Minima Ecosystem Developer Call Notes - January 2025

1. Ethereum Foundation Crisis Discussion

Spartacus Rex points out that Ethereum headquarters is facing a serious crisis:

"There seems to be a crisis going on at Ethereum headquarters, their numbers aren't going up. They're seeing Solana people making loads of money and they're upset. Now they're pointing fingers and getting harsh on Twitter, criticizing the foundation."

On the fundamental issue with foundations:

"If your cryptocurrency requires governance, it's broken"

"Cryptocurrency governance is oxymoronic, like gold doesn't need to be governed, an objective thing doesn't need to be governed, it should just be"

Evolution of the Ethereum Foundation:

Early Stage:

"Everybody loved the Ethereum Foundation at the beginning with Vitalik at the top"

"They funded the development of Uniswap"

"They funded the initial writing of the ENS system"

"They basically sprayed money on thousands of dev teams"

"They had managed to get out four or five really nice little protocol things that worked on Ethereum"

Current Situation:

"When the value of ETH went up everybody was so happy"

"Now the numbers not going up they're like 'ah we hate you, you haven't done what it is that you need to do to make us money'"

"That's totally the wrong attitude, it's not up to the ETH foundation to make you money"

About Decentralized Environment:

"That's the point about these decentralized environments. Unfortunately now they can't withdraw because they own everything, they run everything. They run all the servers that backup MetaMask, they have their fingers in every pie."

Nature of Centralization:

"This is a classic example of centralization being a one-way street. Once you go down that road, it's impossible to reverse track. You simply can't change from 'everything becomes centralized around a few bodies and institutions' to 'oh actually now we're decentralized'."

2. Decentralization Metrics Discussion

About the meeting with decentralization metrics company:

"They call it the Nakamoto coefficient - how decentralized are you. They've got lots of different ways that they check this:

How many developers work on your code

How many clients you have

How many users you have

How many dapps you have

How many successful DeFi projects you have"

Spartacus Rex's view:

"All of those metrics don't matter because all of those metrics only come to matter if your initial base chain is decentralized. As I mentioned earlier, centralization is incredibly pernicious, and once you start down that road it is a one-way street."

About Technical Centralization:

"If your Tech centralizes, if it has that crack, it only gets bigger. So it doesn't matter how many devs you've got writing your code, how many clients you've got, how many applications you have, if your base chain centralizes over time."

Minima's Unique Advantage:

"This is the one thing that Minima does that none of the others do - every single other chain the larger it gets the more centralized it gets, doesn't matter how many devs they've got or how many clients they've got. Whereas the larger Minima gets, the more decentralized it gets at a base level, because that's how our protocol works."

"The Minima consensus is a decentralized consensus protocol:

No centralization

No incentives to centralize

Whereas all the other chains, whether they're proof of stake chains or proof of work miner-centric chains, do have an incentive to centralize"

3. Technical Details Discussion

MMR System Explained

About MMR Pruning:

"Let's talk about mega MMR nodes, I think they're actually quite cool. You all know, you only store the data that's relevant to you. On your Minima node, you don't have a database of everything, you just have a database of your coins."

Why This Design:

"Why would I bother storing coins that aren't mine, that I can't use? When I send a transaction, I add proof of the database coins to the transaction so everyone can verify it's a valid transaction."

System Advantages:

"It's a really nice system because it's lossless - we haven't lost any information. There's as much information as the full database, but I just store what's important to me, you store what's important to you. I still validate everything coming in, I still check every transaction."

Mega MMR Features:

"It's nodes that store everything"

"It doesn't keep spent coins, just keeps the UTXO (unspent transaction outputs)"

"Interesting thing is this system doesn't actually have to grow"

"Because when you do transactions, some coins get spent, some coins get created"

"The size is proportional to the number of users and transactions"

About Data Scale:

"Currently it's about 180 megabytes. For us 180 megabytes is huge. Bitcoin processes about 600 megabytes of blocks per day. 144 blocks a day, 4 megabytes per block, they process about 600 megabytes a day, and we're worried about 180 megabytes."

