pfrazee

Can we create a smart contract VM on nodejs using Dat?

Ethereum is a trustless network of VMs which run smart contracts submitted by users. It uses proof-of-work to synchronize state across the network, and has every node execute the contracts in order to verify the state's validity. Each transaction is stored in the blockchain for replayability. Read more about it here.

Ethereum's "trustless network" model has some disadvantages:

• Transaction processing is slow - it maxes at roughly 25tx/s right now for all contracts combined.
• Every transaction costs money to execute.
• The entire blockchain state must be shared across the computing network.
• No private transactions.

dominictarr

intro

we've had great success building modular database stuff on top of leveldb with node, but as I have learnt more about databases it's become apparent to me that the idea of a modular database would be better implemented at a slightly lower level.

Level db provides a sorted key:value store, which, because of the sorted property, many things can be implemented on top of. For example, for replication, or for consistent materialized views, we often need a write ahead log. This can easily be implemented via a batch write to level, and writing the log into a section of the leveldb key space which is treated as append only.

dominictarr

Git tracks the history of changes, but in a pm we don't really care about the history, at least not when we are installing. This is the properties that I think we do need.

• security: It must be possible to check the current deps, and know if a single bit has been flipped.
• replication: It must be possible to share that hash, and someone else would do pm checkout <hash> and get exactly the same code as you.
• determinism: If I install X, Y then Z, and you install Z, then X then Y, we should get the same dep tree. If those deps have deps that need to be shuffeled around, then it should do that and keep it always optimal.
• portability: package management is too hard a problem to roll another one for every language. They all suck, more or less. This should be usable for any language, or things that have dependencies.

max-mapper

Disclaimer: This is an unofficial post by a random person from the community. I am not an official representative of io.js. Want to ask a question? open an issue on the node-forward discussions repo

io.js - what you need to know

• io is a fork of node v0.12 (the next stable version of node.js, currently unreleased)
• io.js will be totally compatible with node.js
• the people who created io.js are node core contributors who have different ideas on how to run the project
• it is not a zero-sum game. many core contributors will help maintain both node.js and io.js