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As far as I can see, a billion tx/s blockchain can never work if the P2P network is sufficiently large. Imagine a 10,000-node network, where each node has to h
by runeks 9y ago
As far as I can see, a billion tx/s blockchain can never work if the P2P network is sufficiently large.
Imagine a 10,000-node network, where each node has to handle 1 billion messages per second. Firstly, if we assume a single VM can handle 1 million messages per second, it would require that each node rent ~1000 VMs (for a total of 10 million VMs for the entire P2P network), which they obviously can’t do without compensation. And if you introduce compensation, you need to pay the same fee to each node, which makes it inherently 10,000 times as expensive as a centralized network.
So the question is not whether it’s possible, the question is whether it’s worth it: in how many cases would a user prefer a system that’s 10,000 times cheaper, albeit requiring some trust?
Merchants all over the world are willing to accept VISA credit in exchange for goods and services, but they could — in theory — demand trustless payments in the form of international bank transfers, which are less than 10,000 times as expensive as a VISA transaction.
- tscs37 9y agoSharding intents to solve this by splitting the billion messages into a 1000 (or more) smaller problem space. Thusly only requiring 1 VM per node. (tho you need more nodes for equivalent security)
- runeks 9y agoMaybe my imagination is too limited, but I fail to see how sharding is any different from just reducing the number of nodes in the P2P network.
- tscs37 9y agoBecause Sharding also lessens the load on each individual node. A single node does not need to process everything
- runeks 9y agoLet’s say we have 1,000 nodes in a network that does 1,000 transactions per second. If we shard the data, such that each node only needs to process 10 transactions per second — while trusting the remaining nodes on the other 990 transactions — how is this different from just reducing the number of nodes to 10, and having each node process all 1,000 transactions? In both cases the entire network only needs to process 10,000 transactions per second, and in both cases the network breaks down if 10 or more nodes collude.
- tscs37 9y agoBecause in the sharded example, only the shard suffers a break down, not the entire network, if the nodes collude. It also allows people to run smaller nodes on cheap hardware, this increasing the potential number of nodes in the network.
- runeks 9y agoWhat’s the effect of a single shard breaking down? How many shards need to break down before it causes a problem?
- tscs37 9y agoWell the breakdown of a share has differing effects depending on the consensus rules, same for the entire network. I can't answer that unless you specify which consensus we are talking about.
- pepesza 9y agoPlasma is not for payments. It is a counterpart of Lightning Network, but for code. With LN you can do a lot of extremely cheap payments. With Plasma you can do the same for arbitrarily complicated code. Idea is - take some tokens to domain specific plasma chain, do your interaction with possibly byzantine actors, settle on parent chain when you are done. Today even timestamping is expensive in decentralized world. Plasma actually allows you to do that cheaply.
- runeks 9y ago> With LN you can do a lot of extremely cheap payments. The cost of transactions on a Lightning Network has yet to be determined, because no working LN (with merchants accepting payments) exists yet. We all agree than LN is pretty fast, but the ultimate test is cost per transaction. Allow me to remind you that if you want to send 1 BTC through 10 LN nodes, each of these 10 LN nodes need to bind 1 BTC in a payment channel (totaling 10 BTC in capital costs to transfer 1 BTC). And if just a single of these channels/hops are exhausted, and thus need to touch the blockchain, the LN payment is no cheaper than an on-blockchain one.
- timeout27 9y agoRight, LN nodes will eventually become big speciallized hubs, with great BTC capacity to attend as many channels as possible. Each channel is a source of revenue for the LN node, so LN nodes will try to become as big as possible (both technically and BTC-wise) to cope with greater audience. Think that in a LN-node the profit will be proportional to capacity of open channels, so its very probable that we will see very-big-BTC-LN-nodes appear to serve demand The reputation of LN-nodes will play a very important to the users (as it already happens with BTC exchanges - do you use a unknown-fishy-exchange or do you use a big-known-stable-exchange ?), and so that will incentivize LN-nodes to avoid/solve problems with channels to avoid teardown-to-the-blockchain (which as you mentioned, is abnoxious to the user for its fee and lock-time)
- runeks 9y agoLet’s imagine an LN network with 1,000 payers all connecting to one, single LN hub, which routes all payments to a single payee (merchant). How will the on-blockchain settlement transaction look like? It needs to redeem all 1,000 outputs provided by the payers, because each payer creates a new output when it funds a channel, which creates a huge settlement transaction (1,000 inputs) with a correspondingly huge fee. How does LN get around this issue?