#dusk $DUSK Once encrypted, how does the verification node know that this transaction is real? I originally thought you had to either sacrifice speed and verify slowly, or have every node obtain the plaintext—either way felt awkward.
Later, I pulled up and reread Dusk’s Succinct Attestation consensus mechanism, and only then did I realize it didn’t follow either of the two paths I had imagined. It uses a kind of foldable proof aggregation: the partial proofs produced by multiple validators can be compressed into a single compact piece of evidence, and in the end the chain only needs to keep that one. That means the verification process itself is distributed, but the on-chain footprint is minimal.$SPCXB
Compared with the traditional PoS approach where each validator separately broadcasts its signature and then a bunch of signatures get stuffed into a block, this idea saves not just computational power, but mainly bandwidth and state bloat. One of the worst things for privacy chains is that encrypted data itself already grows in size, and then you add a pile of redundant signatures—nodes simply can’t keep up. DUSK’s design effectively optimizes “consensus overhead” and “privacy overhead” separately, so the two lines don’t conflict.
What it truly solves isn’t “whether consensus is fast,” but rather making sure the verification cost for a privacy chain doesn’t grow linearly with the number of participants—this is basically a must-answer question for scenarios like regulated finance, where there may be dozens or even hundreds of potential participants.$AKE
Of course, I don’t think it’s perfect either. Once the aggregation proof’s generation process has any loopholes, an error from a malicious node could get “packaged” into the final evidence, making accountability harder than in the traditional model. And in extreme network partition scenarios, the publicly available test data still isn’t sufficient.
Can the consensus efficiency of a privacy chain really be both fast and verifiable? Let’s discuss your thoughts in the comments.#dusk @Dusk