Editor's Note: This article comes fromPolkaWorld（ID：gh_6c4c2038ddba）, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from , reprinted by Odaily with authorization. At Polkadot Decoded, the first Polkadot community conference on December 3, Polkadot founder Gavin Wood and moderator Laura Shin had a fireside chat. The following are some dry goods summarized by PolkaWorld from Gavin’s sharing. This article is the first half of the sharing, mainly including Polkadot’s vision, Polkadot’s abstraction, parachain slot auction, and the difference between PLO and ICO. Half of the content will soon be published on the PolkaWorld official account. What is the vision for creating Polkadot? What problems is Polkadot trying to solve? Polkadot hopes to create a more general and abstract model to solve some problems in the blockchain industry. Bitcoin has opened the basic scripting language, Ethereum has expanded more financial transaction methods, and Polkadot hopes to create a more general model. On this basis, we also hope to solve some basic scalability issues, such as how to reach more transactions and how to handle a lot of work on the network. So these two topics are symbiotic, that is, versatility and scalability. Our vision is to "Make blockchain great again" and take the blockchain one step forward. We want to solve the existing problems we know. In fact, if we can travel back to four or five years ago, we will find that people were also talking about "how to process different transactions on multiple nodes" and "we really need to become more generalized". These are actually Polkadot's attempts to solved problem. Specifically what is generic and abstract? You said that Polkadot is a meta-protocol, can you explain what this means? The "meta" in the meta-protocol means transcendence, and the "meta-protocol" refers to the protocol that manages other protocols. You can build other protocols on the basis of it. It is the protocol of the protocol. I mention the meta-protocol here because it is a more low-level, basic, and simple protocol, and we will build those protocols that we generally think of on the basis of it. For example, the Bitcoin protocol is to distribute the blocks. When you execute and interpret the blocks, the transactions in the blocks are like some scripts, but the meaning is to send some bitcoins to a certain address. It is a protocol through which the nodes of the Bitcoin network know how to interpret these blocks, and it is essentially a language. But once you determine the agreement, it is like engraved in stone, it is difficult to change, improve, add new functions, fix bugs, it is very rigid. The meta-protocol is the lower layer of the protocol and defines the protocol. The advantage is that because the protocol is built on the basis of the meta-protocol, you can easily adjust it, just follow the rules of the meta-protocol, and the main protocol can adapt, evolve and iterate over time. Then the next question is "how to change or iterate the meta-protocol?". The idea is that we make it as simple and abstract as possible. We choose an existing and proven technology. Many smart people and stakeholders have discussed and concluded that "this may be the best way to do meta-agreement". So we chose WebAssembly because WebAssembly is pretty much the industry standard, it's been iterated. In the beginning there were actually two separate technologies, one built by Mozilla and one by Google, which came together to form WebAssembly. Because it has gone through many iterations, we are unlikely to need to change it, so it is a good foundation, we can build something on top of this meta-protocol, and define everything else based on it. This is the meta-protocol. source of agreement. So the Polkadot protocol, like parachains, governance, balance, Dot protocol, staking, etc., these things are constantly changing, but its bottom layer is an unchanging meta-protocol, which is why we chose a tested technology like WebAssembly . The meta-protocol is indeed mainly about flexibility and abstraction, because the Polkadot protocol is not very abstract on top of it, it has specific sharding, expansion logic, etc., it is still a collection of many viewpoints, and WebAssembly does not have any viewpoints at all, It's not even our point of view. "Meta-protocol + protocol" is a binary structure. In fact, the journey from Bitcoin to Ethereum and then to Polkadot is the same. Bitcoin is basically unprogrammable, while Ethereum is programmable, but the calculation model is very limited, such as gas, Dynamic gas prices, dynamic resource calculations, limited storage, etc. Polkadot has completely changed this model, because we have a parachain, which is more abstract and general. It is not just a small piece of code like a smart contract, but a whole parachain, which can do any block you can imagine Chains can do things that are much more abstract. Why is it much more abstract? You can implement a smart contract in the blockchain, Edgeware and Moonbeam are already doing this, but you can't build a blockchain in the smart contract in reverse, smart contracts don't have that much computing power, like You can't put shoes in your feet. So we say that Polkadot's model is more general than the smart contract model. Although this does not mean that parachains are more useful than smart contracts at any time, but anything you can do with smart contracts can be done with parachains, and not vice versa. Polkadot has a parachain, can you define a parachain, and the difference between it and a parathread? Parachains are card slots one by one, which are limited, just like the cores of computers. Now some computers have 6 cores, 8 cores or even more cores, and these cores can handle calculations for specific applications. For example, if you open a lot of windows, one core may be processing video, another core may be processing email, and another core may be playing music. They can do different workloads, and the same is true for parachains, but in the blockchain, one of the parachains may be doing smart contract transactions, another may be doing transfer transactions, another is doing governance, and the other is doing Staking is optimized, so multiple parallel chains can work at the same time in each time period. We use blocks to measure time, so we can do so many things at the same time in a specific block. Parallel threads are used when an application does not need to process transactions in every block, and may need to process every 10 blocks, that is, one transaction per minute instead of six seconds. But this time is also reasonable. After all, Bitcoin transactions sometimes take 1 hour, so 1 minute is enough for some applications. Parathreads are more suitable for these applications. Can you give an example, which applications are more suitable to use parathreads instead of parachains? One example is the oracle machine (Oracle). Some scenarios are uploading data from the outside world to the chain. For some types of data, uploading one every 6 seconds seems too much. For example, weather data may be uploaded every day or every hour. One time is enough, and it doesn't need to be uploaded at a very precise time. This scenario is very suitable for parallel threads. Another example is some traditional applications, such as an insurance company whose business is mainly in the United States. Generally speaking, people do not process insurance claims at 4 am, but usually during working hours during the day. Therefore, this type of business is also more suitable for parallel threads, because 60% of the time does not need to process transactions. Parachain card slots have a time limit, so what if an application built on those parachains, such as an oracle, wants to run forever? If you asked me this question a few years ago, there probably wasn't a good solution, but about a year and a half ago we came up with parathreads. A parathread is a pay-as-you-go parachain. It doesn’t work normally, it only works when you pay, but you only pay for one block at a time. If your blockchain doesn't work, then it's going to be hard to raise money to renew slots, but (losing slots) doesn't happen overnight, you have 18 months to convince people that your chain works, let you The token has value, so the lease can be renewed. You have 18 months to secure the next 6 month lease. Even if you can't renew your lease in the end, you don't disappear in a puff of smoke, your chain is still there, the applications on it can use passive data migration, and you can still use parathreads in a pay-as-you-go manner to keep running. It's like you bought a mobile phone number, the package fee is 50 US dollars a month, if one day you don't want to use the package, you can still keep the number, but change to pay by the call time, how much you pay. This question is concerned by many people on Twitter. When will the parachain slot auction be held, and when will you develop it? Before we know when the parachain will go online, we will not conduct auctions, because everyone needs to lock their DOT. It is not good if everyone does not know how long their coins will be locked. Therefore, the auction of the parachain will wait until we have tested the parachain on the chain (such as Kusama/Poca) to be launched. You proposed the concept of PLO (Parallel Chain Lease Offering), what is the difference between it and ICO (Initial Coin Offering)? How does it circumvent the regulatory issues ICOs face in the US?
