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Ethereum Sharding FAQ

223 points by dmmalam 8y ago

DINKDINK 8y ago
Sharding: Putting the trust in trustless /s
pavlov 8y ago
Something about Ethereum feels like a 19th century perpetual motion machine. "Ok, so the overbalanced wheels didn't quite work, but we'll add ball bearings and flowing water and gears and..." In 1872, a man named John Keely demonstrated a machine that operated on what he called the "vaporic" or "etheric" force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ernst_Worrell_Keely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ernst_Worrell_Keely The same year he raised 5 million dollars, equivalent to about $100M in today's money. Two years later he demonstrated a model that was described as a "hydro-pneumatic-pulsating-vacu-engine" with "quadruple negative harmonics". No doubt he'd be a blockchain entrepreneur today. (Edit: Someone actually maintains a big wiki dedicated to Keely's "Sympathetic Vibratory Physics" and "Etheric Elements": http://www.svpwiki.com/tiki-index.php?page=Sympathetic+Vibratory+Physics http://www.svpwiki.com/tiki-index.php?page=Sympathetic+Vibra... Amazing that an investment fraud from 150 years ago is still producing "research"! A sobering reminder of the power of lies.)
- jessriedel 8y ago
  Perpetual motion machines are disfavored because they break a law of physics, not merely because they involve a stack of complicated mechanisms, each of which fixes a problem introduced by the mechanism below. If you've ever had a complicated medical problem, you know that very often you get drug A to counteract side effects of drug B, which was used treat an infection caused by procedure C which was a necessary precaution before performing treatment D to treat the underlying illness. Yes, sometimes such complicated mechanisms are obfuscating a doomed process, but other times engineering is just complicated. The Saturn V had a lot of interdependent parts too...
  - cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
    I would say the "Proof of Stake" they're planning to move towards also defies the law of physics.
    - Hermel 8y ago
      Intuitively, I think "proof of stake" could violate Gödel's incompleteness theorems. These basically state that no complete system can proof its own correctness. And that's exactly what "proof of stake" tries to do: proof its correctness without external anchor of truth. Of course, Vitalik Buterin knows that so he resorted to "weak subjectivity", basically saying that if you are not online often enough, you need to trust someone with providing you check points to decide which fork is the "true" one.
      - DSingularity 8y ago
        I do not find your explanation of the objective of PoS convincing. Maybe you are talking about their protocol that is true by construction? Proof of Stake strategy is to make it where attacks on the blockchain are impossible in the economic sense. Proof of work strategy is making the attack infeasible by making the work required impossibly large. Now is PoS possible? No idea. That possible fork attack seems like an impossible barrier to overcome. But we will see.
        cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
        History has shown us that humans don't always act economically or rationally. So nothing is impossible.
        profalseidol 8y ago
        In PoS, it is a known assumption that if the majority of nodes act rationally, then so be it. This is an issue that is out of scope. Humans can be rational or irrational. That is how they are born. So far, we can only make tools and books to prevent irrationality.
- deft 8y ago
  The name isn't a coincidence. I kind of agree with you, there's a whole lot of words and invented terminology but not much is being said... however solving the problems DLT currently has is (hopefully) doable even if the "well let's add XYZ to the ABC!" approach fails.
- curyous 8y ago
  I agree, I don't think there's any clear evidence that they will eventually get Ethereum to work at scale. At one company I was with, there was an experimental project that only had "just one more thing to fix before it will work" for ten years, before being eventually abandoned.
- mikedouglas 8y ago
  Funny that you mention the 19th century, because another example of a system that required an ever-increasing series of hacks to solve major flaws is the internal combustion engine. Whether the problem that Ethereum solves is anywhere near as valuable as the problems solved by ICE remains to be seen, but this just seems like the engineering process to me, especially for a young technology.
  - ajkjk 8y ago
    Internal combustions work, really well, today, and are not theoretically impossible. Not really the same.
    - smallnamespace 8y ago
      Well, you haven't proven Ethereum's theoretical impossibility either. 'I think this might be a scam' is not a proof, no matter how many heuristics are on your side.
      - tfha 8y ago
        https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf This paper does a pretty good job of laying out a formal, mathematical proof that pos doesn't work
    - fastball 8y ago
      ICE didn't work really well in 1910. Ethereum works today as well. I think you missed the point of the analogy.
    - mikedouglas 8y ago
      They work really well thanks to the invention of the spark plug, the carburetor, the supercharger, and decades of iteration. For many years, they were objectively terrible. Ethereum is three years old. ICE is 200+.
