Latest Advances on NEO — Operational Perspectives II: How to audit Neo with a $10 machine
First of all, it is impossible to not mention the great happiness in seeing the MainNet achieving blocks around 15s, without any forecasting strategy or consensus fine-tuning. As we previously mentioned on Latest Advances Part I:
“We imagine that everybody in the community expect the blocks to be carved always within 15s (one can surely expect a big improvement after 2.9.0 entering the mainnet, however, there is still some possibilities for ensuring a precise block time in most of the time). (…)”
The synchronization of these nodes happened around last Sunday, 20th of October.
Now, let's talk about Storage, a precious piece of our smart contracts logic.
Neo storage history
In the Blockchain, events should be reproduced concisely and precisely. For this purpose, states can be stored on the Blockchain.
For this purpose, NeoResearch team, in partnership with Erik Zhang, designed a Dump script for getting the state of Neo Blockchain Storage during the whole history.
A particular script, and a minor addition of 4 bytes overhead on the local storage items, is now able to provide us with the latest height in which a given storage key was modified (an useful tool for exchanges, digital identity and transparency). With this tool at hand, a simple-rpc-node is being used for re-syncing the Blockchain and generating all history of Neo storage during these last 2 years, published and being updated at https://github.com/NeoResearch/neo-storage-audit.
By using a simple droplet from Digital Ocean (Ubuntu 18.04.1 x64, 1 vCPUs, 2GB / 50GB Disk), that costs $10/month, we have been able to start the synchronization 13 hours ago. Now, we are around the block 1829000 and we expect that the process will reach the latest height in some more couple of hours/days.
Interesting facts:
- The first storage made available was around the block height 1444843;
- All storage's transitions can be summed up to 111MB (until block 1829000).
We believe that with these simple but useful initiatives Neo will keep its place as one the top blockchain systems.
Furthermore, considering the current advances and multilateral contributions from developers from all over the world, we keep our faith and efforts to achieve Da Hongfei's goal/mission of 100,000 tps before 2020.
