All right, let's get technical.
When distributed ledger technology gets mentioned, most people immediately think of blockchains.
That's likely because blockchains are the most common type.
And while debate rages around, Ethereum's merge over the pros and cons of proof of work
versus proof of stake consensus mechanisms on blockchains.
There are alternatives which use a different data structure like Hedera Hashgraph.
So how does it work and can the differing systems talk to one another?
It sounds pretty complicated, but thankfully we have SeaWorld's labs, principal software
engineer Danno Ferrin, who's an expert on these things on hand to help explain.
So Danno, tell us how the directed a cyclical graph structure that Hedera Hashgraph uses
differs from the more well known blockchain type.
One of the big differences between hashgraph and a traditional proof of work or proof of
stake BFT is there is no block leader.
There's no one person in the stake who is.
Everyone agrees.
Okay, surprised it's your turn to make a block.
You get the transactions, you put it in, we'll decide if we like it.
There's no such step in hashgraph.
Everyone's listening to everyone's transactions.
We gossip around what we've seen, and so we pass around hashes and include your history
and someone else's history.
And so from that, with some virtual voting and a bunch of really fancy math, we come
up to a very fixed ordering of the absolute ordering of the transactions without having
to engage in the block production process.
So there is no memory pool.
You don't have to reach in the memory pool and figure out which ones you like and fill
up a block to a certain limit and worry about the backlog.
It's what everyone's seen.
That's the order and that's the order you process the transactions in.
Of course, one of the problems with ecosystems using different technologies comes when they
need to talk to one another.
Your team has focused on increasing the compatibility between Hashgraph and the greater Ethereum
ecosystem.
How important are such projects to the continued growth of the DeFi space?
So one of the things that helps the DEFI space is it gives a common basis to programming
code on, you know, they don't need to care about are you using proof of work or proof
of stake or hashgraph because that's not the the layer that they access their token with.
All they care about is that there is a consensus algorithm that works.
And so they would write their smart contracts on a system that assumed that works underneath
it and work with it.
So I think it's vitally important because now we have all of these projects are writing
in a fairly agnostic way for all of these smart contracts and using a common language
that is abstracted out that the layer beneath it.
One of the complaints you hear often in the blockchain world is that interfaces in different
systems are clunky and not exactly user friendly or intuitive.
So how do you make that aspect better?
So the criticality of the user interface is it's a common, you know, it's like driving
a car, you have a steering wheel and a stick shift and two pedals.
Who cares if it's electric or diesel or if it's got four wheels or, you know, four wheel
drive or two wheel drive, you get in and you can mostly drive at the same it's the same
interfaces.
There might be minor changes which side of the car the steering wheel is on, which will
give you hints as to which side of the road to drive on.
But at the end of the day it's mostly the same.
And where those things are slightly different, it gives you the hints whether things need
to change.
Getting back to the fight over proof of work versus proof of stake.
As someone who's been involved in the Ethereum core development, what's your take on Ethereum
Miner Chandler Guo's push to retain the API.
So this is a bit perplexing to me because from the very first day, from the day of the
Genesis block of the Ethereum Internet, they've said we want to transition to proof of stake.
So I find it perplexing that people who knew this the whole time, you know, about a month
before the things are going to change, that's when they decide that, no, we're going to
do a work with proof of work.
Instead, from a project planning perspective, if they were serious about it, they should
have started it.
The moment that we started successfully forking our test nuts, that's the moment they should
have done it when they saw that, you know what?
This is really going to happen because you don't want to start it too early because,
you know, people won't take it seriously.
But unfortunately, I think they've started it too late for it to take effect.
The miners issue has been that rigs will be rendered useless by the merge.
Is a fork really the only solution?
And if they do manage to get those plans together, what could the future hold for them.
As far as making use of their assets?
I think there's a lot of great places they could put it without having to try and marshal
the new fork coin.
So looking at what I've seen from it right now, I don't think it's got the organizational
oof to succeed.
So I'm not I'm not terribly worried about it.
But people also thought Ethereum Classic was dead for about a week after the fork and it
suddenly came up and started mining.
So it's really hard to predict these things and if they're going to get the engineers
together to make it work, you know, there's really no reason for us to get in front of
it, to stop it.
But everyone, all the major exchanges that have seen all the major DeFi projects, they're
doubling.
Dowden saying the proof of stake fork is what we're going to be going forward on.
That's what we're committed to.
That's what we're going to service and respect.
So as far as community adoption, you know, if you want to continue to mind the old chain,
it's not going to have the same the same utility as the main chain.
All right.
Thanks a lot for that, Danno.
That was Danno Ferrin from Swirlds labs.
All right.
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