More writing! This week I got through almost everything I would’ve liked to. The writing phase is definitely more involved than I thought it was going to be. For example, in writing the background knowledge section, I came across numerous more papers that are beneficial to include to provide a greater picture of the research space. It’s certainly a cat and mouse game between making progress and providing a comprehensive overview with correctly-sourced citations.

I was able to complete all of my desired parts of the paper this week. As a reminder, it included:

Background knowledge

State machine replication

Characteristics/properties

Availability-finality dilemma

Sleepy model

Synchrony Assumptions

Atomic broadcast protocol

Gasper

LMD-GHOST

Casper

Potential Attacks (ex-ante, long-range, balancer attack)

Reorg Resilience

Desired SSF Traits

Reasons for SSF (MEV, reorg resilience, etc.)

Asynchrony tolerance

Dynamic participation

Subsampling

At this point, I’m not sure if I want to continue writing or move into the phase of coming up with new contributions. I think I’ll likely introduce some of the most promising consensus protocols, namely RLMD-GHOST and Goldfish, and then do the research. This way, I can get a strong understanding of the two most likely SSF implementations, then take time diving deep into them and looking for areas of improvement. It will also be incredibly helpful to have access to three of the authors of these papers, which I’m very grateful to be in contact with.

Currently, I have a little over 5000 words written. I haven’t been keeping track of page or word count, so it’s very satisfying to see so much progress over the past 10 days or so.