Author: Kevin Primicerio, Cofounder of Pianity
Reviewer: Kyle
Discover how AO's holographic state revolutionizes blockchain scalability, leveraging Arweave's immutable logs for consensus without compromise. A new era of efficient, scalable decentralized computing is upon us.
The AO computer reaches consensus through a "holographic state," leveraging Arweave's immutable message log to bypass traditional scalability constraints. This approach marks a significant shift from established systems like Proof of Work and Proof of Stake, paving the way for a new era of efficient and scalable decentralized computing.
Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum employ consensus mechanisms for network participants to agree on the ledger's state, encompassing transaction validations, account balances, or smart contract outcomes.
Bitcoin pioneered decentralized consensus via Proof of Work (PoW), where miners solve puzzles to add new transaction blocks. This consensus ensures transaction history agreement, making unauthorized alterations virtually impossible without significant computational power.
Ethereum uses Proof of Stake (PoS) to achieve consensus through staking for transaction validation and block creation. This aims to reduce PoW's energy demands.
By requiring all nodes to validate and agree on each transaction or contract execution, these mechanisms often limit the network's speed and throughput, posing significant hurdles for scalability.
Layer 2 (L2) solutions have been pivotal in overcoming the scalability and energy consumption hurdles. While L2 solutions like rollups and sidechains aim to offload the transactional burden from the main blockchain to achieve higher throughput and efficiency, AO's model leverages the immutable storage capabilities of Arweave to ensure scalability and reduce computational overhead. This strategic alignment with L2 principles, albeit on a fundamentally different architectural level, emphasizes AO's commitment to enhancing decentralized computing.
Process states are not conventionally stored or agreed upon in the AO system. Instead, they're implied "holographically" via a log of Arweave-hosted messages. This ensures consistent output upon computation, even if network participants have yet to observe/compute it.
Therefore, a holographic state represents a process's status, inferred from an immutable message log on Arweave, without needing real-time computation or consensus.
This means that compute costs are delegated to users who can calculate their states or request execution by Compute Units (CUs). Using deterministic, metered Virtual Machines ensures that given the same inputs (the message log), the outputs (the state) will always be the same, regardless of who performs the computation.
The concept allows for unbounded resource utilization in processes, leveraging the lazily evaluated architecture principles of SmartWeave and Celestia.