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Jepsen: Radix DLT 1.0-Beta.35.1

jepsen.io

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Re: Jepsen: Radix DLT 1.0-Beta.35.1

#71
post #24
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you (new account) failing to disclose your conflict of interest here?

Happy to share I'm an advocate of this project and follow its developments closely

You're also financially involved, akin to a franchisee or a "member" in an MLM, and make money on providing staking services on this blockchain. It's fine, but it's important to put your comments in context: you will always tend to defend your overweight investment in this pyramid, while I never heard of it til today.

One of your recent-ish blog article for instance, that contrast (commercial vs technical) with the Jepsen report: https://www.radstakes.com/post/airdrops-incoming-radstakes-p...

And your statement of the 2% fee you seem to take on every staking: https://www.radstakes.com/post/radstakes-year-end-report

This report will not help your business, but you should pressure RDX Works into doing a new one on the next version rather than convince us we didn't read properly some quite shocking things in the first one :s

Re: Jepsen: Radix DLT 1.0-Beta.35.1

#72
post #5
post #4

I like the deadpan ‘radix claims 1.4mm tps; in testing, transactions at more than 1/s can cause slowdowns’ - impressive lack of eye rolling.

Slightly out of context, the 1.4mm tps test was during an earlier iteration of the sharded architecture (coming in 2023) whereas Jepsen were testing the unsharded mainnet.

But they wrote it in the present tense, said it was a world record even ! And how can you say an earlier iteration will come in the future, that seems like a crypto-truth bending like we see a lot :s

Admit it, they exaggerated and removed the statement to instead put it in a timeline now saying: Unlimited scalability and composability to carry DeFi into the global mainstream future with sharded, linearly scalable Cerberus consensus.

A much more reasonable statement /s

You can see a version here of the statement: https://web.archive.org/web/20210711084824/http://www.radixd...

1.4m TPS on a DLT : Radix' last consensus algorithm 'Tempo' publicly achieved 1.4m TPS in 2018, the current world record. The new algorithm 'Cerberus' is theoretically infinitely scalable

For me that means they pretended to have this throughput in 2018, before this "Cerberus" miracle that is infinite. So one could repeat on twitter at every opportunity that Radix is 1.4m TPS, world record, and "later" be "infinite" with Cerberus.

As they say in https://www.radixdlt.com/post/replaying-bitcoin, use the #1MTPS on Twitter to share your opinions. lol.

Re: Jepsen: Radix DLT 1.0-Beta.35.1

#73
post #8
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To Jepsen’s surprise, RDX Works asserted that phenomena such as aborted read, intermediate read, and lost writes do not constitute safety violations (in the blockchain sense). RDX Works claims that to describe these errors as safety violations would not be understood by readers from a blockchain background; this report is therefore “factually incorrect”. On these grounds, RDX Works requested that Jepsen delete any…

What Radix say is true though. In private DBs, reads from the DB node are considered transactions and need to follow the same rules as writes. But on public blockchains(ledgers) only state manipulation is what matters. For example, Metamask obtaining an address balance would be a transaction, but no one calls it that way because it doesn't modify the state.

I don't think readers with any kind of computational background expect to read FAILED writes. Apparently, neither does RDX Works - claiming to have fixed most of the issues.

Re: Jepsen: Radix DLT 1.0-Beta.35.1

#74
post #55
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious to hear which database is the winner from your perspective based on Jepsen's insight?

If you find out, let me know! Folks are always asking me "What database is best?" and I'm just shuffling my feet and going "Uhhhh, well, systems are really hard to build correctly, there's lots of tradeoffs, you probably want something with a proven replication model under the hood but so much depends on workload and operational characteristics beyond just safety... If you find a database you love please tell me abou…

I think it's a refreshingly mature section, And my hats off to you for going there. Unfortunately I don't think the typical reader who I really do believe loves Jepsen outrage porn is going there

Re: Jepsen: Radix DLT 1.0-Beta.35.1

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live outside the United States and have never seen mm mean anything other than millimeter

Meanwhile I live in the UK and it's completely standard for monetary quantities.

