Gavin Wood on Kusama: What is the difference between Kusama and Boca Mainnet and how will it develop?

Source: PolkaWorld

Editor's Note: The original title was "Gas Kusama Questions and Answers"

Q1: Gavin, can you briefly introduce your background to the community, and what led you to establish / found Poca?

Gavin: Sure, my background is a programmer and game enthusiast. I started programming when I was 8 years old, designing / writing games as a kid, and eventually worked in the game industry. About 6 years ago, Vitalik and I co-founded Ethereum. After the launch of Ethereum, Parity technology was created to further promote the development of blockchain technology. Then, in 2016, I wrote a Poca white paper describing a vision for a "next generation" blockchain. I want to push things beyond my comfort limit and see what can really be done in terms of building an abstract platform for the next generation of blockchain technology for developers . Polkadot is a fairly important protocol, especially compared to Ethereum, which we have been developing for two and a half years, but I am excited that we will soon see some results from this work.

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Q2: What is the difference between Poca's mainnet, Kusama and Westend? How does SPREE benefit you in low-cost work?

Gavin: Boca's "mainnet"-its design is solid, stable and reliable. It will evolve, but not too quickly. It will take a relatively conservative approach to security and "change," and it will be suitable for applications that require strong assurance from their platform. Kusama is similar to Poca in many ways. It will use the same underlying technology, but it will evolve faster and with less care. It will not focus so much on security, but more on experiments and testing our hypotheses in the real world. Crazy ideas will be implemented and tested on Kusama. Westend is our final test net. Unlike the other two networks, Westend will keep a "Sudo" module that allows us to create and destroy tokens at will. The supply of Westend tokens will be unrestricted and may therefore have no value.

SPREE is a key technology of Polkadot and a blank in the Polkadot technology stack. In fact, this is crucial to Boca's value proposition, and I'm a bit embarrassed because I didn't think of it myself first! (An enthusiastic Reddit netizen proposed the core of this idea about a year ago.) What it does is allow Polkadot not only to ensure that the parachain runs exactly according to its own code, but also that its logical parts (such as token accounting) are in It is also “normal operation” under normal circumstances. This is important because if you allow chains to send messages to each other, you may need to know that the sending chain does not violate the meaning of certain specific messages, even if its own code is defective, badly designed, or completely malicious. So SPREE gives these guarantees to the message receiver. This is a subtle difference, but in the final analysis, this means that Polkadot's security can be extended appropriately.

Q3: In Kusama, KSM can help people try Boka's governance, staking, nomination and verification functions in a real environment. So how will KSM and Kusama networks develop after Boca goes online?

Gavin: Once Poca is online, Kusama Network will continue to act as the crazy cousin of the "rock" network and Poca. For a network with the latest and greatest technology. It is reckless to roll out new technologies (both low-level and high-level) to the Poca Mainnet before trying them in a lower-risk environment. Kusama provides the necessary test bed to experiment with these new ideas without posing a risk of instability to the main network of Poca. In the next few months, we have a lot of experiments waiting in line for Kusama. Some of them are too crazy to enter Poca now, but maybe one or two experiments will be very successful (maybe after adjustments) and we will eventually Bring them online to the main network of Poca. Kusama is designed to survive alongside Poca, and our first bridging project is likely to bridge the two.

Q4: What major milestones have you achieved so far? Are there new partnerships and interesting cases?

Gavin: My personal proudest milestone is the first runtime upgrade. Polkadot and Kusama are designed as evolving, mobile protocols . I think Ethereum's "hard fork" idea is a bit flawed. A technology either develops or dies. I want to establish Polkadot as the least stable blockchain protocol to date. To this end, we write all the business logic of Polkadot into a platform-independent language called Webassembly and include it on the chain! This means that the logic of the chain itself can choose to upgrade itself. Kusama has gone through about 30 upgrades.

Synchronizing some of our test networks with Javascript is another great milestone. You also get a light client.

It's great to see the first Cumulus-based parachain running, albeit on a local test network.