      - beefield 8y ago
- aaron-lebo 8y ago
  Yep. I've considered many times that Ethereum went down one path of evolution from Bitcoin, which is get more and more complicated. The problems with certain subsystems (the scripting language for example) have been discussed at length on HN, knowing how hard it is to modify complex systems that only get more complicated, I doubt they'll ever fix these issues, they'll be battling them indefinitely. That's a real problem considering you can never really trust Ethereum and the entire thing is predicated on trust. And what does all this complexity buy? Cryptokitties. We sure this is a worthy tradeoff? Would they Eth guys even be able to recognize this considering what's invested personally and monetarily? There's plenty of suckers, so I'm sure the "next year" kicking the can down the road cycle can go on as long as it's needed, but I'm interested to see if we ever get something of value out of it. The other evolutionary route interests me, but I'm too busy, lazy, ignorant, and disturbed by the entire space to test it out. Maybe some day.
  - fastball 8y ago
    I guess you aren't familiar with MakerDAO and DAI. etheraffle.com also seems like a relatively good use case for a ÐApp. In fact there are thousands of good use cases. I don't think you're familiar enough with the space to be providing meaningful criticism. Your reductio ad absurdum to "just cryptokitties" is fairly telling.
    - aaron-lebo 8y ago
      I've been observing the space since before Eth launched. If you believe that raffles are an example of useful systems, then we'll have to disagree. In fact there are thousands of good use cases. If there are, then we'll surely see them. You're providing more of what I'm talking about - it's always next year, always coming, but the mainstream adoption is nascent.
      - mst 8y ago
        While I suspect that in the long run blockchains will absolutely end up finding some niches where they're persistently used, I do agree that a lot of the broader claims remind me a lot of "next year will be the year of linux on the desktop".
- Nition 8y ago
  Great, if frustrating reading there. I love the linked news article interviews with Lieutenant E.L. Zalinski.[1][2] > Lieut, Zalenski's mirth interrupted him at this point. "Now," he resumed," when I started for Philadelphia I was careful to take with me a 10,000-pound gauge. That was my little equipment. This, as I suppose you know, or if you don't must take my word for it, is a standard instrument. Well, as soon as the Keely people saw this gauge they said to me, 'You had better not show it to Keely. It would only anger him!' Much I cared about angering him! I wanted justice. One of his partisans, however, informed Mr. Keely that I had brought this gauge with me, and the great man replied that he would not use it. In the course of his experiments he said he had got 50,000 pounds pressure. But—observe the but—he then remarked that he had broken all the pressure gauges he had. I then quietly rejoined that I had a pressure gauge which was only capable of registering 10,000 pounds. Said I, 'I would like to have you put it on, and break it for me.' Mr. Keely made no immediate reply to this. Shortly afterward, however, he remarked, with an air of feeble assertion, 'I do not believe in pressure gauges, anyhow.'" > The subject appeared to be excruciatingly funny to Liet. Zalenski. [1] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1884/09/24/106158625.pdf https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1884/09/24/106... [2] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1884/11/16/106166155.pdf https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1884/11/16/106...
  - scrumper 8y ago
    Those are just brilliantly written, thank you. What a contrast in journalistic style to today! "And the energetic gentleman laughed in the same strain in which the cat was heard when she feelingly exclaimed, 'Hi, Hi! I have eaten the canary!'" "The 'etherealized vaporic force' which was so liberally poured into the ears of a large and gullible public..." I can't get enough. It's wonderful.
  - asciimo 8y ago
    Reminds me of that guy who pretends to be Satoshi Nakamoto: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/craig-wrights-proof-that-he-invented-bitcoin-fuck-off-im-not-going-to-jump-through-hoops/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/craig...
- kang 8y ago
  Haha, “Vitalik’s project immediately before Ethereum is that he was collecting investments from people to fund building a computer program to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, supposedly by simulating a quantum computer."
  - drcode 8y ago
    He was like 16 years old when he was working on that thing and has a solid track record since then... let's cut him a break.
    - nope96 8y ago
      He tried and failed to scam people when he was 16, but now has a successful scam so we should cut him a break? "solid track record" meaning cloning bitcoin and giving yourself and friends a bunch of free tokens worth $7,764,000,000: "12 Million Ether were created to the development fund, most of it going to early contributors and developers"
    - kang 8y ago
      "solid track record" Can you name one thing he built/invented that does anything? Beyond collecting bitcoin.
      - paulmd 8y ago
        Speaking of which, Ethereum is not really novel either. Bitcoin includes its own VM which has opcodes that allow smart contracts too... just most of them are disabled because the reference implementation had bugs at the time Satoshi abandoned the project, and the development process is currently so calcified and politicized that development has essentially ground to a halt. The concept of memory-hardness is not really novel either, see: bcrypt/scrypt.
        lojack 8y ago
        Vitalk was originally a bitcoin developer who proposed extending the op codes to make a more general purpose computer, and only started Ethereum after he encountered resistance to the idea. I don’t think anyone was claiming bitcoin wasn’t prior work.
