Thinking in Solana

There is a particular cognitive dissonance that hits you when you first study blockchain concepts and Solana’s execution model in particular. It isn’t confusion exactly — it’s something closer to the feeling of a familiar room with the furniture rearranged. Everything is still there. But it’s been deliberately separated. Just checking our cognitive compass: in Software Engineering, what we do with libraries and clients and nodes is create enforceable abstractions that allow programs (automated computations) to scale and to have predictable output for a spectrum of valid inputs. With that we have a definition that feels abstract until we apply it to a very concrete problem: I want a gazillion valid transactions per second available all the time! So what very concrete problem does Solana solve for us? Well — here’s the precise technical challenge that gives us that throughput: Solana solves the fundamental “synchronization bottleneck” of transactions in a decentralized network. Many…