Hello everybody! I was part of the MEGA-Ace program. My project was a detailed Algorand protocol overview paper and a network and consensus simulator.
My goal over the course of the next month or so is to transform both the aforementioned paper and the simulator into valuable resources for the community and release them publicly. I envision these tools being used for education, divulgation, and even for protocol research. Improving communal understanding of how consensus and the network as a whole work, and then providing an environment to safely test, modify and potentially “break” them could IMHO have a very positive impact.
Using the simulator, I aim to explore various coordinated attack strategies, conduct preliminary testing of different consensus configurations, and examine scenarios such as sudden drastic changes in balance distributions, network failures and partitions, and possibly present findings and stats collected in another publication.
While I’ve made significant progress in my work, there’s a list of specific questions I’ve encountered that I couldn’t find the answers to by reading the codebase or specs. files. Is there somebody in Algorand Inc. working on the consensus/network implementation to whom I could address these questions?
Thanks in advance.