Reversing technology? Aptos and Sui are actually alliance chains

By: Whistle

**This is Whistle's 2nd post about why Aptos and Sui don't work. **

Interview | Beichen Guests | Steven

Whether it is capital endorsement or technical endorsement, Aptos and Sui are very capable. But** they actually have no blocks, no chains, and no future. **

This episode of the podcast invites technical expert Steven, who interprets Aptos and Sui as a distributed network from the perspective of a communication engineer. The final violent argument is that their technical logic is untenable. **

Here is the condensed text version:

Bei Chen: Before the formal chat, please introduce yourself first.

Steven: I am a technician who has worked in communication for 20 years, and I have a certain understanding of distributed systems, and all blockchain technologies can be analyzed from the perspective of distributed systems. I hope my point of view It will be helpful to everyone.

Bei Chen: Let me add something. Steven is a technical expert who often makes violent comments on the blockchain. This time, Steven is invited to systematically analyze some public chains for us. This will be a series. Today, we will start with several public chains of the Move language ecology. rise.

**Steven: **My violent theory is that Sui is not the right direction for the blockchain. What is strange is that in the past year, no one has pointed out that Sui, Aptos, and Linera, the three public chains from Meta, have problems, but the problems are actually obvious.

**Beichen:**This is also a point of confusion for me. People in the currency circle seem to be quite ignorant. For example, after the appearance of Dfinity before, many technical people in the currency circle were very excited. They felt that its narrative was very grand and could solve many problems. problem, but in fact that is the story of cloud native, Microsoft and IBM have been doing it for many years.

Steven: It’s like this. Most of the technical people in the currency circle are software engineers. What they care about is whether new functions can be realized. **Move language runs more efficiently and is driven by capital, which is enough.

And I am a communication engineer, and I see the blockchain as a distributed system, and I am concerned about the status of each part of the system and the overall efficiency and security of the final formation, so I can see some big problems. **

For example, the CTO of Solana used to be in the same company as me, so he made Solana as a communication engineer, and I, who is also a communication engineer, can understand the starting point of those technologies at a glance. If you let cryptographers look at it, then there must be another view.

In addition, I think that no one criticizes Aptos and Sui is the wrong direction, because the capital behind them is too strong.

Bei Chen: So no one dares to say it?

Steven: It’s not that I don’t dare, but ordinary software engineers don’t need to care about this, while communication engineers either have conflicts of interest, or don’t care about it at all.

But I think someone in this industry should stand up and point out which projects have advanced technological progress and which projects are purely for cutting leeks.

Now the blockchain industry is caught in a dilemma - since Ethereum, there has been no new technological paradigm. It is a relatively dangerous signal for the blockchain, but for such a long time, capital has been busy cutting leeks, and technology is also catering to capital to do work in this area. Of course, leeks are purely following the trend.

** Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin not to do these things, but a continuation of the cypherpunk movement, using technological progress to promote social progress, so as to avoid the erosion of personal freedom by large centralized institutions. **But the current circle is reversed. A small number of skilled people are exploiting and plundering most people with lower skills than him. This is by no means Satoshi Nakamoto's ideal.

Beichen: Let’s start with the first question. Many people are optimistic about these public chains using the Move language because they think it solves the pain points of the blockchain. So do you think the Move language is better than the solidity language?

Steven: There is no comparison between Move and Solidity, because their foundations are different, so it is impossible to say which one is better.

Solidity is a compiled language for Ethereum, which must be executed in the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It is a Turing-complete language. Of course, there are many problems with it, so I won't go into details here.

The Move language is a language created by Facebook when it was working on the Libra project. It is written based on the Rust language. Libra is essentially a standard consortium chain, and all nodes are officially admitted nodes, so the Move language is for the consortium chain. Born, it inherits the hardware resource management of the Rust language, has good parallel capabilities, and then programs resources on the type level.

Rust is a compiled language, while **Move language is an interpreted language, which was later inherited by projects such as Aptos and Sui, but the technical logic of these projects is problematic, which determines that it has no future technically. Language itself is irrelevant. **

For the public chain, the Move language is not a good language, because if you leave projects such as Aptos and Sui, the Move language cannot be used

Beichen: For developers, the Move language is still very attractive.

