The most important open research questions for Society Protocol (SP)

General Architecture Discussion
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This is intended to be a living document, laying out the most important open research questions pertinent to creating the optimal version of Society Protocol (SP).

Add your own research topics to this thread, and if they’re relevant and important we will add them into to the main post.

Open Research Topics

  • Can Events be input without “gas” fees in the Web4 state machine? This may be possible due to the Hunting and Activity Scores mechanisms.

  • Value Functions (VFs) optimization & leaks…(add your own to this thread)

    • Leaks: What are some of the possible exploits inherent in the 9 original VFs?
    • Optimization: How should the optimal Activity Score calculations be handled for each of the VFs?
    • Optimization: An alternative system for courts that’s more unexploitable to side-channel attacks

  • What kind of virtual machine (VM) should SP use?

  • Account Abstraction: Account recovery methodologies

    • Social methodologies for account recovery (key rotation, and account freeze upon the request of peers)

  • How to create various clients for SP which can interoperate in different languages?

    • What languages should the first Web4 clients be built in?

  • Consensus mechanism

    • Lean ZK consensus

  • Architecture: How can we scale bandwidth, Events, and VF scaleability to global societal scale while maintaining synchronous composability (ideally)?

      • Splitting the execution, storage, and consensus layers is obviously optimal. There are currently two sets of Actors responsible in the system for these layers (the Hunters and Farmers), is there a more optimal distribution?
      • Architecture direction: Is splitting every VF into its own L2 architecture worth pursuing?

Process

I would start spinning these off into independent topics. This main canonical thread should be used mostly as a directory for keeping track of independent topics.

Create new threads for individual topics, and link them in the replies here for inclusion into the canonical list.

DONT try to fit debates about these actual issues in this thread.

Ways to Contribute to the Society Protocol Movement [A Canonical List]
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Some thoughts: (1) On the account recovery issue, perhaps some Actors can post a “bond” (like a letter of credit) to either facilitate the ability to get key recovery, or as extra security against a peer-initiated account freeze. (2) How to deal with bad Actors – what qualifies as “bad”? – who decides whether someone is “bad” and how to prevent people from being maliciously targeted just because they are unpopular (false/fraudulent labeling)?

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More thoughts on architecture: (1) does a level-2 achieve the modularity that a network needs to be secure in a worst case scenario? (2) Do entirely separate chains (severable in an emergency but linked within the network) provide more security and safety to segregate chains from bad acts/bad actors? I’m thinking of segregating Instances, just like medieval European towns were separate and afforded some protection against the pandemics of the time.

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Metrics for the state that binds

Shared reality can tighten into coordination or collapse into mass psychosis. Work needed on protocol-level signals that distinguish the two.