Gavin Wood shares JAM whitepaper update responding to DOOM on-chain operation controversy

Author: PolkaWorld Community

The March Tech Fellowship meeting took place last night, and PolkaWorld was the first to put together Gavin's remarks to help you stay up to date on the latest developments in JAM and Polkadot! Read on to see what Gavin has to say!

PolkaWorld Note: The Technical Fellowship meeting is a monthly online meeting for Polkadot, where most of the Fellowship members participate and share their work progress for the month! Essentially, you can learn about the hottest major developments in Polkadot during this meeting! The Technical Fellowship is a decentralized on-chain technical expert group for Polkadot and is one of the core contributing organizations to Polkadot's technological development.

Alice and Bob: Hi Gavin! Last month you sent us a video mentioning the progress of the command line interface and the related codebase you are developing. Coincidentally, just before and after the video was sent, I happened to see your live demonstration in person, and then some pretty exciting things happened. So today, I'm really eager to hear about your progress over the past month and what specifically has been happening behind the scenes.

Gavin: Well, the last time we were on the phone, I was on a JAM tour in Asia, probably on the way to Taipei or Hong Kong, and it was too late, so I took a video and sent it to you. I've done this tour for the past month and just returned from Chinese mainland a week and a half ago.

After coming back, this codebase has officially been integrated into the PolkaJAM code. I hope to release the binary version of this codebase before our next call, along with some tools that allow everyone to create their own PolkaJAM testnet and play around with it. In addition, we also plan to open source the CoreVM service and some related tools so that developers can truly start deploying their software on the JAM testnet.

In addition, I completed a quite important task, which is the release of version 064 of the Graypaper. The focus of this update is to provide a feature that allows you to more intuitively see what is happening on the JAM network — for example, the core on the chain, how many resources the service has consumed, how much gas has been used, etc. All these statistics will be directly recorded on the chain. Although it was possible before, it was particularly troublesome, requiring a lot of extra complex work and prone to issues. Now it's much simpler, with data directly recorded on the chain, updated once per block, and you can see it clearly at any time.

This feature sounds simple, but when I actually did it, I found it a bit complicated, harder than I expected, and it took a few extra days. But it's now completed, and you will soon be able to see this new version in the gray paper repository, which is expected to be officially released today or tomorrow.

This feature is particularly useful for the JAM Toaster project. Our team member Erin, who many of you may know, is currently working on a beautiful web interface, so you will be able to clearly see various data on the JAM chain in the future. This will bring some fun things; we can use it to do cool stuff, like the previously demonstrated DOOM game running on the chain, where we can see the on-chain activity data increasing in real-time while the game runs, which is very intuitive and interesting. In the future, we might also add metrics like TPS; although JAM itself does not have strictly defined 'transactions', displaying this type of information is quite useful for intuitively showing the level of activity on the chain, even if it does have a bit of a 'bragging' aspect.

Basically, this is what I have been busy with recently. Of course, there are some other small updates in the gray paper, and these activity statistics functions have also been integrated into the PolkaJAM code. Once the new version is released, everyone will be able to use it right away.

Alice and Bob: That's great, Gavin. I have two small questions: The first question is, are the statistical features you just mentioned similar to a debug output, or like a program log?

Gavin: No, it's not just simple debug output. You can think of it like when you usually use a Linux system and open a monitoring program that can tell you in real-time how much CPU resources are being used. Now we have similar functionality on the JAM chain. Without this new feature, if you wanted to see the operating status on the chain, you would need to deploy some dedicated nodes, which is particularly troublesome and unrealistic. Now it’s much more convenient; each node actively reports the details of the tasks it is performing (such as how much gas was used, the size of the data transmitted, etc.), allowing us to clearly see what each node and service is actually doing.

Alice and Bob: The second question is, last month you showcased running DOOM on-chain, and then there was quite a debate on Twitter about it for several days. Some people said that this doesn't really count as running on-chain, and the arguments got pretty intense. Would you like to take this opportunity to explain how you view this issue?

Gavin: To be honest, I’m not sure what those who say it’s not running on-chain are thinking. They haven't seen the real code (because I haven't made it public yet). I think they might just be keyboard warriors on Twitter, saying whatever they want without really understanding what we are doing.

DOOM is indeed running on the blockchain! Specifically, it runs inside a core of JAM, using our developed CoreVM service. You can think of CoreVM as a blockchain version of Docker, where the programs running feel no different from those on a regular computer. We ported the game code to this virtual machine, just like porting a game to Windows, Linux, or Mac, and then the game runs normally.

But I have to admit that DOOM on this chain is actually not fun, because the blockchain is slow to produce blocks, and it takes about 6 seconds to give a response, which makes the game experience not good. But our purpose in showing this is not to play games, but to prove that our JAM on-chain environment is powerful enough to have enough bandwidth and computing power to run ordinary software. That's the key.

Indeed, some have raised doubts, thinking that we are not really "on the chain" and even said that JAM is just a "Data Availability Layer (DA)". They really have no understanding of what JAM actually is. However, after more than a hundred Twitter debates, they have finally come to understand a little bit. In fact, what we are doing is much more advanced than other ecosystems, so it is natural for some to misunderstand and even take a negative stance to pick faults. In the future, there may be other projects attempting to imitate us.

As for the debate between on-chain and off-chain, I find it quite uninteresting. In fact, the core issue is very simple: "on-chain" means ensuring the security and credibility of the computing process through a decentralized approach. Traditional blockchains, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, require each node to compute the same data and programs, while JAM uses a protocol called ELVES that allows nodes to avoid everyone having to perform all the calculations, while still ensuring the security and consistency of on-chain computations. This method has been publicly disclosed and widely reviewed, and we believe it is the key approach for the future large-scale development of blockchain.

Those who are still struggling with "which node did what" can only accept the reality in the end: if the blockchain wants to really develop, it must reduce the workload of the nodes, and at the same time ensure the security and trustworthiness of the results through other means.

So that's basically what I've been busy with lately! Thank you!