- narrator 8y ago
  Yeah, I looked at the original Ethereum spec and thought this thing isn't going to scale. Boy, did I miss out on making a lot of money. I still don't know what practical use people actually use Ethereum for besides as a currency and ICO scams.
  - asciimo 8y ago
    There's a decentralized Twitter clone that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. https://peepeth.com/welcome https://peepeth.com/welcome
  - ENGNR 8y ago
    One use case that's already operational and doesn't need additional transactions - distributed domain resolution The entire .eth registar runs in a smart contract. You put your ETH in to claim the domain, others also bid during the bidding period, the winners ETH is locked away and returned when they release the domain, the rest get refunded. Considering DNS is continually politicized and still subject to points of failure (the CAs), distributed ENS is a far better design IMO
- drcode 8y ago
  As someone deeply involved in this community, I sort of agree about the "Rube Goldberg" feel of his ideas, but Vitalik et al have delivered pretty reliably: I think both ethereum and casper are pretty safe bets at this point (yes, I'll likely get some comments telling me I'm wrong and how horrible ethereum and casper are) The sharding stuff, however, is still iffy at the moment (I've studied it pretty closely) ...but if vitalik is confident he can make it work, I'll bet on v every time.
  - nextos 8y ago
    Ethereum is, so far, missing a key element for me to take it really seriously: Formal Methods. There are some small efforts, but I'd rather have formal methods from the beginning, not as an afterthought. The problem is that market forces favor releasing early rather than releasing correct things. It's the MIT vs NJ paradox again, or worse is better. But this time the potential risks are much bigger.
    - drcode 8y ago
      Well it was a ton of work to get ethereum out the door... Adding a couple more years to formally prove everything first sounds like the perfect way to be stuck in development limbo forever. As you say, formal methods are being applied after the fact to some degree at least.
      - nextos 8y ago
        I think it is a common misconception that formal methods will lead to an extremely slow development cycle. That is only the case if you go for the best guarantee of correctness: Theorem Proving. There are more agile options. For example, model checking all protocols is pretty easy in comparison to theorem proving. Still a significant effort, but perhaps an order of magnitude easier.
    - rickycook 8y ago
      well, that would be tooling though. you wouldn’t say that x86 is missing formal methods therefor you shouldn’t use it right... solidity, etc sure maybe... but at that point, releasing early is probably a good thing so that you can get a whole community working on things and getting ideas and collaboration from a large group of people *edit: unless you mean like geth, or some minimal reference client should be formally proven
- nope96 8y ago
  > Something about Ethereum feels like a 19th century perpetual motion machine. Funny you'd say that: "Vitalik's project immediately before Ethereum is that he was collecting investments from people to fund building a computer program to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, supposedly by simulating a quantum computer." http://archive.is/8wHvq http://archive.is/8wHvq "Buterin later said he had “greatly overestimated” the likelihood of the team breaking mathematics" https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/ More: http://bitcoinerrorlog.com/2016/08/vitaliks-quantum-quest/ http://bitcoinerrorlog.com/2016/08/vitaliks-quantum-quest/
  - ttul 8y ago
    All sufficiently successful entrepreneurial “geniuses” are eventually shown to have been lucky for the most part. - Proverb
  - DalasNoin 8y ago
    Simulating a quantum computer on a regular computer to speed up np-complete problems is insanity. Trying to break mathematics is insanity. I tried to verify your sources, it seems to go back to Gregory Maxwell and an anonymous source, BitcoinErrorLog. David Gerard cites BitcoinErrorLog. zero proof.
    - nope96 8y ago
      https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/906189639802859520 https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/906189639802859520 Jorge Timón was pitched it > Was he soliciting investment though? > Jorge Timón @timoncc Yes, he and another guy were claiming the classical computers simulating quantum would be a mining revolution.
      - DalasNoin 8y ago
        i'm honestly trying to verify this. i'm quiet skeptical about the character of some developers of bitcoin, i dont know about peter todd. bitcoinerrorlog is linking to this video of him talking about quantum computers as a proof. this is the closest i have come to hard evidence of this extreme claim. i have listened to the first half of the video, just him talking about quantum computers. Very impressive talk for a 19 year old. https://youtu.be/DkUpZkeqhF4?t=16m46s https://youtu.be/DkUpZkeqhF4?t=16m46s
- tCfD 8y ago
  Or the epicycles of the heliocentric era, where the focus then as now was on futile ever finer retweaking of conclusions to fit unexamined and faulty premises.
