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There's no way a single shared blockchain would be able to serve the whole world. The number of transactions per second is one thing. The size of the chain is a

There's no way a single shared blockchain would be able to serve the whole world. The number of transactions per second is one thing. The size of the chain is another. If we all start throwing money transactions AND idle drawings into the same bucket, it will overflow. Something needs to change. The current architecture clearly does not scale. Maybe something more like Pascal Coin would be better able to scale up to become used worldwide for daily transactions. EDIT: Before you downvote, I'd like to ask you a few questions. Are you invested in ETH or some other blockchain technology? And if you are, how does that color your thought process?

DalasNoin 9y ago
Have a look into blockchain sharding. There is also Lightning and Plasma, though they are far less promising.
- kordlessagain 9y ago
  What is your rationalization for saying Lightning is not promising? I think that, given the state of the ecosystem, spreading opinion around as fact is not healthy.
  - 0wing 9y ago
    It sounds like Lightning is attempting to solve an unsolvable NP-hard math problem regarding routing. [1] The Lightening network is mostly a gimmick attempt to save the design failures of scaling from the BTC communities refusal to increase network bandwidth in order to save disk space. That and for the Lightening network to work without opening up a dozen "deposit channels" into everywhere you shop, users will be pushed into larger liquidity hubs, i.e. payment processor middlemen which is ironic given this is exactly what Satoshi's white paper sought to avoid. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
    - rspeer 9y ago
      I am not a bitcoin fan but I can't imagine anything like this would be affected by the NP-hardness of the traveling salesman problem. It's not like the system breaks if someone finds a way that a payment could have been routed faster. There are quick approximations to the TSP. Also, a payment network doesn't sound like a single object that has to traverse a graph with various costs, it sounds like a network flow problem.
      - DalasNoin 9y ago
        i don't think 0wing got this one 100% right. he is maybe referring to a claim about lightning, that it is going to be private. but this is not true, there will be a full map of the lightning network. david gerard and emin gün sirer(one of the greatest blockchain researchers) have pointed this out: https://twitter.com/davidgerard/status/940311875820179456 https://twitter.com/davidgerard/status/940311875820179456
        rspeer 9y ago
        I see what David Gerard is saying, it's just that having a map is very different from having to find the optimal solution to TSP on that map. We look at maps all the time and don't solve TSP on them.
        DalasNoin 9y ago
        there is a lot of missinformation going around in the crypto-currency world. i think that after this privacy claim was debunked it morphed into the idea, that lightning was mathematically impossible. somewhere along the line TSP was added to the explanation. 0wing says TCP is "unsolvable NP-hard" which doesnt make much sense. well, its hard to understand the path of rumors. lightning might yield a constant factor scaling improvement with worse security and worse convenience, but it can work.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
DougN7 9y ago
I agree completely. A shared ledger is a great idea, but not when anyone can write almost anything into it. Then it starts turning into some sort of massive torrent that has to be synced around the world.
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago
  If you've tried recently to sync up a self-hosted ETH wallet app, you've probably noticed what an incredibly long time it takes to get the whole blockchain. Meanwhile the HDD is thrashing around like crazy; if you're not using an SSD then forget it. Wallet apps like Parity are a little more forgiving (probably smarter in how they handle the blockchain), but still, it's dozens of gigabytes already. To me, the single, shared, universal blockchain idea seems more like a proof of concept. It's also pretty hard to ask every node in the network to see every possible transaction. I am virtually certain that whatever ends up taking over the world will not operate that way. Things just don't scale like that.
  - ripply 9y ago
    For anyone not familiar with some of the proposed scaling features for Ethereum, quadratic sharding could alleviate this problem by having hundreds of Ethereum universes that can talk to each other and commit their root merkle hash to the main chain
    - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
      Sounds like a good idea. How are transactions routed from one "universe" to another? Let's say I'm on universe A, you're on universe B, and I want to send you a few bucks.
- rkagerer 9y ago
  So who decides what is worthy? If I value the penis I draw important enough to spend $100 to have it embedded into the blockchain forever, who are you to say it's garbage?
kordlessagain 9y ago
I do not invest in ETH. The reason why varies, but essentially I hold a belief that various portions of their stack have various levels of trust which are not well understood. For example, the Ethereum community has "allowed" people to use poorly constructed libraries to build contracts that were later invalidated by someone "goofing around". Other incidents show the stakeholders are willing to change core code to get their stored values back (or their associates stored values back). These issues are not to say the core chain of Ethereum is of low trust. It is not. You are correct in assuming there is no way for a scalable and fast blockchain to store data that serves the worlds needs. Ethereum is built on the promise to do away with current decentralized services, by way of allowing the identity and value used to be placed on their chain and executed using some programmable logic, in a way that is trustworthy. Of course we've been doing this for years with centralized services. Images drawn by people, for example, have no business being in a chain, but they could be "pinned" to the chain by way of some loose, lower trusted consensus than the main chain. A few of us could store it for a price using IPFS/Filecoin while others of us make a statement that we know the file in question exists by signing an entry on a main chain - instead of just putting the image there in total.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  > The Ethereum community has "allowed" people to use poorly constructed libraries to build contracts that were later invalidated by someone "goofing around" Ah back when Ethers were $7 each instead of the $800 today The real question is whether your poor investment decisions are relevant to the discussion of this thread These are commodities, broken things about them makes the more valuable or scarce, just like when an oil pipeline is destroyed in a conflict zone. Your opinion about oil has no bearing on you making money.
  - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
    > your poor investment decisions Y'all need to calm down a little.
    - ringaroundthetx 9y ago
trophycase 9y ago
Invested. Check out Plasma

