The Real Transaction Lifecycle: From Your Device to the Blockchain — Transcript

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1. 0:05Hello everyone. Uh welcome back to uh my
2. 0:08messy whiteboard. Uh today I'm going to
3. 0:11chat with you about some of the
4. 0:13essentials of networking. Uh and
5. 0:17particular so the mechanism through
6. 0:19which uh anything that's happening on
7. 0:21web 3 takes place is instantiated
8. 0:25uh over networks. And we're gonna start
9. 0:28with, you know, one of us here sitting
10. 0:32at home. Uh, and uh, we start off by
11. 0:37deciding to initiate a transaction.
12. 0:43So, we decide to initiate a transaction
13. 0:46and it first goes over the first hop uh,
14. 0:50of the trip of this transaction. Uh
15. 0:53maybe it's Wi-Fi and here you are sort
16. 0:56of uh you know struggling to get Wi-Fi
17. 0:59with whoever else is in your household
18. 1:02or maybe uh also your neighbor's
19. 1:04microwave. Uh then it gets to you know a
20. 1:08first what's called an access point uh
21. 1:11in your neighborhood maybe inside your
22. 1:13uh apartment building. Um then it's
23. 1:16going to go through some fiber which is
24. 1:18of course shared uh with all kinds of
25. 1:20other people. uh and then it goes from
26. 1:22more and more of these different access
27. 1:25points and throughout it's going to go
28. 1:27through something which we represent
29. 1:29like this as electrical engineers which
30. 1:32this kind of X looking thing is actually
31. 1:34a switch. So it's going to go through
32. 1:36switches and routers. A switch is the
33. 1:39physical machine that actually connects
34. 1:43inputs to outputs and the routing is
35. 1:46what decides what action that machine
36. 1:49takes. So think of the routing as
37. 1:51actually being the software part and the
38. 1:54switches being the hardware part. Okay.
39. 1:57So eventually it gets through here and
40. 2:00um it's going to get of course uh to
41. 2:03some block builder and the way it's
42. 2:06going to happen here that it gets
43. 2:08through a block builder is that it's
44. 2:10going to go through uh a variety of
45. 2:13these different switches uh you know all
46. 2:16over the world and there's going to be
47. 2:18all kinds of fancy routing. So uh this
48. 2:22is also going to be coming from all
49. 2:24kinds of other places and your block
50. 2:26builder is going to go ahead and build a
51. 2:29block uh according to these different
52. 2:31transactions.
53. 2:33Now um this has to get uh onchain and
54. 2:38basically it will have to go through a
55. 2:40proposer uh and the proposer maybe the
56. 2:44block builder managed to get a proposer
57. 2:50connection that's pretty good but
58. 2:52generally again here you will still have
59. 2:54all of these switches you know it's not
60. 2:56like there's somebody with a a roll of
61. 2:59fiber connecting everybody to everybody
62. 3:02else and then there's proposer is going
63. 3:04to have to talk to a bunch of validators
64. 3:08uh and get enough of these validators to
65. 3:11agree and validate whatever uh block is.
66. 3:20Okay. So let's look at this proposer.
67. 3:24There isn't a dedicated fiber going from
68. 3:28a proposer to each and every validator.
69. 3:33Let's think about it. If you did have
70. 3:36this kind of direct connection,
71. 3:39suppose uh that I have uh uh 100
72. 3:44validators or maybe let's just say a
73. 3:47thousand validators. That's 10 to the
74. 3:49power of three. you know that's
75. 3:52basically not more uh than say Ethereum
76. 3:56has or if you think of something like uh
77. 4:00rotor in Solana you'll have to be
78. 4:02talking to 200 of them so let's even
79. 4:05just bring it down say it's 100 which is
80. 4:0810 to the power of two each of these
81. 4:12nodes right because the proposer takes
82. 4:15turns being proposer sometimes it's just
83. 4:17a validator sometimes it's a proposer if
84. 4:20each of these has had to have a
85. 4:22dedicated connection to the other.
86. 4:25With something like Ethereum, even if
87. 4:28you think that there's only a thousand,
88. 4:30which of course is not true, there's a
89. 4:31lot more than that. You would need
90. 4:33roughly the square of that 10^ the 6.
91. 4:36You would need basically a million
92. 4:40separate
93. 4:42dedicated lines going across the world.
94. 4:45Not happening. Think even of something
95. 4:48like Solana with even if you have to
96. 4:50contact a hundred of them, you would
97. 4:53need now 10,000 different connections,
98. 4:57different pieces of fiber going across
99. 5:01the world in all kinds of awkward spots
100. 5:04to try to connect everybody directly to
101. 5:07everybody. So that's basically not
102. 5:09what's ever happening, okay? you're
103. 5:12always going through a network and
104. 5:14inside this network there's a lot of
105. 5:16different switches where those switches
106. 5:19are basically doing the routing where
107. 5:21again routing if you will is the
108. 5:23software part of operating the switch.
109. 5:27So the idea that you can have uh you
110. 5:30know dedicated links or pointto-point
111. 5:32links is simply not feasible. It just
112. 5:36doesn't scale right. you you can't do
113. 5:39this many dedicated lines. And then what
114. 5:42would happen is if a new node came in
115. 5:44all of a sudden then you would have to
116. 5:46run a thousand new lines to connect
117. 5:49everybody to everybody else, right? You
118. 5:51would never ever add a new validator.
119. 5:57So it's really important when we talk
120. 6:00about bandwidth to realize that even if
121. 6:04you may have some portions um that are
122. 6:07fiber uh that's dedicated to something
123. 6:11those portions are never actually
124. 6:13pointto-point portions. um that just
125. 6:16portions inside your network which is
126. 6:19then connected to a variety of different
127. 6:22um
128. 6:24different uh uh switches and that the
129. 6:29reality is always that you are in what
130. 6:32we called a switch network. So this
131. 6:34switch network is basically the reality
132. 6:37of any system. You can of course speed
133. 6:39up some uh some links here and there by
134. 6:42putting in some dedicated fiber. That's
135. 6:43great. Uh but that's not really changing
136. 6:47the underlying operation of a network
137. 6:51and it can't it can't just uh just from
138. 6:54uh just from the math of it. Um so we'll
139. 6:57continue to talk more about this and
140. 6:59also think even in a very simple system
141. 7:02how the bandwidth here if you're doing
142. 7:06for instance in in Salana something like
143. 7:09a star system has to be shared and what
144. 7:13are the effects what are the
145. 7:15consequences of that sharing. So just
146. 7:18remember there is no such thing as a
147. 7:20dedicated link.