ID, we can predict exactly which cluster node the transaction will be in. This is an incredibly useful property because it means that if I’m going to search for something, I always know which of the shards it’s going to be on which corresponds to a particular cluster node.

The future Teranode creates

“What new business opportunities do you see emerging as the node evolves into the Teranode structure? Connor Murray asked.

To which Shadders replied, “Because it’s extensible like [I’ve explained in this episode] you could have all kinds of extra services. You might not even need to be the person running the Teranode kernel to add extra bits on top. You can have a person that’s a miner running a Teranode and they can give you a data stream or something or whatever because they have a Teranode and they have it anyway, and then you can co-locate something. something next to them and use that to build token indexes or whatever, serving Merkle proofs – something that is not strictly speaking a function of the central node, it probably makes sense to ‘from an economic point of view whatsoever. But there might be a specialist who runs one of these block-only validate nodes and uses it to create Merkle trees, Merkle paths and serve them as a business model. I think there is a whole world of possibilities out there.

“Basically the framework itself is a way to connect to what’s going on in bitcoin, but it’s also a way to be able to do any kind of work that can be distributed and fragmented like that. I would be very happy to one day find people using the open framework for things that have nothing to do with bitcoin. It would be a victory, it would mean that we actually did something useful in a larger context.

Subscribe to Murray Distributed Technologies’ YouTube channel for the latest episodes of Whiteboard Sessions with Steve Shadders.

New to Bitcoin? Check out the Bitcoin for Beginners section of CoinGeek, the ultimate resource guide to learn more about Bitcoin, as originally envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto, and blockchain.

[ad_2]