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Dialogue with Mina Protocol: Discover the charm of "lightweight blockchain"

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How is the world's lightest blockchain protocol implemented?

Original title: "Dialogue with Mina Protocol: Discovering the Charm of "Lightweight Blockchain""

Original source: Lianwen-ChainEvent

On February 9, Beijing time, the twenty-eighth lunar month, Coinbase, The Mina protocol, which Bixin invested in, made its debut in the Chinese community on the Bixin live broadcast. Mustafa Yilham, Bixin’s global business development director, had a conversation with Evan Shapiro, the founder of the Mina protocol. He was sought after by the Chinese development community and investors. Chain" for more charm.

Introduction to Mina protocol

Mina protocol is based on zero-knowledge proof ZK-SNARKs (Recommended by V God), the lightweight blockchain protocol can compress the size of the blockchain from hundreds of GB to an astonishing 22KB. End users can directly run and verify Mina's main network and nodes with their mobile phones, which is favored by developers around the world. The Mina test network has become the world's largest POS test network other than ETH 2.0. In 2021, Mina will continue to expand its popularity and community size in China.

Directly click on the dialogue

Mustafa : First of all, thank you Evan for participating in the Bixin live broadcast today. I believe many friends who are watching the live broadcast are very curious about you. Could you tell us something about your background and how you participated in encrypted digital assets?

Evan: I started paying attention to cryptocurrencies when I was in high school, and I was very Passionate about programming and very excited about the development of computer technology. I remember coding on my computer during class. My current co-founder, Lzaak Meckler, and I started talking about cryptocurrencies and speculating about the future. Later I got a Carnegie BSc in Computing and a MSc in Robotics. After graduating, I worked at Mozilla. Fast forward to a few years ago, Lzaak and I met again and had a spark because of our mutual attraction to cryptocurrency, and decided to try to make ourselves for the field. contribution.

Mustafa: Everyone knows that the Mina protocol is the most lightweight zone in the world The blockchain protocol, is only about 22kb, which is practically the size of a few lines of words on a social media platform. Can you tell us how this is achieved? What is the core technology supporting the Mina blockchain?

Evan: Of course, what we did with Mina was use a lightweight Replaces the entire transaction history with a zero-knowledge proof that is only about a kilobyte or a few tweets in size, so you only need to look at the small proof to know if the current state of the blockchain is correct. It is much easier to download the proof than the entire transaction chain, so Mina's pool of qualified validators is more inclusive, which is more conducive to decentralization and usability. The technique underlying Mina is zero-knowledge proofs, which were first proposed in academic cryptography papers in the 1980s. They have always been an interesting and exciting field, but it is only recently that zkSNARKs and their associated innovations have progressed enough to allow practical application of this established theoretical idea.

Mustafa: Why is it important to be a lightweight blockchain? How will this affect end users? Will every user with a smartphone be able to run a full node in the future?

Evan: Usually when you want to participate in a blockchain you have to download The entire chain to verify its correctness, which is what nodes do to reach consensus. As more transactions are added to the chain, the blockchain becomes heavier and the resource requirements of validating nodes increase.

So while the original promise of blockchain was to return power to the decentralized masses, in reality, this is not the case as mature blockchains are Continue to grow and develop. When the barriers to entry for running nodes are high, such as the need for a large amount of resources, relatively fewer and fewer nodes can participate, which reduces decentralization and ultimately makes the network more vulnerable to 51% attacks that affect security, this is not good.

Unlike first-generation blockchains with relatively "heavy chains" such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, Mina uses a chain length of only 22 kb, So participants can quickly synchronize the entire chain. Mina is designed to scale while retaining the highest levels of resiliency, privacy and security for users without compromising decentralization. Mina is also the first production system to implement recursive zero-knowledge proofs without a trusted setup. Essentially, Mina is built differently so that it keeps growing without any end user being able to participate in it anytime, anywhere.