Network Topology Discussion

Current Need for Relay Nodes:

"You need relay nodes just because you don't have an external IP. If you had an external IP, you could run it from your phone. Your phone doesn't have an external IP, that might change in the future."

IPv6 Potential:

"IPv6 is interesting because IPv6 gives you a global address. You might notice those weird IPs, not four numbers 255.5.3.74, but like F4F5E6E7 six double-byte numbers. That's an IPv6 address, that's a global address."

Future Possibilities:

"When we switch to IPv6, you might actually be able to have internal external IPs on your phone, so your phone will be able to actually receive incoming connections."

About Network Topology Nature:

"The current network topology is completely independent of the protocol. This is just how the peer layer works, and if we want to propose new schemes, we can. I'm actually rewriting the peer topology."

Game Development Implementation

Game Development Example Using Tic-Tac-Toe:

State Variables Usage:

"All games work on the same basic principles. All the game data is kept as state variables, all updates are validated by scripts."

Game Flow:

"The game always starts with both of you putting in some money"

"The script can have a counter that increments on each move"

"It knows on the first counter, first player must put in some money"

"Check the amount, okay, now we're in phase two, which means second player must put in money"

About Game State Storage:

"For Tic-Tac-Toe, you could just use comma-separated values, 0 is empty, 1 is circle, 2 is cross, you'd have nine comma-separated values. You could actually write a script to substring it up."

Validation Mechanism:

"You could use byte arrays or whatever you wanted, but you'd have to say this is the memory of the game - what round am I on, whose go is it, what's the state of the board."

Company 2.0 Concept

About On-Chain Share System:

"Imagine I have a local pub and they wanted to do an extension. I'm like 'why don't you ask us? Why don't you say, look, I need to make the restaurant bigger, so I'm going to make some tokens, and you're going to buy the tokens, and then every month I'm going to send 10% of the profits that the pub makes to the people who own the tokens.'"

Capital Raising Method:

"This is the original purpose of stock, the old school way of actually raising capital. I need to raise capital, I need to have shares. I need some money, and the people who give me the money, I need to give them something."

Tokenized Shares:

"Instead of giving them a document, I give you a token, and then I can see who owns the tokens, and I can send some profits to those people."

Technical Implementation:

"Mechanically that's actually pretty simple. Imagine you make 10,000 of these things and sell them. I can track everybody that has one of those NFTs, I can see the address that it's at."

Automation Possibilities:

"Is it possible for shareholders not to rely on the person responsible? That's more complicated, you get into congestion issues. You could do it more like a claim, so it's like if you've got this password access, they send the transaction saying 'look, here are my coins, please send me what you've earned this month.'"

4. New Developments

New Mini DApps:

Mini FS

Mini web

Chain mail

About Chain mail:

"I want people to be able to communicate without having to be Maxima contacts."

Development Transparency

"We have a new team dev's channel, which is basically where all the devs talk on Discord, and it is open to the public."

About Transparency Importance:

"It's more about this whole engagement thing. We're trying to make you realize that we're just normal people like you. There's nothing special going on, we're not casting spells at the back here."

Upcoming Release

"There's a pretty major release normally scheduled for next week, so we think you will enjoy what we have to offer."

Future Outlook

About New Regulatory Environment:

"This is the first time ever that crypto is actually in a positive environment. This is the first time ever where we've got an SEC and the current rulers of the world (which are the American government frankly for all of us whether we like it or not) that are pro, they're not anti, they're not trying to send us all to jail immediately."

Opportunities:

"I think this is going to be a very different five years. Look at what we've achieved against the tide, now we're going to be moving with the tide. We're going to be surfing with the waves."

Small-Scale Application Possibilities:

"This is the point about this technology that small people can use it to do small things. It's not always about the big boys. On a small scale, can my pub launch a token which will pay a dividend to see if I can extend the restaurant."

Conclusion

Spartacus Rex emphasizes: "We are getting to a really good stage. We are reaching like 'wow it actually works, it doesn't break, it doesn't crash.' I'm very happy with the way that the tech has come along. I wish it could have come along faster, but frankly we're a small team."