State Channel, VM, Mempool and Performance Improvements

In addition to Bitcoin-NG’s Proof of Fraud, the new epoch release introduced a number fixes and improvements to state channels, Sophia, VM and mempool.

Last week a new release was uploaded to our GitHub repo. The release is focused on the Bitcoin-NG Proof of Fraud.

As we covered extensively in our previous post, the biggest contribution of this release is the Proof of Fraud (PoF) protocol that is responsible for reporting a malicious mining leader that creates forks in a generation.

In addition, this release implements numerous features related to state channels, mempool, Virtual Machine and performance. These updates:

Change the difficulty from a floating point number to an integer value as seen in P2P message PING, and node status.
Add a fixed gas limit per micro block.
Add fixed gas to all transactions (contract create and contract call transactions use the fixed gas plus gas needed for their execution).
Modify mempool to select transactions up to the gas limit per micro block.
Restructure the serialization format for headers by shrinking the version field to 32 bits, and by introducing a flags field in 32 bits.
Update the state channel’s Finite State Machine (aka FSM) so that it will now terminate if it detects that someone is trying to close the channel on-chain.
Add built-in functions String.length and String.concat for Sophia strings.
Fix a Sophia bug where None would match a Some(x) pattern
Add events (logs) generated by the VM to the call state tree.
Fix the AEVM CALL instruction to place 0 (as opposed to 1) on the stack if the value operand is not covered by the balance of the currently executing account.
Fix the Sophia AEVM primitive operations to check that the specified value is covered by the balance of the currently executing account — regardless of whether the value is used by the primitive operation.
Fix a bug that affected syncing of large generations (> 64K).
Move Sophia value encoding/decoding from AEVM bytecode to Erlang code. This affects consensus.
Make execution of some chain related instructions in contracts more efficient.
Make the TIMESTAMP instruction deterministic by using the timestamp of the current micro block.
Make the DIFFICULTY instruction deterministic by using the difficulty at the previous key block.
Make the gas cost of oracle VM primitive operations proportional to the TTL of the objects (oracles, queries, responses) on state trees.
Improve the stability of the user HTTP API.

Follow the development progress at Pivotal Tracker.

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