Ah, I see where I got confused. I see fernet as a randomized leader election & explicitly being designed in order to give a single sequencer a specific time as leader (so that provers know which blocks to work on, among other reasons) – removing this characteristic means it’s no longer fernet, at least in my mind Thanks for the clarification! In general I like the randomness guarantees Fernet provides, with clear incentives for people to run Aztec specific infrastructure, and believe it leads to healthier long term decentralization (as Santiago mentioned). I think the designs that get submitted to the proving RFP will be interesting, since it’s the only thing Fernet doesn’t define.
So, back to your original point - it seems a possible mitigation for your original concern of L1-proposer-censorship could be by extending the proposal phase to 2 or 3 slots on L1? Or even longer “proposal” VRF-reveal phases? For example, you could run the “proposal phase” (VRF reveal phase) 2 or more “slots” in advance, and take the lowest VRF from the entire 8-10 minute slot (block period, the upper bounds of the proving phase). That means you (theoretically) would have to be censored by about 40-50 L1 proposers in a row.
I am confused. Do you mean selecting from a stakeholder set vs L1 validator set?
The all-pay nature of the auction (L1 txn cost) reduces to ~two/zero bidders and only in the final block. It seems more effective and simple to just assign slots, as in PBPS.
Honestly, I haven’t read PBPS yet since you just recently posted it yesterday and we closed the sequencer proposals back in June - however I’ll take a look & circle back once I understand more
Just went through Taiko’s proposal, thanks for sharing it. It looks pretty simple, though I’m worried about prover griefing: what happens if the proposer or builder does not share with the prover the data they need to generate the proof?
Thanks for the clarification! In general I like the randomness guarantees Fernet provides, with clear incentives for people to run Aztec specific infrastructure, and believe it leads to healthier long term decentralization (as Santiago mentioned). I think the designs that get submitted to the proving RFP will be interesting, since it’s the only thing Fernet doesn’t define.