Since launching Nockchain one week ago, the response has been tremendous.
We're seeing a ton of passionate interest, and receiving lots of questions. So this week's newsletter is just a roundup of what's happened in the first week, with some answers to the questions we're seeing.
In this issue:
- Community pull requests for the open-source client
- Introduction to Dyck words in the Nock ZKVM
- A larger discussion of the open-source client
- Nockchain technical updates
Spotlight: Community Pull Requests
This PR introduces a jet for mpeval (multi-point evaluation of polynomials) that cuts the time every node spends checking a block.
mpeval bulk-evaluates a polynomial at many points, an operation every ZK-proof verifier in Nockchain’s zkVM calls while checking a miner’s proof. Jets are native implementations of functions specified in Nock.
We're happy to see that community devs are already meaningfully improving the open-source client.
Introduction to Dyck Words in the Nock ZKVM
In this video, Brian explains how we use Dyck words in the Nock ZKVM.
Dyck words are a tool from combinatorics (basically they're balanced sets of parentheses) which we use to enumerate Nock nouns (binary trees).
On the Open-Source Client
Within a few days of launch, we noticed a large number of people trying to mine Nockchain with the open-source reference client unmodified. Given the state of things at launch, the chance of an unmodified client winning a block was (and still is) practically zero (at this moment, not forever).
We did not plan for the open-source client to be that uncompetitive at launch, so once we realized it, we wrote a blunt tweet to ensure that nobody would waste their time or energy. Since then we've received questions about what happened, why this happened, etc.
The basic answer is just that we did not know until the last minute how exactly the open-source client would fare on day one. We of course knew from the beginning that people would have to improve the open-source client to have any chance of winning blocks, but we had hopes of improving it more ourselves before launch. Other things came up and the show had to go on.
We knew of at least some specific parties who started improving the reference client privately on the day we released the code. This isn’t to say we expected everyone to be following that closely, or to have the time/energy to be so on top of it, but we took this to mean that our comms were successfully conveying the competitive element.
Remember that this game has only just begun. The open-source client will be improved (as noted above, we're already getting pull requests) and we’re going to improve it ourselves. There will be mining pools, etc. Proof of Work naturally decentralizes over time, Bitcoin is the canonical example.
Know that we're deeply invested in the open-source mining community finding success. We just can’t control exactly how or when. That’s the whole point of doing PoW and this unpredictable fair-launch strategy we concocted: Nobody should be capable of controlling these things.
Nockchain Technical Updates
Needless to say, we're working around the clock to nurture this infant blockchain! No fancy updates for the moment, we're just doggedly working to increase network stability, reduce consensus latency, mitigate network weather, and improve our mining rate.