Steven: The attractive ones are Aptos and Sui. You must use Move language to do projects on them, but Move language cannot run on other blockchains.

**Beichen:**Then, do products developed on these Move language public chains have advantages over other high-performance public chains (such as Solana)?

Steven: It has nothing to do with language. All public chains starting from Libra are problematic, and this is the root of all problems.

Beichen: Let’s compare the technical characteristics of the three Move language public chains, Aptos, Sui and Linera. Which one do you think may be more technically powerful now?

Steven: They are public chain projects, but they are not real blockchains. In other words, the direction of the public chains they represent is very bad, which will lead the entire blockchain world to a negative technological trend.

Their entire system is inherited from Libra, and there are improvements on this basis, but not much. There are relatively few technical materials published by Linera. I mainly talk about Aptos and Sui.

Beichen: That’s before talking about Aptos, so let’s talk about Libra first.

**Steven:****Libera is an unfinished product, it is a relational database with a version number, **just use the transaction as a carrier, record the transaction and then output the result and the ledger status Distributed transaction settlement system.

Note that it will update the ledger status every time it trades, which is completely different from the traditional blockchain. The blockchain ledger will only add new fields, and will not modify the existing fields.

**This global state control method is suitable for alliance chains, not for public chains. **Since its high performance comes at the expense of decentralization and security, it is enough to add a little cryptography to the centralized system, and there is no need to use blockchain.

Beichen: So you think Aptos, which has inherited Libra, is not necessary?

Steven: Aptos will have some good designs in actual use, such as the private key can be changed after the account address is generated, the wallet can be restored with multiple signatures, etc. It is the same as the account restoration of traditional banks, but these functions are realized It will bring greater security risks, because there are logical problems in the data structure, which lowers the security level of the distributed system.

Beichen: Specifically, what operations did Aptos cause the security level to drop?

**Steven:**Aptos’s accounting method is to use the key value in the entire account as an operable data structure, and then set up a timestamp to arrange the execution order on the blockchain, without forming a wide range of miners. consensus.

**This is the approach of the alliance chain, which treats all nodes as a cluster for management, and its shared memory pool protocol is equivalent to the buffer zone in the traditional business cluster. **So although Aptos improves the operating efficiency, it is easy to be attacked, because the timestamp is proposed by the Leader in the validator (validator), and the block time is easy to estimate.

Although all BFT algorithms have this security risk, other public chains that use BFT algorithms are more cautious. For example, after Ethereum is converted to a POS mechanism, all mining nodes also use BFT algorithms in the merge stage, but All nodes are at the same level, and random numbers determine which nodes will package all transactions, so as to ensure the security of the entire chain.

Therefore, the basic logic of the data structure for parallel processing claimed by **Aptos is incorrect-it does not determine the order of the front and back according to the linked list structure, and determines the global state in a packaged manner. There are no blocks at all, and there is no Without the chain, it's just a relational database. **

This is why Aptos can modify and delete data, because it is not a blockchain, just like a traditional relational database.

Aptos is a group of server clusters of Web2 vendors to provide services for everyone, but in order to make it look like a blockchain, state control is added to each operation. In this way, the efficiency will definitely be high, but it must be controlled The number of nodes, because if there are too many nodes, the efficiency of state synchronization will drop.

**It can be said that Aptos removes the decentralization and security in the impossible triangle of the blockchain, so the efficiency is meaningless. **

Bei Chen: Next, let’s talk about Sui.

Steven: Both Aptos and Sui have a similar problem, that is, not all nodes need to reach a consensus.

Aptos is at least trying to move closer to the blockchain on the basis of Libera (although it can't change the essence of the alliance chain), **Sui will showdown directly-I am a distributed smart contract execution platform, and the block chain The chain doesn't matter. **

Sui divides transaction attributes into simple transactions and complex transactions. Simple transactions only need to be signed to end, while the so-called complex transactions only require Byzantine consensus. In other words, as long as any transaction can be submitted in the system, it can theoretically be verified independently, and in the end it is just a state synchronization. This is really self-discipline, no different from traditional clusters, so the efficiency must be very high.

