Mina: Lightweight, Constant-Sized Blockchain | Hacker News Reader

Mina: Lightweight, Constant-Sized Blockchain

github.com

20 pointshliyan5 comments

I am very concerned about invisible inflation from unauditable chains. Mina throws away a great deal of information when committing to the blockchain. We have an opportunity to catch zero knowledge proof exploitation on say zcash or monero because the tx is recorded. But the risk still exists, and with Mina whole classes of exploits are additionally undiscoverable.

How do I know the developers don’t have a trapdoor that enables minting coins out of nowhere?

What does this enable for end users? Faster or cheaper transactions?

It seems incredibly marginal if it just compresses the chain itself more. Seems like something the other chains could adopt piecemeal (more feature than a product). But perhaps this is just a hobby project so I expecting too much.

The simplicity of Mina offers relative long-term peace of mind and fairly instant direct control if ever needed. Simpler, more likely, more secure.

My problem with the stubborn way the mina project is presented is that they deflect scrutiny away from the performance stats too much and makes them look suspect. Because to them the low count of full-nodes and slow TPS don't matter, the simplicity of validators/nodes trumps all in their mind and leaves them with no concerns. Their cagey approach just makes it harder to work out anything, which degrades trust.

As someone who just found out about the project space today via podcast [1] I much prefer their competitor solana's open approach where they are data heavy upfront and even show [2] their concerns of the current number trends. They say the utmost simplicity is a moot point as you have to jump in and trust someone at some arbitrary point, it doesn't matter if trust goes all the way back.

[1] https://blockdebate.buzzsprout.com/767033/6993889

[2] https://solanabeach.io/validators

Not to be confused with Mina: blazing fast application deployment tool (https://github.com/mina-deploy/mina)

Curiously, the "Mina whitepaper" has no mention of "Mina", as the project was still called "Coda" when they wrote it.

This is one of the very few blockchains written in Ocaml.

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