- zodiac 8y ago
  I'm sorry, but I feel this is really lazy and nonconstructive criticism. Perpertual motion machines violate a law of physics, and the bells and whistles attached to it were at best misguided attempts that didn't address the fundamental issue, or at worst attempts to defraud investors. I can't tell what you are claiming here; is it that 1. Sharding is fundamentally impossible; in any public blockchain, all computers must validate all transactions, and the scalability trilemma cannot be avoided, or 2. Sharding is possible, but the solutions outlined in the FAQ are unnecessarily complicated; a much simpler solution exists You haven't provided arguments for either, and I can't even tell which argument you're making. On a higher level, I could agree with the general sentiment that complicated solutions tend to be wrong or at least very suboptimal, but only as a heuristic. It's a heuristic that doesn't even hold very well in this space; in the space of PoW fork-choice rules, bitcoin-style longest-chain is simpler than Somplinsky's GHOST rule (https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf), which is in turn simpler than ethereum's current "modified GHOST", but in each case the added complications really were necessary and lead to better properties.
  - pavlov 8y ago
    More explicitly, my position is this: Ethereum's claims of an upcoming blockchain-powered "Web 3.0" revolution are so overblown that they're indistinguishable from perpetual motion peddlers. The Ethereum designers don't want to recant their outlandish promises, so they keep proposing increasingly complex bells-and-whistles fixes that sound impressive in a 10,000 word FAQ but won't bring the "global supercomputer" substantially any closer to reality.
cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
Good for them for nerding out with all the esoteric tech to solve the decentralization problem. But evidently all this means nothing if it's possible to mutate the blockchain itself through social and political engineering.
- spacenick88 8y ago
  But if that mutation needs majority (from miners or stake holders) how is it any worse than a democratic country deciding to change a law or print money or whatever?
  - doubledad222 8y ago
    Presumably it's a lot harder for a group of evil-doers to get a country into changing laws or printing more money. Your opinions may vary. I have my faith in (some) countries.
  - gph 8y ago
    Wasn't the main part of the allure to blockchain/crypto to be better than democratic societies and institutions? After all that's what they are trying to replace right? Governments can't be trusted and all that?
  - spookthesunset 8y ago
    It's far worse because it lacks any kind of controls or process to make sure everybody gets a fair shake. A good government answers to all citizens. Blockchains answer to those with the most hash power (i.e. $$$$). You are effectively saying you'd prefer mob rule over due process.
barbegal 8y ago
The section I particularly have a problem with is "How is the randomness for random sampling generated?" Everyone seems to think this is a solved problem but the reality is it is extremely difficult to solve. (The same problem exists for proof of stake schemes) There is lots of complex cryptography, game theory and economics involved in working out if a robust solution really exists. The most commonly stated solution is something called a "Threshold Signature Scheme". Threshold signatures schemes (and threshold cryptography in general) have two main problems. Firstly they don't scale well. As you add participants you need lots of extra rounds of communication and computation. Secondly they aren't resistant to Sybil attacks. The proposed way around this is to link participation to a stake of coins (yep back to proof of stake) such that launching a Sybil attack requires lots of coins. This is not trivial however because of the "Nothing at Stake" problem where stake can be used to participate in many forks of a scheme at the same time.
- drcode 8y ago
  Ethereum POS is already running on a test net, you're welcome to go over there and see what happens when you try to use your stake on "many forks at the same time". Spoiler: you won't be able to do so without losing your stake very quickly.
  - barbegal 8y ago
    Well not quite. The test net is actually a hybrid of proof of work and proof of stake [1]. Proof of work is used as the main decider in the case of a fork, however if long forks are seen then checkpoints validated by proof of stake are used. The slashing function is in the contract [2] but there is actually no incentive to duplicate votes on the testnet since there is only rewards for voting (block rewards are given to proof of work miners). [1] https://github.com/ethereum/casper/blob/master/IMPLEMENTATION.md https://github.com/ethereum/casper/blob/master/IMPLEMENTATIO... [2] https://github.com/ethereum/casper/blob/master/casper/contracts/simple_casper.v.py https://github.com/ethereum/casper/blob/master/casper/contra...