Therefore, **Sui did not adopt the usual way of blockchain to deal with data consistency. This is not innovation at all, but directly abandons the most basic consensus of blockchain. **

Beichen: So is it necessary to increase state control in the distributed clusters of the traditional Internet?

Steven: No need, just ensure that the data on all servers is consistent.

Beichen: Then Aptos and Sui add state control, does it have any effect on security?

Steven: It has a certain effect, but the effect is not very strong. In theory, it will definitely be attacked. Hackers can attack as long as they can control a small number of miners. But to be honest, this kind of situation is unlikely to happen, because Aptos and Sui will strictly control the entry threshold and number of nodes. It can only be said that the possibility of doing evil is much greater than that of traditional blockchains.

Beichen: So I can understand it as just a blockchain-like distributed network, not a blockchain?

Steven: Yes, **is a blockchain-like cluster system, but adds a certain state control to each operation. **This is inherited from Libra, so whoever is technically stronger, Aptos or Sui, I can only say that Aptos has done more things on the basis of Libra, while Sui is closer to Libra in its original state, I can’t say which one stronger.

Although Solana also sacrificed the security and decentralization in the impossible triangle, at least it has made a little innovation, and abides by the basic principles of blockchain global control and consensus algorithms. Aptos and Sui are directly a traditional relational The database abandons the basic nature of the blockchain.

Beichen: All Move-based public chains are essentially alliance chains?

Steven: Yes, and Sui doesn't want to pretend to be a public chain.

Beichen: The domestic use of the alliance chain is mainly out of compliance considerations. I feel that it is a transitional product that will eventually die out and will soon die out.

In short, different people will pay for different IQ taxes. The narratives of Aptos and Sui are very appetizing to those in the Web2 world, because they can only understand these things, they may not even agree with the logic of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and feel that it is an illusory vision, and the technology is not It is far behind Web2. At this time, a high-performance public chain appears, and they will feel "this thing is good" out of an instinctive sense of intimacy.

**Basically every bull market will attract a new wave of people who just came from Web2, and their IQ tax is basically locked in the two categories of "high-performance public chain" and "large-scale easy-to-use products", but life The cycle is destined to be short. **It is undeniable that although it is an IQ tax, it can indeed attract hot money to the industry.

I came into contact with a capital some time ago. They are laying out the Sui ecology. The logic is relatively simple and rough, that is to say, the Sui ecology will definitely have a DEX or other basic packages, so you only need to vote for the top one or two in the first batch. , there will be good returns.

How should I put it, there is indeed nothing wrong with it, but these so-called "high-performance public chains" have a life cycle, and they are not a real order exporter. They can only undertake the hot money of Web2 and the technology of Web3 , to make a wave of quick money. **EOS is like this, BSC, Solana, etc. are like this. For example, I think Solana is not dead yet, but she is already brain-dead, so she can actually be declared dead.

Steven: They didn’t understand the essence of the blockchain, and didn’t seriously look at the bible of the blockchain world—the Bitcoin white paper, and even Satoshi Nakamoto’s thoughts in the previous emails. How to solve problems that traditional systems cannot solve.

Beichen: So how do you see the future of Aptos and Sui?

Steven: To be honest, this is more difficult to predict. **Technology doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t delay making money. **I think they are tools for harvesting the big capital behind it, so it ultimately depends on how long the capital can last (if FTX does not fail, Solana can also last).

**Aptos and Sui are technically projects developed from Libra's corpse, directly using the existing technology as a selling point and building a project. **

Just to put it simply, what technology do I have, so I use this technology as a selling point to design a system, which cannot solve the problem of landing in any scene. If you do it without thinking through it, it is definitely not correct, so I personally think that they have no future.

Active participation in a short period should have good benefits, but it is not the right direction for the development of blockchain technology, and even has a reverse effect.

Beichen: Aptos and Sui are not talking about capital’s conspiracy or bureaucracy, but most of the participants (from project parties to capital to developers, media, and retail investors) really believe that it represents the blockchain s future. It should be said that it is the wishful thinking of a group of people who have just come to the Web3 world from the Web2 world.

Let's stop here today, can you summarize all the views today?

Steven: To sum it up, **All these projects of the Libra series use the technology of the alliance chain to make the public chain. This is a technical degradation, and the technology itself is untenable. **