DalasNoin 9y ago

Have a look into blockchain sharding. There is also Lightning and Plasma, though they are far less promising.

kordlessagain 9y ago
What is your rationalization for saying Lightning is not promising? I think that, given the state of the ecosystem, spreading opinion around as fact is not healthy.
- 0wing 9y ago
  It sounds like Lightning is attempting to solve an unsolvable NP-hard math problem regarding routing. [1] The Lightening network is mostly a gimmick attempt to save the design failures of scaling from the BTC communities refusal to increase network bandwidth in order to save disk space. That and for the Lightening network to work without opening up a dozen "deposit channels" into everywhere you shop, users will be pushed into larger liquidity hubs, i.e. payment processor middlemen which is ironic given this is exactly what Satoshi's white paper sought to avoid. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
  - rspeer 9y ago
    I am not a bitcoin fan but I can't imagine anything like this would be affected by the NP-hardness of the traveling salesman problem. It's not like the system breaks if someone finds a way that a payment could have been routed faster. There are quick approximations to the TSP. Also, a payment network doesn't sound like a single object that has to traverse a graph with various costs, it sounds like a network flow problem.
    - DalasNoin 9y ago
      i don't think 0wing got this one 100% right. he is maybe referring to a claim about lightning, that it is going to be private. but this is not true, there will be a full map of the lightning network. david gerard and emin gün sirer(one of the greatest blockchain researchers) have pointed this out: https://twitter.com/davidgerard/status/940311875820179456 https://twitter.com/davidgerard/status/940311875820179456
      - rspeer 9y ago
        I see what David Gerard is saying, it's just that having a map is very different from having to find the optimal solution to TSP on that map. We look at maps all the time and don't solve TSP on them.
        DalasNoin 9y ago
        there is a lot of missinformation going around in the crypto-currency world. i think that after this privacy claim was debunked it morphed into the idea, that lightning was mathematically impossible. somewhere along the line TSP was added to the explanation. 0wing says TCP is "unsolvable NP-hard" which doesnt make much sense. well, its hard to understand the path of rumors. lightning might yield a constant factor scaling improvement with worse security and worse convenience, but it can work.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

DougN7 9y ago

I agree completely. A shared ledger is a great idea, but not when anyone can write almost anything into it. Then it starts turning into some sort of massive torrent that has to be synced around the world.

Florin_Andrei 9y ago
If you've tried recently to sync up a self-hosted ETH wallet app, you've probably noticed what an incredibly long time it takes to get the whole blockchain. Meanwhile the HDD is thrashing around like crazy; if you're not using an SSD then forget it. Wallet apps like Parity are a little more forgiving (probably smarter in how they handle the blockchain), but still, it's dozens of gigabytes already. To me, the single, shared, universal blockchain idea seems more like a proof of concept. It's also pretty hard to ask every node in the network to see every possible transaction. I am virtually certain that whatever ends up taking over the world will not operate that way. Things just don't scale like that.
- ripply 9y ago
  For anyone not familiar with some of the proposed scaling features for Ethereum, quadratic sharding could alleviate this problem by having hundreds of Ethereum universes that can talk to each other and commit their root merkle hash to the main chain
  - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
    Sounds like a good idea. How are transactions routed from one "universe" to another? Let's say I'm on universe A, you're on universe B, and I want to send you a few bucks.
rkagerer 9y ago
So who decides what is worthy? If I value the penis I draw important enough to spend $100 to have it embedded into the blockchain forever, who are you to say it's garbage?

kordlessagain 9y ago

I do not invest in ETH. The reason why varies, but essentially I hold a belief that various portions of their stack have various levels of trust which are not well understood. For example, the Ethereum community has "allowed" people to use poorly constructed libraries to build contracts that were later invalidated by someone "goofing around". Other incidents show the stakeholders are willing to change core code to get their stored values back (or their associates stored values back). These issues are not to say the core chain of Ethereum is of low trust. It is not. You are correct in assuming there is no way for a scalable and fast blockchain to store data that serves the worlds needs. Ethereum is built on the promise to do away with current decentralized services, by way of allowing the identity and value used to be placed on their chain and executed using some programmable logic, in a way that is trustworthy. Of course we've been doing this for years with centralized services. Images drawn by people, for example, have no business being in a chain, but they could be "pinned" to the chain by way of some loose, lower trusted consensus than the main chain. A few of us could store it for a price using IPFS/Filecoin while others of us make a statement that we know the file in question exists by signing an entry on a main chain - instead of just putting the image there in total.

ringaroundthetx 9y ago
> The Ethereum community has "allowed" people to use poorly constructed libraries to build contracts that were later invalidated by someone "goofing around" Ah back when Ethers were $7 each instead of the $800 today The real question is whether your poor investment decisions are relevant to the discussion of this thread These are commodities, broken things about them makes the more valuable or scarce, just like when an oil pipeline is destroyed in a conflict zone. Your opinion about oil has no bearing on you making money.
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago
  > your poor investment decisions Y'all need to calm down a little.
  - ringaroundthetx 9y ago

trophycase 9y ago

Invested. Check out Plasma