Tezos and Ocaml: A self-amending cryptographic ledger | Hacker News Reader

Tezos and Ocaml: A self-amending cryptographic ledger

github.com

90 pointswalterbell16 comments

Can somebody explain with layman terms how this works?

It means hard forks (afaik) are not required when features are added. Protocol can grow organically. Interesting tech but not sure about the use case. Blockchain is all cart-before-the-horse.

An article providing more background to the project and the open-sourcing. Perhaps they should consider moving to GitLab

https://www.coindesk.com/tezos-launch-story-whats-left-232-m...

https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos

(betanet branch has the launch release)

Can't find any information anywhere about how it self amends.

Thought about this myself a few times.

One way would be to have transactions that contain code and an address. send money to the address and after a certain freshold the code goes live. Node restarts with new code in place.

Kind of dangerous and funny at the same time.

The way they self amend is that they literally will just vote to replace a particular file in their implementation with a new one.

As noted in the README, all of the devlopment now occurs in gitlab [0], and github is a mirror.

[0] https://gitlab.com/tezos/tezos

Too bad the whole thing was/is shadowed by the split of founders and foundation. As always with pretty much any cryptocurrency over-promises that fell short (launch was supposedly scheduled for end of last year) and greed.

Cherry on-top they are now demanding passports (KYC) for those that fell for their ICO while nothing was mentioned when they are actually collecting the money.

Hopefully at least their software will be of some value and not a total scam like their rest practices.

I don't think there was a "scam." I think they learned that in order to issue tokens and get exchange listings, they needed KYC in the new environment by the time they were done. There was a definite screw up in the initial governance when the picked a bad apple for the foundation.

The foundation and founders are reunited once again, so if the tech is solid, and so far it has been, then all signs are positive.

Happy to take any questions from here to the devs/founders. (The 30 June launch date was hard to hit, but I think everyone has recovered by now.)

I'd love to hear more about the process for proposing amendments to the chain. My understanding is that users can propose code changes to the protocol, and receive bounties for these changes.

My specific questions are:

* How are changes actually proposed technically? Do users submit a transaction with their proposed changes, and then other users vote on them? Can anyone submit proposals?

* Is the voting / upgrade process part of the codebase yet, or is that work still coming?

Considering the close ties of OCaml and Coq, has anyone done some sort of formal verification for Tezos ?

The main focus has been on the formal verifiability of smart contracts written in Michelson -- https://www.michelson-lang.com/ I'm checking on Tezos itself.

Worth pointing out: these guys worked for a long time off a very large capital-raise round to implement and run a test net, only to just replace it at the very last moment with a completely new main net.

Could you expand on that a bit? My understanding is that a test net is launched before main net. Or they are run in parallel.

If properly designed, the main net should really just be the test net. Any small issues should have been ratified on the test, and the chain should move to production without any issues. However, Tezos basically released a whole new product, without proper prior testing.

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