Mustafa: As mentioned earlier, the core of the Mina protocol is Zk-Snarks( zero-knowledge proofs). Can you briefly explain what a zero-knowledge proof is?

Evan: The basic advance of a recursive zero-knowledge proof is this: I can simply Send a small proof to ensure "this is what I'm going to prove", but don't share any sensitive information, such as passwords. Recursive zero-knowledge proofs allow Mina nodes to quickly share and update proofs of the correct blockchain state throughout the network.

Mustafa: The Mina team is considering ZK-snark from the perspective of scalability, And "zero-knowledge proofs" themselves have been a very hot topic lately, in part because of their privacy-focused features. Due to recent events in the United States and around the world, people are increasingly concerned about their privacy. What type of privacy features will Mina provide?

Evan: Mina enables Snapps - "snark-based applications" or enables SNARK's general-purpose smart contract. They are Turing-complete like other smart contract languages, but since they are built on top of SNARKs, they have privacy and verifiability features. This means that user data can interact with Snapps privately. Snapps will also be able to operate with existing Internet verified private data, thereby unlocking a large amount of [existing Internet data] that can be verified through Snapps on the Mina main chain.

So, for example, users can securely prove private information to Snapp, such as providing their credit score or the amount of funds they have on their bank's website. The overall process can do this without exposing the details, just by computing them. For example, the system can prove that the user's base credit score is greater than a certain value.

Mustafa: What is your future vision for the Mina protocol? What type of applications do you think will be built on the Mina protocol in the future?

Evan: We hope to rely on the Mina protocol to achieve a more effective and fair future. Create a new internet that works for everyone, not just the tech giants. The way we achieve this is by allowing anyone to participate in governing the systems that power "decentralized applications" that are used to exchange ideas, value, and data. That's in stark contrast to today's internet, which is controlled and operated by the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon, whose business models revolve around collecting user data and then selling that data to advertisers for use in targeting specific ad campaigns.

The first step towards this goal is the accessibility of Mina to achieve decentralized access to the blockchain. The second part is Snapps, or Snarkified apps, which open up the possibility of a whole new class of apps. Snapps are functionally similar to decentralized applications (dapps) on Ethereum, but are superior due to three specific additional properties:

1 .Verify the accuracy of the data without revealing the content of the data

2. Verify that expensive calculations are performed correctly.

3. Significant scalability advantages

Combined with existing verification data on the Internet , which will allow Mina to act as a bridge between real-world data and the blockchain. Developers will be able to build Snapps that, for example, interact with a user’s credit score in a decentralized manner, while at the same time proving their participation in an online community or proving an off-chain transaction transferred in a specific way while ensuring privacy.

Questions from netizens

Mustafa: Yesterday Musk announced that he bought 1.5 billion bitcoins. What do you think, and how will it affect the development of the encryption industry?

Evan: Musk made me realize that the encryption industry is becoming more and more mainstream, Also began to have more and more players and institutions began to intervene. A question I often ask myself is: we have these resources, in which direction can we lead the encryption industry, my greatest vision is to lead the encryption industry to a more visionary place through Mina and the Mina team.

Mustafa: Does Mina support smart contracts, and what language does it use?

Evan: Snapps is already Mina’s smart contract, and we will do our best in the future To support javascript, and some other existing languages, it is convenient for developers to develop smart contracts on the Mina mainnet more easily.

Mustafa: The ultimate vision of Mina is that end users can use their mobile phones to run verification directly Mina's main network and nodes, when can this step be done?

Evan: We are ready from a technical point of view, and we need to develop more Many protocols and applications will take about 1-2 years

Mustafa: How can Chinese community members better participate in the growth and development of Mina?

Evan: Currently there are two most direct ways to participate, one is in China Friends in the community can participate in community building together. The second is the development and support of Mina technology.

If you are interested in Mina community development, you can enter Mina China official community to learn more.