PoP: The Blockchain is the Difficulty

Another way to understand proof of performance is that the blockchain itself is the difficulty.

In other words it is the actions of the network which are needed by other nodes in the network and by wallets which is what proof of performance measures in order to produce a block.

This perspective not only informs us about how Litheum is able to scale but also has implications for the subject of what's called now “Data Availability” or the ability for third parties nodes and wallets to receive data from the chain.

Because the rpcs are the difficulty, it's important that we only allow nodes to serve correct data. Serving incorrect data is considered out-of-consensus behavior and is slashable. A very helpful side effect of this approach is that it's much easier to communicate with Litheum as a network then for other stake based chains.

Data Availability under PoW

One very helpful side effect of the proof of work consensus is that the work can be independently evaluated by anyone even without fairly having access to the network. because the difficult has can be independently verified as containing a large amount of difficulty, if anyone has the block headers then with some reasonable assumptions it's easy to verify that a new block header or the current block header is Legitimate. and because it contains both half of the previous block and the Merkel root of the current block, these two cryptographic Primitives can be used to validate state.

Although this is a very clever mechanism, it's still suffers from scaling issue as it is difficult for a note or wallet to get such State including both block headers and transactions.

Data Availability under PoW

Proof of stake systems instead must rely on significant amounts of knowledge of the staking table to determine which validator sequencer or other node is permitted to create a state transition, I.E. block. Of course these proof of stake systems also suffer from the scaling issue which we've discussed.

Data Availability under PoP

Litheum on the other hand because the rpcs, I.E the network itself, is the difficulty, any data produced by nodes in the network is highly trustable as the production of falsified or incorrect data is considered a slashable offense as a necessary mechanism in the consensus.

By bootstrapping viaa this concept and including a list of nodes, i.e. the staking tables, via an RPC, Litheum enables wallets decentralized applications and nodes to communicate with itself in a more robust way which we will discuss in the next section.