The Financial Times recently changed their abbreviation for million from “m” to “mn” to help screen readers. They would typically read an m suffix as metres; I guess the FT chose mn rather than mm so that screen readers would not say millimetres instead of million.

Re: Jepsen: Radix DLT 1.0-Beta.35.1

#76
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love for a highly reputable team or individual to test blockchains and their claims. However, the testing should be done in a way that respects the fact that blockchains are a different type of database and should be judged as such. For example, because of the blockchain trilemma, increasing transaction speed isn't always a good thing since it could sacrifice decentralization.

Right but there's a noticeable difference between claiming millions of transactions per second on your blockchain home page and having around 5 in an audit. Sure transaction speed isn't always a good thing, and 5 tps might be very good, but then it should be marketed as such and with a slower speed than competitors, rather than say it broke a world record, maybe ?

No offense but you and the people downvoting me don't seem to understand blockchains very well. If TPS is all that matters then there would be no need for a blockchain, just use a traditional database.

As someone who's been in the blockchain space for 8 years I've seen numerous scamcoins become popular because they lure people in with claims of high TPS. High TPS isn't actually that hard of a problem. High TPS with decentralization and security IS hard.

Case-in-point, blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum limit TPS on purpose specifically because they care about decentralization. After all, that's the whole point of a blockchain.

I would encourage you and the people downvoting to read up on a few things. 1) The blockchain trilemma. 2) Why Bitcoin and Ethereum limit transaction speed and block size. 3) Layer 2 Rollups (zkRollups) that offer an actual solution to transaction speeds without sacrificing decentralization.

In summary, my point is that judging a blockchain by the standards of a traditional database is like judging a traditional database by the standards of a filesystem. Sure they both store data and yes a filesystem might store data faster but there are other constraints that make them fundamentally different (like ACID transactions).

Re: Jepsen: Radix DLT 1.0-Beta.35.1

#77
post #68
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core ledger system lost committed transactions by choosing not to write them to disk before acknowledgement.

Isn't this is a rather common configuration for a distributed DB? Given one node dies before flush, you trust that the remaining nodes in the system will not die at the same time and live long enough to flush to their respective disks. It's a gamble yes, but depending on your environment the risk can be smaller than the benefits. For a blockchain ledger, you might want to choose the safer corner of CAP in that equati…

> Isn't this is a rather common configuration for a distributed DB?

In my experience it is not. Rather, aggressive fsyncing/O_DIRECT usage are common. The rationale for this is usually partition risk: better to durably log a write before propagating it than to potentially fail in propagating it and then be left in a position of having to either reactively fsync or hope that automatic flush-to-disk will persist your unexpectedly-sole possession of that update.

Re: Jepsen: Radix DLT 1.0-Beta.35.1

#78
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but there's a noticeable difference between claiming millions of transactions per second on your blockchain home page and having around 5 in an audit. Sure transaction speed isn't always a good thing, and 5 tps might be very good, but then it should be marketed as such and with a slower speed than competitors, rather than say it broke a world record, maybe ?

No offense but you and the people downvoting me don't seem to understand blockchains very well. If TPS is all that matters then there would be no need for a blockchain, just use a traditional database. As someone who's been in the blockchain space for 8 years I've seen numerous scamcoins become popular because they lure people in with claims of high TPS. High TPS isn't actually that hard of a problem. High TPS with d…

I agree TPS doesn't matter, what I'm saying is that honesty does ! Who cares, they could have claimed a record of 5 TPS and that would be it, why lie about millions, speak of a world record, and then launch an army of over-invested mobs fawning over it everywhere ?

We understand crypto very well: the goalpost is always changing for a solution looking for a problem. Yday you were probably telling everyone your investment was the best because it could handle a million per second, today you tell us we're idiot: TPS don't matter. So what matters, what is this thing good for ? It's no better than Ethereum and at least Ethereum can launch a tree of related scams so it has half a utility.

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