Q5: I want to know the importance of parachains in Kusama's entire ecosystem. Can you explain what benefits developers can get after setting up parachains?

Gavin: Parachains can be thought of as "shards" of Poca. Purchasing a parachain (or rather, leasing-because you will get DOT back later) basically gets 1/100 (approximately, this number is not final!) Of the total computing power of Poca. Broadly speaking, this gives you two things: sharing security across Polkadot, and connecting the rest of Polkadot . It works similarly to deploying smart contracts on Ethereum, because you can get security and connectivity. The difference is that with Ethereum, users must pay Ethereum miners for each transaction they make in the app. With Polkadot, your users will never pay Polkadot validators. In addition, compared with smart contract systems, Polkadot parachains have much less stubborn opinions. As a developer, you have more freedom and performance is more or less at native speed. This has a huge impact on the types of applications it can support.

I think Kusama's ecosystem will evolve into a parachain-centric ecosystem.

Q6: The maintenance of the Polkadot network requires participants to play four basic roles: collator, fisherman, nominator, and validator. Can you tell us what each character means in the Poca Network?

Gavin: Validators are the simplest: they put a portion of their funds under staking in order to be selected as a network operator (currently 160 on Kusama). They produce and eventually confirm blocks, and are randomly selected as validators of the parachain. The nominees also take tokens, so there is also a risk of financial loss, but they "loan" to one or more verification candidates. As with the verifier's funds, as long as the verifier's behavior is correct, their funds are safe. If validators act maliciously and harm the network, they risk losing money. Phishers are basically "full nodes" that exist in the network to check whether the nominees and validators are operating normally. If they find that someone has done something wrong, they can report it and give them a reward. Finally, the collectors are those who operate the parachain. Polkadot does not really know or care about who these operators are, because they have no economic relationship with them. They exist to provide validators with "PoV" (Proof of Validity) blocks, which can then prove they are legitimate and include them in their blocks. Otherwise, the collector will run on its own (parallel chain) network and process transactions completely independently of the relay chain. Some parachains may have only one collector (for example, owned and operated by a private company). Some may have many whitelist collector nodes (for example, a consortium). Others may allow the interested public to organize them. Others may still need proof of work to become their collectors. Polkadot does not limit parachains in this regard.

Q7: What use does Kusama have in the real world? Where can we use Kusama? What types of problems can the Kusama network solve? What more exciting updates and partnerships do you plan for Kusama? Gavin: Kusama is a community-driven experimental version of Polkadot. Broadly speaking, it solves the same problems as Boca and uses the same use cases. The difference lies in its prospects and governance. As a community-led chain, Kusama is likely to attract parachain teams that are still prototyping, and maybe they do not need the more conservative guidelines of the Polkadot mainnet. As a member of the Kusama community, I hope to deploy some code (you can see it in Github if you want to see it) and ideas (this cannot be seen in Github), these codes should help everyone Discover something interesting.

Q8: What are the advantages and disadvantages of the experimental nature of the Kusama project?

Gavin: Kusama is Boca's crazy cousin: it gets more ideas and technology faster. It moves and develops faster and more violently. Sometimes it falls, sometimes it flies. Polkadot is the older sister, more stable and more reliable. Some applications require this guarantee, and others may not.

Q9: What do you think of Kusama and its ecosystem, and your plan for 2-5 years?

Gavin: I would like to see a coherent community based on distributed governance . I want to see it mimic the government of the nation state in some ways: treasury management, central bank-style currency management, defense and development spending, and even voting on external issues. Bitcoin has always had the idea of ​​"we are gold". Zero Governance (in fact, "opaque" would be more accurate because someone who has commit access to the Bitcoin Core repository has the power to change key parts of the agreement). It believed that currency should not be created outside the original regulations. This was both a remarkable feat (both praised by central bankers and modern economics), but it also missed the opportunity.

Kusama eases this limitation in some places. It does not want to be "gold", but rather actively operates its ecosystem, as well as its currency, monetary policy and national treasury.

