Sharding phase 1 spec (RETIRED)

[JustinDrake]

@jamesray1

I like the reward for collators, it contrasts to no reward for full nodes at the moment.

Collators are not full nodes. They are somewhat like miners in Ethereum 1.0. Full nodes remain unrewarded with sharding.

@jamesray1

It’s good that the entry cost for participation as a proposer is only 0.1 ETH

The entry ticket for a proposer on a single shard is PROPOSER_DEPOSIT + MIN_PROPOSER_BALANCE which is currently 1.1 ETH.

@jamesray1

collators still need to deposit 1000 ETH (otherwise too many collators would reduce throughput, increase overhead or increase latency)

Too many collators would not reduce throughput (it would allow for collators to secure more shards, i.e. more throughput). What do you mean increase latency? The main reason for having a high deposit is overhead in to main chain from the SMC.

@jamesray1

What mechanism are you going to use for pseudo random selection

We will use blockhashes in phase 1 as described in get_eligible_collator. This is imperfect (because of grinding opportunities by miners) but good enough for now. You can find some code for the old spec here.

@jamesray1

Similarly, how does this function work, what’s the code? What’s the hash function, keccak256? AIUI there’s not much benefit in abstracting this.

It’s just a simple keccak hash on the concatenation of the inputs. Both get_eligible_collator and compute_header_hash are helper functions added for clarity of exposition. They can be made private.

@jamesray1

So shouldn’t it be something like Proposer balance: proposer_registry[proposer_address][shard_id].balance?

Well spotted I fixed it to proposer_registry[proposer_address].balances[shard_id].

@ldct

did the definition of self-proposal mean to use “collator”?

Well spotted, fixed

@jannikluhn

Should the shard ID contain (part of) the SMC address?

If we need a new SMC then the NETWORK_ID (part of the shard ID) will be updated. I have added SMC_ADDRESS to the list of parameters.

@jannikluhn

I’m not a native English speaker, but I’m wondering if the plural here is correct (same for “transactions” and “receipts root” in current Ethereum, by the way).

I’m not a native English speaker either but I think you may be right. I’ve followed your suggestion.