CoinGeek Backstage: Steve Shadders discusses building Teranode for BSV

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In this episode of CoinGeek Backstage, Becky Liggero caught up with nChain CTO and chair of the Bitcoin SV Technical Standards Committee Steve Shadders, behind the scenes at the CoinGeek Conference in Zurich.

They discussed the future of mining clusters, as described in section 5 of the original Satoshi whitepaper, and the ongoing work in building the Teranode for the BSV enterprise blockchain, which will revolutionize the scaling debate by effectively removing all barriers to maximum transactions per second.

Shadders said miners will cluster and specialize in the future. He quoted Satoshi on server farms—Satoshi expected nodes would be run by many machines in a clustered environment, with different parts of the cluster working on different parts of the network. He said that one of the challenges in Teranode is working out this ideal distribution of workloads between machines, and making sure it all works properly.

Shadders pointed out that some jobs require huge amounts of memory, so some servers might be configured with loads of memory without storage or a heavy CPU. Whereas other jobs are CPU intensive, so distribute these to machines with different architectures for optimum performance. Shadders said Teranode is a flexible framework that allows you to distribute work between multiple different machines as required.

He said the BSV Node Infrastructure team had built the capability to distribute work, but also to be able to measure the results of that. But the engineering of Teranode doesn’t stop with writing the software—it’s all about capacity management and engineering, and managing that will be a full time job in future.

The Teranode project will bring huge scale to the BSV network. Shadders said if you have a throughput capacity of 50k transactions per second and all you need is more machines to double it or triple it, scaling becomes a non-issue. Teranode takes these limits on throughput and block size and completely removes them, allowing for unbounded scale on the network.

Shadders conceded that Teranode will never actually be finished—once it is up and running and doing the job as per whitepaper, there are always optimizations, better ways to do things, improved architectures and other opportunities for improvements. Yet people in mining and other industries that might make use of the framework would benefit from learning more about how it works, and should already be taking steps to improve their knowledge.