    - drcode 8y ago
seibelj 8y ago
One theory I have on the hate towards Ethereum (and cryptocurrencies / blockchain in general) on HN is that it's a radically different way of solving problems, something that is alien to software engineers who have put decades of time becoming experts at solving problems a certain way. So rather than invest more than 15 minutes learning about it, they say "Blockchain is just a distributed database and it's useless!" or attack it from a variety of minimum-thought / minimum-effort angles. There is genuine innovation in this space and it is going to impact a lot of areas. Decentralization, immutability, protocols monetized with market forces, fee-less payments that cannot be prevented, to name but a few interesting areas. And of course there are numerous downsides. Difficulty of keeping keys safe, bugs that cost millions of dollars, issues with scaling. But these are problems that people are solving right now. As a technologist, you should be looking at the possibilities! Now is the time to start a new company or project, not 5 or 10 years from now when the tech has matured.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  As a technologist I look at vaporware and call it vaporware. I look at get-rich-quick schemes and call them get-rich-quick schemes. I look at how blockchain don't solve a single problem that hasn't already been solved more efficiently on much grander scales, and I call them out as such. Your words, and images of grandeur, and promises of great things to come are just that: words, and images, and promises, and I call them as such. Blockchain is not "the next Internet that haters cannot see", as the overused saying goes. So far it's nothing but the next Tomagotchi or Pets.com, and nothing that's happening in blockchain can prove it otherwise. And so, we call it as such.
  - jMyles 8y ago
    > I look at how blockchain don't solve a single problem that hasn't already been solved more efficiently on much grander scales, and I call them out as such. This position is the most confusing of all the blockchain FUD out there. It's easy to show that it's false: today, people are able to purchase proscribed plants and medicines in a way that completely subverts the efforts of state to prevent that. Now, I'm not saying that's sufficient to prove the kind of meaning you're looking for, but doesn't it give you the slightest bit of pause? Doesn't it make you say, "Wow - that's something people have been trying to do since the garden of eden and nothing has ever done it so successfully. I wonder what else this thing can do?" I think that for most open-minded observers, something like this thought process is what keeps our attention. I think that undermining drug prohibition is a wonderful thing and an obvious net good for the world. But I also think that it's a sign that there are more mundane / lawful-good elements that will arise in time. Porn has largely driven the internet forward at various critical junctures. But if we had stopped and said, "oh, is this thing just about porn? How useless," then we'd be in a much worse place. Give it some time and an open mind.
markkat 8y ago
TBH part of what makes me so bullish on Ethereum is how much of an emotional reaction it produces, both for and against the technology, all the while it continues to gain mindshare and utility.
- doubledad222 8y ago
  I've had a couple friends try to enroll me into their ponzi schemes. They were really emotional both during the sale and after I remained in "no". I think emotions are just the communication of the base animal part of people. No need to imbue it with prescience or exceptional intelligence.
  - markkat 8y ago
    Ponzi schemes are terrible. Many ICOs aren't much more. However, blockchain enables digital scarcity. That's an interesting piece of technology right there. Using it as a state-machine is a very interesting application of it. IMHO many negative emotional responses come from scamming applications, many positive ones from new possibilities created by the technology, some of both are just due to the transformative nature of its application.
    - spookthesunset 8y ago
      > However, blockchain enables digital scarcity. Eh? Scarcity? Ever looked at all the forks of bitcoin? Blockchain absolutely does not enable scarcity. This has been proven time and time again...
      - tuesdayrain 8y ago
        You say that as if Bitcoin forks are unquestionable proof of increasing supply, which many people will disagrewle with. I consider them to be completely separate products, seeing as the forks are not backed by Bitcoin's hashpower.
        8y ago
boffinism 8y ago
'FAQ' seems like the wrong term. I doubt that "What are some trivial but flawed ways of solving the problem?" is frequently asked...
- hobofan 8y ago
  Eh, having had quite some discussions on the topic, a lot of the "flawed ways" come up as "why don't we just do this?" suggestions.
- adrianmonk 8y ago
  Yeah, this is more like the Socratic method but one-sided and with leading questions. Being a method for uncovering the truth, I guess that's OK if the question you're trying to investigate is "What is the proposal?".
goodroot 8y ago
Please HN... Can we approach this with an open-mind? These technologies have major promise. I do not see the use in being reactively closed mind and negative towards the efforts here. As an Ethereum - not a "crypto" - supporter, I feel brow-beat each time one of these threads comes up. Let's take a deep breath, explore it, and try to help it realize its potential instead of instilling doubt and criticizing. This is a community for forwarding thinking builders...
