Miners as Validators on Flare - Leveraging miners from underlying chains for consensus on Flare Network

[Seoulite]

I'm not sure if this is a new document or not, but it was recently linked by the Flare twitter and I thought it might produce some useful discussion. It is highly technical and I don't understand it, so I'm wondering if someone would be able to explain it in simple terms. I'm particularly wondering what this would mean if BTC was made into an F-asset, since it states that "control over the Flare network is proportionally given to the miners that contribute the most to the safety of underlying blockchains on Flare, weighted by market cap" and clearly BTC would dominate in this area.

https://docs.flare.network/en/validators

[brianwalden]

10 hours ago, Seoulite said:

I'm not sure if this is a new document or not, but it was recently linked by the Flare twitter and I thought it might produce some useful discussion. It is highly technical and I don't understand it, so I'm wondering if someone would be able to explain it in simple terms. I'm particularly wondering what this would mean if BTC was made into an F-asset, since it states that "control over the Flare network is proportionally given to the miners that contribute the most to the safety of underlying blockchains on Flare, weighted by market cap" and clearly BTC would dominate in this area.

https://docs.flare.network/en/validators

From what I can make out, this isn't about validators from other networks validating Flare transactions. It's about using them to provide a data stream for the state of their own ledger.

You can think of this as the FTSO for communicating each new block as it's added to an F-asset's ledger. Instead of weighing their vote by how much FLR they hold, their vote is weighed by how successful of a miner they are on their own network. It does say that there are caps both per ledger and per validator so the top Bitcoin miner can't just dominate the whole thing.

This data is particularly important for minting F-assets. If you're converting your XRP to FXRP, the Flare Network has to know that you sent the specified amount of XRP to the specified wallet so it can communicate that with the agent. Same thing in reverse for unminting - it has to be able to check that the agent actually sent you the XRP.

Maybe it's helpful to think of Flare as a crypto search engine. Just like Google sends out spiders to crawl the whole internet and index it, Flare is trying to create a huge index of the state of other ledgers and price feeds from various exchanges. Flare isn't just trying to connect ledgers in the sense of moving coins back and forth between them. Flare is going to have all the data from the whole cryptoverse.

I can't even begin to think of the possibilities here. Every time I think I'm starting to wrap my head around Flare, it turns out it's even bigger than I thought.

Edited May 20, 2021 by brianwalden

[Seoulite]

Thanks @brianwalden for attempting to explain. I understand far less than you, so it's hard for me to even comprehend what this means. The first sentence of this document is this:

Flare is unique as a network in that it is focused on bringing together liquidity from all other networks into a unified composable system so that they can operate with smart contracts, and without levying any changes on how the underlying networks already work today. (emphasis mine)

So from this, am I to understand that Flare is attempting to sit at the intersection of the crypto universe, kinda like 'the Source' in the Matrix movies. It is the central hub of data feeds. It hears all and knows all. It can connect to any network and use that network to add to itself (like the Borg from Star Trek). I'm grasping for metaphors here because I don't have the knowledge to conceptualise this. 

Are they trying to be the smart contract network for the entire crypto space?

[brianwalden]

2 minutes ago, Seoulite said:

Thanks @brianwalden for attempting to explain. I understand far less than you, so it's hard for me to even comprehend what this means. The first sentence of this document is this:

Flare is unique as a network in that it is focused on bringing together liquidity from all other networks into a unified composable system so that they can operate with smart contracts, and without levying any changes on how the underlying networks already work today. (emphasis mine)

So from this, am I to understand that Flare is attempting to sit at the intersection of the crypto universe, kinda like 'the Source' in the Matrix movies. It is the central hub of data feeds. It hears all and knows all. It can connect to any network and use that network to add to itself (like the Borg from Star Trek). I'm grasping for metaphors here because I don't have the knowledge to conceptualise this. 

Are they trying to be the smart contract network for the entire crypto space?

Yeah think of it like Google. Google is kind of what connects the whole internet together. For most people Google is their starting point. Hugo said the FTSO is the beating heart of the Flare Network. I think we can abstract that into data collection in general. Flare is going to be a huge data aggregator. Google doesn't kill off websites, it makes them more accessible to people who are trying to find the content they contain.

Think of how we all complain about CMC. I would expect that someone will quickly build a price tracker based on Flare data. If you're using bots to trade, you can set up on Flare to use as your data stream and follow the arbitrage opportunities across exchanges. You'll still make the actual trades on those exchanges, but Flare is like your data center.

What about a smart contract for trading across ledgers. You wanna trade UNI (ERC-20) for CAKE (BEP-2). You've worked out your agreed upon price with someone (probably using Flare's price feeds). You each put FLR into the smart contract as collateral in case you don't follow through. You've each got until a specified time to send the coins to the other person. You send your UNI to the other guy's Ethereum wallet, he sends his CAKE to your Binance wallet. The smart contract uses the state connector data to make sure that both transactions happen and releases your collateral back to you when it does. If only one side completes the transaction, he gets the other guy's collateral as compensation.

These are just simple ideas. I'm guessing having all this data available in one place creates possibilities we haven't even thought of yet.

[brianwalden]

Holy ****. Hugo might actually be an evil mastermind hellbent on taking over the world.

This is the information age. Cryptocurrencies are essentially just data. Hugo is collecting all the data. The F-assets are just tokenomics. All that data available for anyone on the network to use. Flare is going to be the gateway to the cryptoverse.

[JoeBishop]

Add Flare's interest/work with Handshake and your theory makes even more sense @brianwalden. Not just domains, but add in the ability to collect data on "real world" objects (a barrel or Brent crude oil for example) and things get really interesting.

If you haven't seen this video, give it a watch. It's above my full level of comprehension, but I understand just enough to get tingly.

 

[brianwalden]

Hugo is Dr. Frankenstein and he's building a monster.

Ripple is the skeleton giving it form. The Ethereum Virtual Machine is the brain. Avalanche's consensus is the nervous system. Chainlink is the heart, feeding data throughout the body. BNB's tokenomics are the lungs, fueling it with oxygen.

He's trying to cherry pick the best of crypto and combine it into one network.

[WrathofKahneman]

So the "miners" described on that page - these are miners on the Flare network that mine by reporting on other blockchains (via FTSO).  Is that right?

[Seoulite]

2 hours ago, WrathofKahneman said:

So the "miners" described on that page - these are miners on the Flare network that mine by reporting on other blockchains (via FTSO).  Is that right?

No I believe they are miners from other networks who can also validate Flare via the state connector system. Their rewards for being a validator are partly based on how big their mining role is on their original network.

[Seoulite]

So coming back to this idea of 'cannibalising' other networks, in this case is Flare hitchhiking off the security and decentralisation of other networks too? In other words, is Flare going to be as secure and decentralised as the sum of every crypto put together?

[brianwalden]

So there's a very long interview Hugo did with a Doge group recently. He said more than once that validators from other networks would be participating in Flare consensus. I don't understand how it works, but that man obviously does, so one way or the other is going to happen.

I'll post the interview in its own thread it deserves it.