Status, the Ethereum-based messaging and wallet project, writes about Ethereum clients, the Nim language, secure messengers, and reproducible builds.
HN commenters link it for Ethereum client work like Nimbus Fluffy and the Ethereum Is Green post, and it comes up in discussion of Status's Nim sponsorship.
We did cover part of it here: https://our.status.im/status-partners-with-the-team-behind-the-programming-language-nim/
But to give more detailed explanations:
- We are a blockchain company and close partner with the Ethereum Foundation. Ethereum research is done in Python, using Nim allows to quickly transcribe research to fast code.
- We focus on resource-restricted devices; for now mobile phone but running a blockchain node on a router might make sense in the future as well, so we need tight control over memory allocation.
- We can reuse C and C++ tooling (Valgrind, LLVM Sanitizers, gdb, lldb)
- The biggest bottleneck we have (and all Ethereum clients have) is cryptography, using Nim means being able to reuse cryptographic libraries written in C or C++ or even using C++ templates with one of the easiest FFI or rolling our own implementation.
- WASM is going to be very important for blockchain development and the most important thing is generated codesize (because it lives forever in the blockchain), Go and Rust struggles with WASM codesize at the moment. Nim is very good at that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtsCwRjtbrQ
- Being the main sponsor of a language means also being able to shape it suitable for our needs from scratch.
So this was why we started using Nim in the first place.
The Nim team was started 2 years ago and the experiment is successful. For example, our Ethereum client was kickstarted by translating python to Nim with an automated tool:…
The crux of the article is that the front-ends are all routing calls through centralized APIs to get their message included on the blockchain. Infura and Alchemy don't do much. They just pass a JSON-RPC message to an Ethereum node running on their servers. There is some additional indexing services they provide, but there are many open, decentralized alternatives for that such as TheGraph Protocol. And it's not unfeasible for an application to run its own Postgres instance to index data from the ETH blockchain.
As for full-fat clients on normal mobile devices, the main issue is the data requirements. Running a full node can take hundreds of gigabytes. It is possible on light hardware. People are running Beacon chain nodes on Raspberry Pis. But you do need the storage and that tends to be scarce on mobile.
Meanwhile, the Ethereum core devs are aware of this issue and are actively working towards it. They shipped the Altair hard fork this year that has adds sync committees which make it possible to do without needing the whole chain history (using merkle trees): https://github.com/ethereum/annotated-spec/blob/master/altair/sync-protocol.md#introduction
The light clients to follow from those improvements are forthcoming but here is one in progress:
https://our.status.im/nimbus-fluffly/
The status blog has some good posts covering daos+communities/wallets/zkproofs/clients => https://our.status.im/
https://www.youtube.com/c/ETHGlobal has lots of recordings of talks from their hackathons, their playlists split into different topics
https://www.radicalxchange.org/# is full of interesting discussions, organises meetups, more big picture discussions of the stuff web3/crypto is playing with
I enjoyed this conversation with Stuart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalogue) from a few years ago, it lays the ground of what then became NFTs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLGZdLpHl1w
https://ethereum-magicians.org/ is a more technical forum to discuss eips
https://interdependence.fm/ is a good podcast from some musicians interviewing people in the space.
https://twitter.com/dhof Dom (creator of Vine) is constantly pushing novel toys on chain, i enjoy his playful approach to making stuff less serious.
really though its a "get involved to understand" scene/subculture. if you can ignore the noise of markets/speculation/capitalism its a fun crowd poking around. Theres all sorts from content/identity/scaling/money stuff/games. it feels like playing an mmorpg. at some point it'll hit its eternal september moment but its been really great the past few years.
"We plan to make a significant carbon offset to mitigate the environmental impact of this NFT. Within one week of the closing of this auction we will update this page with details of the steps we took."
Every action we take has tradeoffs. Everyone acts hoping that they can bring more good to the world than bad. Thats not to say we shouldn't be critical of decisions people make, but the moral panic around nfts is overblown imo. There are solutions being worked on [1] and the upside to addressing coordination problems[2] is huge.
Or, as the saying goes, "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater"
[1]https://our.status.im/ethereum-is-green/
[2]https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
"Miners have strongly opposed this change, as it will significantly decrease their revenue, and they have even went as far as creating a website dedicated to stopping its integration. The currently listed mining pools on this website that are against EIP-1559 far exceed the required 51% hash power."
See also:
- https://our.status.im/vitalik-escalates-eth-2-0-merge-as-miners-plan-a-51-attack/
... as featured here:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26441399
> it is a simple perception that Status might disappear tomorrow for any number of reasons, and then what happens to Nim?
Status only started sponsoring Nim in 2018[1]. Before that Nim was doing just fine. So the answer to your question is: nothing is going to happen to Nim if Status disappears.
1 - https://our.status.im/status-partners-with-the-team-behind-the-programming-language-nim/