- snissn 8y ago
  I feel the same way, I'm skeptical to post anything crypto related here anymore, meanwhile I'm busy "buidling" and keeping up with crypto / ethereum communities on discord
- barbegal 8y ago
  On a positive note sharding technology does have great promise because of the problems that it can potentially solve. With Bitcoin you can only validate a transaction by having all of the unspent transactions in memory [1]. With a sharded system you only need to have a subset of those transactions in memory. At a fundamental technological level you are increasing the size of available memory by using the memory of other nodes. And there are ways you can query other nodes about their subset of unspent transactions by using a merkle tree. If you trust the root of a balanced merkle tree you only need O(log(n)) computations [2] to prove that a leaf belongs to it. This sharding mechanism could be added to bitcoin where the root of the merkle tree of the unspent transactions is added to each block. Nodes on the network can store a sub-tree of arbitary size and validate part of each block. Whether this scheme would be robust to dishonest miners is still an open question though. [1] http://gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh http://gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh [2] https://gist.github.com/maaku/41b0054de0731321d23e9da90ba4ee0a#inclusion-proofs https://gist.github.com/maaku/41b0054de0731321d23e9da90ba4ee...
  - hobofan 8y ago
    > With Bitcoin you can only validate a transaction by having all of the unspent transactions in memory. I'm somewhat sceptical of that claim, for the reason pointed out in the blog post, and I think you can get away with much simpler solutions for quite some time. - You can use many heuristics to decide which UTXO data to keep in memory. LRU + deprioritizing addresses where the balance is too low to pay the current transaction fees seems like a good start. Research shows that there is a high percentage of stale data[0]. - With a block time as high as 10min, you can definitely spend 1ms on read latency for retrieving UTXO data from disk. - Even if you don't manage to retrieve UTXO data from disk quickly, that just means that the transaction missed its chance to be included in the current block. It could still be ready in time for the next one. Overall, UTXO set growth is, of course, a problem since it increases centralization, but I don't think the problem of _in-memory_ UTXO sets is as big as it is often made out to be. [0]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1095.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1095.pdf
ilaksh 8y ago
I personally think that sharding is going to work great because for starters 100% trustlessness was, in my opinion, never a real requirement. If it was then nothing in our society would work. People are going to look back and say that the HBO show 'Silicon Valley' was 'prescient', but really they are just catching up to developments in Ethereum and similar projects. Long live the real PiperNet (well they have some significant differences but also some similarities).
Slivvvy 8y ago
more like sharting am I right boys?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mst 8y ago
Having just attempted to read and comprehend this, my total conclusions are: (a) I have a headache (b) I have absolutely no idea if this is going to work. (if anybody has more useful conclusions, I'd love to hear them, most of the threads seem to be alternating "blockchain yay" and "blockchain boo" comments, neither of which tend towards being desperately informative)
- oceanman888 8y ago
  I feel the same, the arguments about blockchain is one of the more fruitless one about technology(scams and over-hype makes it worse). Meanwhile the doers is trying to figure out how to make it useful. Once some infrastructure and successful examples are done(For example block chain collection done right or oracles that publish user or sensor data for other smart contract to use at a cost). We will have much more stuff to start arguments from.
voidmain 8y ago
I think maybe you could improve on this sort of approach by weakening the invariants. Instead of trying to make sure that only valid "collations" get on the main chain, let anyone willing to pay for it put collations on the main chain but define the first honest one on the chain to be valid. You can't tell which ones are valid at a glance but you can with O(shard history) resources.
- DennisP 8y ago
  If you can figure out the details on that, they'd probably be interested.
Animats 8y ago
What's the need for a high transaction rate? "10,000 TPS". Right. Nobody uses cryptocurrencies for small transactions any more. It's just a speculative investment. Bitcoin being stuck at 7 TPS is embarrassing, but if they could get up to a few hundred TPS, that would probably be adequate.
- crowbahr 8y ago
  The end game goal of Eth is to become the main way to process transactions globally, overtaking Visa et al. Not only are cryptos still used for transactions (the dark web marketplaces are still used after all) but they have ambitious goals for widespread adoption through dapps and larger financial integrations.
- immad 8y ago
  Ethereum is also a DAPP platform. In theory you could build a decentralized Twitter/Facebook using Ethereum but without 10k+ TPS there is no practical way to get enough users using it.
  - stjohnswarts 8y ago
    Honest questions why would you need a blockchain for this? I can understand for money transactions/contractual signing but for Facebook? Does anyone really care that there is a ledger for Facebook?
