RFC-0100/BaseLayer

The Tari Base Layer

status: draft

Maintainer(s): Cayle Sharrock

Licence

The 3-Clause BSD Licence.

Copyright 2018 The Tari Development Community

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

  1. Redistributions of this document must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
  2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
  3. Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS", AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Language

The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY" and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 (covering RFC2119 and RFC8174) when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.

Disclaimer

This document and its content are intended for information purposes only and may be subject to change or update without notice.

This document may include preliminary concepts that may or may not be in the process of being developed by the Tari community. The release of this document is intended solely for review and discussion by the community of the technological merits of the potential system outlined herein.

Goals

The aim of this Request for Comment (RFC) is to describe the major software components of the Tari Base Layer network.

Description

The Tari Base Layer network comprises the following major pieces of software:

  • Base Layer full node implementation. The base layer full nodes are the consensus-critical pieces of software for the Tari base layer and cryptocurrency. The base nodes validate and transmit transactions and blocks, and maintain consensus about the longest valid proof-of-work blockchain.
  • Mining software. Mining nodes perform proof-of-work to secure the base layer and compete to submit the next valid block into the Tari blockchain. Tari uses two Proof of Work (PoW) algorithms, the first is merge-mined with Monero and a second native SHA3 PoW. The Tari source provides three alternatives for Tari miners:
    • A standalone miner for SHA3 mining
    • A merge-mining proxy to be used with XMRig to merge mine Tari with Monero
    • A stratum-compatible pool miner.
  • Wallet software. Client software and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) offering means to construct transactions, query nodes for information and maintain personal private keys.

These three major pieces of software make use of common functionality provided by the following libraries within the Tari project source code:

  • Local data storage
  • Cryptography services
  • Peer-to-peer networking and messaging services

RFC-0010 provides more detail on how the source code is structured within the Tari codebase.