serai/docs/protocol/In Instructions.md
Luke Parker c182b804bc
Move in instructions from inherent transactions to unsigned transactions
The original intent was to use inherent transactions to prevent needing to vote
on-chain, which would spam the chain with worthless votes. Inherent
transactions, and our Tendermint library, would use the BFT's processs voting
to also vote on all included transactions. This perfectly collapses integrity
voting creating *no additional on-chain costs*.

Unfortunately, this led to issues such as #6, along with questions of validator
scalability when all validators are expencted to participate in consensus (in
order to vote on if the included instructions are valid). This has been
summarized in #241.

With this change, we can remove Tendermint from Substrate. This greatly
decreases our complexity. While I'm unhappy with the amount of time spent on
it, just to reach this conclusion, thankfully tendermint-machine itself is
still usable for #163. This also has reached a tipping point recently as the
polkadot-v0.9.40 branch of substrate changed how syncing works, requiring
further changes to sc-tendermint. These have no value if we're just going to
get rid of it later, due to fundamental design issues, yet I would like to
keep Substrate updated.

This should be followed by moving back to GRANDPA, enabling closing most open
Tendermint issues.

Please note the current in-instructions-pallet does not actually verify the
included signature yet. It's marked TODO, despite this bing critical.
2023-03-26 02:58:04 -04:00

356 B

In Instructions

In Instructions are included onto the Serai blockchain via unsigned transactions. In order to ensure the integrity of the included instructions, the validator set responsible for the network in question produces a threshold signature of their authenticity.

This lets all other validators verify the instructions with an O(1) operation.