Density 8y ago
Sorry for being ridiculously inappropriate, but the cryptocurrency topic calls for me to leave this more appropriate title here: Ethereum Sharting FAQ. Have a nice day!
homakov 8y ago
Interestingly Ethereum has hit in a sweet spot: tech crowd that learns EVM quickly and enjoys playing with it (like a new raspbery pi) & has sizable spare cash to invest in ether/erc20. Bitcoin is nowhere as fun to learn, the VM is quite boring. I wonder if any other blockchain can hit into this sweet spot.
hardwaresofton 8y ago
I'm really really really not qualified but: TLDR, split up a blockchain into a bunch of smaller blockchains sharded by something (let's say address), and then a different tier of nodes which only operate at the shard level can exist -- they call these "collations". collation-internal transactions can be managed by only the nodes in the collation, and they even lay out an initial proposal for how to do cross-collation transactions, leaning on merkle proofs for verification. They also propose making it transparent as a part of an auto-loadbalancing part of the blockchain so developers wouldn't feel any difference. This paper was actually pretty interesting. It's pretty thoroughly researched, and the solution that they come up with (sharding) is actually pretty promising as a solution to the centralization + throughput issues of the blockchains up until now. I certainly learned a lot about blockchain systems by reading it, and more importantly learned the current problems with the state of the art and how this group plans to address them. At this point, I also look at blockchain as a generic distributed database problem -- so I get the feeling these finndings will benefit the field some day. Surely something will come out of the research energy that's being dedicated to blockchain right now that will be beneficial to future researchers.
- dlubarov 8y ago
  That's pretty accurate. One minor thing: > developers wouldn't feel any difference The details haven't been decided yet, but developers will need to deal with some kind of locking or "yanking" [1] mechanism in order to communicate with accounts on foreign shards. [1] https://ethresear.ch/t/cross-shard-contract-yanking/1450 https://ethresear.ch/t/cross-shard-contract-yanking/1450
thisisit 8y ago
I wonder what effect PoS will have on the Ethereum ICO system. If coins are needed to stake and mine, large holders might have more incentives to hold Ethereum instead of any assets?
decentralised 8y ago
Sharding will enable Ethereum to scale without compromising on the decentralised and permissionless nature of it's blockchain implementation. Really excited about this!

223 points by dmmalam 8y ago

Sharding: Putting the trust in trustless /s

Something about Ethereum feels like a 19th century perpetual motion machine. "Ok, so the overbalanced wheels didn't quite work, but we'll add ball bearings and flowing water and gears and..." In 1872, a man named John Keely demonstrated a machine that operated on what he called the "vaporic" or "etheric" force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ernst_Worrell_Keely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ernst_Worrell_Keely The same year he raised 5 million dollars, equivalent to about $100M in today's money. Two years later he demonstrated a model that was described as a "hydro-pneumatic-pulsating-vacu-engine" with "quadruple negative harmonics". No doubt he'd be a blockchain entrepreneur today. (Edit: Someone actually maintains a big wiki dedicated to Keely's "Sympathetic Vibratory Physics" and "Etheric Elements": http://www.svpwiki.com/tiki-index.php?page=Sympathetic+Vibratory+Physics http://www.svpwiki.com/tiki-index.php?page=Sympathetic+Vibra... Amazing that an investment fraud from 150 years ago is still producing "research"! A sobering reminder of the power of lies.)

jessriedel 8y ago
Perpetual motion machines are disfavored because they break a law of physics, not merely because they involve a stack of complicated mechanisms, each of which fixes a problem introduced by the mechanism below. If you've ever had a complicated medical problem, you know that very often you get drug A to counteract side effects of drug B, which was used treat an infection caused by procedure C which was a necessary precaution before performing treatment D to treat the underlying illness. Yes, sometimes such complicated mechanisms are obfuscating a doomed process, but other times engineering is just complicated. The Saturn V had a lot of interdependent parts too...
- cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
  I would say the "Proof of Stake" they're planning to move towards also defies the law of physics.
  - Hermel 8y ago
    Intuitively, I think "proof of stake" could violate Gödel's incompleteness theorems. These basically state that no complete system can proof its own correctness. And that's exactly what "proof of stake" tries to do: proof its correctness without external anchor of truth. Of course, Vitalik Buterin knows that so he resorted to "weak subjectivity", basically saying that if you are not online often enough, you need to trust someone with providing you check points to decide which fork is the "true" one.
    - DSingularity 8y ago
      I do not find your explanation of the objective of PoS convincing. Maybe you are talking about their protocol that is true by construction? Proof of Stake strategy is to make it where attacks on the blockchain are impossible in the economic sense. Proof of work strategy is making the attack infeasible by making the work required impossibly large. Now is PoS possible? No idea. That possible fork attack seems like an impossible barrier to overcome. But we will see.
