Siggi Óskarsson joins CoinGeek Weekly Livestream to fill us in about Teranode

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There has been much excitement about Teranode among BSVers in recent weeks. On this CoinGeek Weekly Livestream episode, Siggi Óskarsson talks to Kurt Wuckert Jr. about building it, how it differs from SV Node, its scaling limits, and other related topics.

Who is Siggi Óskarsson?

Óskarsson may not be as well-known as some other personalities in the BSV blockchain ecosystem, but he’s no stranger to it. He tells Wuckert he first got involved in Bitcoin in 2013, lost interest during the block size wars, and returned when the Bitcoin Cash split
happened.

After the split, Óskarsson got into BSV development. He has worked on TonicPow, Honā, and JungleBus, among other projects. He’s also deeply involved in the architecture side of things, having worked on Bitcoin Schema and open social protocols.

MAPI to Arc and SV Node to Teranode

Óskarsson and his team were tasked with creating MAPI 2.0, he tells Wuckert. They decided to create something that would outlast MAPI and scale massively. In doing so, they came up with a new transaction format that has implications for Teranode and scales better.

“Teranode is an absolute beast,” Óskarsson says. It will process any valid transaction you give it, and it only has to validate it once, dramatically simplifying the system.

The primary differences between SV Node and Teranode revolve around their architecture. While SV Node is a monolith, Teranode splits everything up and does all types of work separately. It also processes transactions differently, taking a transaction-first approach rather than a block-first one.

With Teranode, everything is sharded out except block assembly. Keeping the central machine that does that in sync with all the others has been the most challenging thing so far, Óskarsson says.

What does it look like at scale? What hardware is needed to run it?

Being a transaction processor himself, Wuckert is interested in knowing what sort of hardware setup would be required to run Teranode.

Óskarsson says there’s no concrete answer yet. However, 2,500 transactions per second could be done on a Macbook. To get to 50,000 would require a couple of servers.

A related question asks what the roadmap is after a million TPS. Óskarsson says things could probably be pushed to 6 million TPS, but it would require some reengineering after that.

Will adopting NAR and DAR mean BSV blockchain is accepted as the gold standard network?

Óskarsson says we need to think about what Bitcoin is: a timestamp server. We can do lots with one of those at scale, such as notary services.

However, for any of this to be feasible, law is required, and that’s what Connor Murray and his team have been working on with the Network Access Rules. They’re absolutely necessary, he says.

To learn more about why they chose AWS to test on, the secret to getting Teranode done, horizontal scaling, and whether this will help prevent so-called 51% attacks, watch the livestream via this link.

Watch: Teranode is the future of the Bitcoin network