[PBA2] Mod 6 Polkadot Comments

[kianenigma]

I tried to listen to the majority of day 0 of Polkadot so far and here are a few additional questions, and comments that could be incorporated in the slides next time:

• A diagram showing a spectrum where one end is smart contract or bitcoin script and another end is a (system) parachains. Importantly, where would you place parathreads in there?

• What host functions do parachains have access to? Is there a process to ask for new host functions? Or is it just fixed forever?

• Can’t we also add some kind of dank-sharding, where all nodes participate in data-availability, next to validators, sort of as backup?

• Nested relay chain idea is still out there a lot. Why is it not viable?

[ordian]

Generalizing students feedback so far:

• Compilation takes too long. Need to provide instructions with how to build all needed binaries at least 1 day prior to the exercise.
• Content was delivered too fast. Too many new concepts per minute.
• Some redundancy in explanations might help. If something was missed, there's no way of understanding the concept anymore during the lecture.

[nuke-web3]

It is starting to become more clear to me at least that the target audience for this content needs to be defined: are we trying to train Polkadot core engineers here? I think rather it's parachain engineers. So more focus on cumulus would be good IMHO. I will need to recap on materials I missed in the video to give more concrete feedback.

Ideas for polish on things to refine the hands-on fun stuff 🥳 :

• protocolId mentioned sometime in the Substrate lectures in the context of networking and stressing that this is needed for not getting conflicting networks @BradleyOlson64 - you have a guide from Ricardo now I think?

• setup a hosted relay chain like in the PoW activity that everyone peers with for the auction games, we have 75+ students bid on slots

  • have everyone get acquainted with generation and management of keys ala https://docs.substrate.io/tutorials/get-started/add-trusted-nodes/ - perhaps in the FRAME mod.
  • practice parachain testnets locally to practice setup manually of a testnet first (not zombinet)
  • pre-activity in class, everyone submits keys that wants to play as a validator (optionally)

  (more ideas welcome, and I would love to help assist in creating this before the next wave BTW!)