Q10: To become a validator, one needs to contribute or vote for more than 40,000 KSM. Can you explain it?

Gavin: Just like Polkadot, there is a market-based mechanism for selecting validators for Kusama. NPoS is our reformed staking, which allows nominees to share the risks and rewards of validators in case the validators themselves cannot get enough votes. The Web3 Foundation has launched a "Thousands of Nodes Program" that allows those who do not yet have a good reputation to attract 40,000 or any number of votes to become validators and gain that reputation.

Q11: My question is that both Polkadot and Casper represent interesting new protocols. Could you please introduce the difference between the two, and is it possible to coexist in a mutually beneficial relationship in the future?

Gavin: The current Casper plan (I'm assuming you are referring to Serenity / Ethereum 2) has a lot in common with Polkadot. Both are scalable "sharded" designs that can randomly assign parallel work among a large number of validators. The main differences between them are twofold: Polkadot's goal is to evolve over time; Polkadot is heterogeneous and sharded. Heterogeneous sharding allows Polkadot to have domain-specific sharding / parachains that can do a good job (for example, plasma-style fast payments, fully secured stablecoins or anonymous coins). This is not to force all shards to become common smart contract style shards, and the performance of these shards is often much worse and the economy and execution environment are much stricter. Of course, some shards of Polkadot will also be these smart contract shards, but it is free to deploy case-driven shards.

I don't understand why the two cannot coexist, I can imagine seeing a bridge between them. In other words, when bridging between systems that do not share consensus, there will always be a degree of security loss.

Q12: As you said, Kusama is an early and highly experimental version of Polkadot. So, once Polkadot is online, why would anyone use Kusama instead of Polkadot? ?

Gavin: Right! Kusama will continue to be Poca's "Canary" network, experimenting with less certainty or some new technologies and ideas before applying it directly to Poca. In the long run, I hope that Kusama will adopt a more accommodative monetary policy, and adopt a more "happy just" approach to community investment and spending, so as to promote its positive development.

Q13: How will Kusama empower investors, companies, developers, and platform users to provide influential solutions and bring value to the world?

Gavin: Today, blockchain is a huge economic system. Kusama is an economic system with a governance priority; it is designed to make it accessible to the stakeholders it gathers. Real use stems from real utility. Of course, a large part of Kusama's role will come from technical efforts such as parachain, but I think there is enough room to further the use of the community, including general integration, better UI and application support. Back to the beginning of encryption: distributed and empowered (I think it was a bit forgotten in a silly attempt to attract a mainstream business audience).

Q14: What role does the Web3 Foundation play in Kusama? No one can achieve something valuable by themselves. Can you share your successful partnership?

Gavin: The Web3 Foundation is a relatively large holder of KSM, and Kusama is regarded as both an important strategic initiative (as a practical testing ground for Polkadot) and a key cornerstone for developing Web3 concepts. For the Polkadot mainnet, for example, the elements of community governance and Futarchy may be considered too aggressive. Therefore, a small portion of its non-substantial funds will be used to continue the development of Kusama, both in technology and in public-facing services, reflecting the role of its community and governing body.

Q15: As an investor, why should you invest in KSM tokens? What exciting updates and partnerships do you plan for Kusama holders?

Gavin: There are some initiatives I am interested in seeing for Kusama. However, rather than detailing each initiative and announcing a partnership that is almost always three minutes hot, even if it starts with the best intentions, I prefer to let the community judge us based on our actions and delivery. First and foremost, Kusama is a project based on a sincere desire to develop and advance blockchain boundaries . I don't know if this is a particularly "investor-friendly" proposal, but it is true. We are technical experts who dare to take risks, have achievements, and have ambitions. Time will tell whether our direction is good or bad, but the end of a partnership cannot save a bad team or stupid ideas. I think my 100 minutes are coming. Sorry I didn't answer everyone's questions, but I really have to go back to work and continue building the future.

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