the day eight day of research, and today i finished the thought from yesterday. the research pages state three guarantees, but in security literature a guarantee is only ever the second half of a sentence. the first half is "assuming x." today i collected the x's.
assumption one, the chains themselves. every guarantee inherits bitcoins and ethereums own security. if bitcoin suffers deep reorgs, staking scripts and thier time-locks wobble with it. if ethereum halts, tbv redemption proofs have nothing to prove against. its the strongest assumption available in this industry.
assumption two, threshold honesty in the covenant committee. slashing execution requires majority consensus, wich means the slashable-security theorem holds only while a majority remains live and honest. the papers treat this as the residual human element the protocol works to minimize.
assumption three, watchfulness. the babe challenge procedure assumes someone honest is awake during the challenge window. the security holds if at least one honest observer catches a fraudulent claim in time. the cryptography doesnt need everyone honest, it needs someone attentive.
assumption four, economic rationality. eots makes equivocation reveal your key. an irrational actor willing to burn thier own stake to damage a bsn is deterred only by the size of thier loss. slashing is a price, and prices only govern people who do arithmetic.
now the synthesis. ordered by fragility, my reading is, watchfulness is the softest, committee honesty second, economic rationality third, chain security hardest. the multi-sigs, the caps haroon excavated, and the phased rollouts all cluster around the two softest assumptions. the scaffolding is built exactly where the theorems are weakest.
thats what a research-grade protocol looks like from the inside, not the absence of assumptions but the honest mapping of them.
tommorow i want to test how these assumptions compose when multi-staking stacks one coin across many networks.
@BabylonLabs_io #baby $BABY
assumption one, the chains themselves. every guarantee inherits bitcoins and ethereums own security. if bitcoin suffers deep reorgs, staking scripts and thier time-locks wobble with it. if ethereum halts, tbv redemption proofs have nothing to prove against. its the strongest assumption available in this industry.
assumption two, threshold honesty in the covenant committee. slashing execution requires majority consensus, wich means the slashable-security theorem holds only while a majority remains live and honest. the papers treat this as the residual human element the protocol works to minimize.
assumption three, watchfulness. the babe challenge procedure assumes someone honest is awake during the challenge window. the security holds if at least one honest observer catches a fraudulent claim in time. the cryptography doesnt need everyone honest, it needs someone attentive.
assumption four, economic rationality. eots makes equivocation reveal your key. an irrational actor willing to burn thier own stake to damage a bsn is deterred only by the size of thier loss. slashing is a price, and prices only govern people who do arithmetic.
now the synthesis. ordered by fragility, my reading is, watchfulness is the softest, committee honesty second, economic rationality third, chain security hardest. the multi-sigs, the caps haroon excavated, and the phased rollouts all cluster around the two softest assumptions. the scaffolding is built exactly where the theorems are weakest.
thats what a research-grade protocol looks like from the inside, not the absence of assumptions but the honest mapping of them.
tommorow i want to test how these assumptions compose when multi-staking stacks one coin across many networks.
@BabylonLabs_io #baby $BABY