Rebitrum Design
Design parameters
Looking at the business requirements from the chapter before, Rebitrum needs to meet the following requirements:
1. Robust and secure: built on a proven and secure blockchain.
2. Fast and scalable.
3. Includes decentralized consensus mechanism.
4. Provides extensible smart contract support, without a Turing-complete instruction set.
5. As immutable as possible (Block anchoring enabled.).
Each of these design principles is described in detail below.
Robust and Secure
Bitcoin Core is the most robust and longest running blockchain in the world. It has been operating with no disruptions since the genesis block in January 2009. Furthermore, from a security standpoint, Bitcoin core has proven itself to be most secure blockchain with no security incidents, while securing the crypto asset with the highest valuation in the world, that is, Bitcoin (BTC). As of this writing, Bitcoin Core successfully secures $150 billion worth of crypto assets, or 68% of the crypto asset market capitalization. The proven security and robustness of the Bitcoin Core made it the blockchain of choice for Rebitrum base for extension. Rebitrum is built based on a fork of Bitcoin Core 0.18, specifically v0.18.1.
Fast and Scalable
One of the proven disadvantages of the Bitcoin blockchain has been the slowness of transactions on the chain. Furthermore, scalability has become an issue as the number of blocks on the chain increase. In order to implement a blockchain with the required speed and scalability, Rebitrum fork of Bitcoin Core will include the following improvements:
Block time: 30 seconds
Block size: 16 MB
These improvements provide a transaction rate of over 2,200 transactions per second (tps) while maintaining manageable compute and bandwidth requirements to allow for decentralized operations of Rebitrum.
Decentralized Consensus Mechanism
Bitcoin Core is using Proof-of-Work (PoW) as the consensus mechanism. Rebitrum leverages the best aspects of PoW, that is, using hashing of the staking node’s ID for block creation while focusing the majority of the consensus on Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The major improvement in the PoW mechanism for Rebitrum is that staking nodes can run without investing in high-end servers and ultra-fast bandwidth connections. Thus, Rebitrum is creating the potential for easier and faster decentralization of the mode ownership and infrastructure.
Non-Turing-complete Smart Contracts
Decentralized financial transactions are implemented through smart contracts. For example to ensure that borrowers repay lenders, smart contracts implement the conditions of lending in the code. For smart contract development, Rebitrum will be adding opcode support for decentralized financial instruction sets. The Rebitrum opcode complements and works in tangent with the Script scripting language of the existing Bitcoin Core protocol. The Rebitrum scripting language is called Recipe, denoting the language’s role in describing and allowing for decentralized financial contracts. Bitcoin Script instruction words usually start with the prefix OP_*. Recipe instruction words carry the prefix DF_*.
Immutable through Block Anchoring
While the common discussion of immutability is a binary conversation (a blockchain is either immutable or not), in fact, immutability is on a spectrum. The level of immutability of a blockchain is related to the cost of a rollback or “fork out” of mined blocks, also known as a 51% attack. It takes time to amass significant miners or minters to make 51% attack costly enough that it is generally regarded as immutable, meaning that a new blockchain is automatically at a disadvantage when it comes to the immutability of the records. Some newer blockchains have been taking shortcuts to increase its immutability quality, typically by compromising on decentralization. For example, the chains may allow only delegated stakers chosen by the founders, or by making the blockchain permissioned instead of permissionless. Rebitrum aims to maintain decentralization quality while maintaining immutability. To do so, Rebitrum will anchor its block to Bitcoin blockchain every few blocks. This further enhances the immutability of Rebitrum without any compromise to the decentralized nature of the chain.
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