      - cocktailpeanuts 8y ago
        History has shown us that humans don't always act economically or rationally. So nothing is impossible.
        profalseidol 8y ago
        In PoS, it is a known assumption that if the majority of nodes act rationally, then so be it. This is an issue that is out of scope. Humans can be rational or irrational. That is how they are born. So far, we can only make tools and books to prevent irrationality.
deft 8y ago
The name isn't a coincidence. I kind of agree with you, there's a whole lot of words and invented terminology but not much is being said... however solving the problems DLT currently has is (hopefully) doable even if the "well let's add XYZ to the ABC!" approach fails.
curyous 8y ago
I agree, I don't think there's any clear evidence that they will eventually get Ethereum to work at scale. At one company I was with, there was an experimental project that only had "just one more thing to fix before it will work" for ten years, before being eventually abandoned.
mikedouglas 8y ago
Funny that you mention the 19th century, because another example of a system that required an ever-increasing series of hacks to solve major flaws is the internal combustion engine. Whether the problem that Ethereum solves is anywhere near as valuable as the problems solved by ICE remains to be seen, but this just seems like the engineering process to me, especially for a young technology.
- ajkjk 8y ago
  Internal combustions work, really well, today, and are not theoretically impossible. Not really the same.
  - smallnamespace 8y ago
    Well, you haven't proven Ethereum's theoretical impossibility either. 'I think this might be a scam' is not a proof, no matter how many heuristics are on your side.
    - tfha 8y ago
      https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/pos.pdf This paper does a pretty good job of laying out a formal, mathematical proof that pos doesn't work
  - fastball 8y ago
    ICE didn't work really well in 1910. Ethereum works today as well. I think you missed the point of the analogy.
  - mikedouglas 8y ago
    They work really well thanks to the invention of the spark plug, the carburetor, the supercharger, and decades of iteration. For many years, they were objectively terrible. Ethereum is three years old. ICE is 200+.
    - beefield 8y ago
aaron-lebo 8y ago
Yep. I've considered many times that Ethereum went down one path of evolution from Bitcoin, which is get more and more complicated. The problems with certain subsystems (the scripting language for example) have been discussed at length on HN, knowing how hard it is to modify complex systems that only get more complicated, I doubt they'll ever fix these issues, they'll be battling them indefinitely. That's a real problem considering you can never really trust Ethereum and the entire thing is predicated on trust. And what does all this complexity buy? Cryptokitties. We sure this is a worthy tradeoff? Would they Eth guys even be able to recognize this considering what's invested personally and monetarily? There's plenty of suckers, so I'm sure the "next year" kicking the can down the road cycle can go on as long as it's needed, but I'm interested to see if we ever get something of value out of it. The other evolutionary route interests me, but I'm too busy, lazy, ignorant, and disturbed by the entire space to test it out. Maybe some day.
- fastball 8y ago
  I guess you aren't familiar with MakerDAO and DAI. etheraffle.com also seems like a relatively good use case for a ÐApp. In fact there are thousands of good use cases. I don't think you're familiar enough with the space to be providing meaningful criticism. Your reductio ad absurdum to "just cryptokitties" is fairly telling.
  - aaron-lebo 8y ago
    I've been observing the space since before Eth launched. If you believe that raffles are an example of useful systems, then we'll have to disagree. In fact there are thousands of good use cases. If there are, then we'll surely see them. You're providing more of what I'm talking about - it's always next year, always coming, but the mainstream adoption is nascent.
    - mst 8y ago
      While I suspect that in the long run blockchains will absolutely end up finding some niches where they're persistently used, I do agree that a lot of the broader claims remind me a lot of "next year will be the year of linux on the desktop".
Nition 8y ago
Great, if frustrating reading there. I love the linked news article interviews with Lieutenant E.L. Zalinski.[1][2] > Lieut, Zalenski's mirth interrupted him at this point. "Now," he resumed," when I started for Philadelphia I was careful to take with me a 10,000-pound gauge. That was my little equipment. This, as I suppose you know, or if you don't must take my word for it, is a standard instrument. Well, as soon as the Keely people saw this gauge they said to me, 'You had better not show it to Keely. It would only anger him!' Much I cared about angering him! I wanted justice. One of his partisans, however, informed Mr. Keely that I had brought this gauge with me, and the great man replied that he would not use it. In the course of his experiments he said he had got 50,000 pounds pressure. But—observe the but—he then remarked that he had broken all the pressure gauges he had. I then quietly rejoined that I had a pressure gauge which was only capable of registering 10,000 pounds. Said I, 'I would like to have you put it on, and break it for me.' Mr. Keely made no immediate reply to this. Shortly afterward, however, he remarked, with an air of feeble assertion, 'I do not believe in pressure gauges, anyhow.'" > The subject appeared to be excruciatingly funny to Liet. Zalenski. [1] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1884/09/24/106158625.pdf https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1884/09/24/106... [2] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1884/11/16/106166155.pdf https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1884/11/16/106...
- scrumper 8y ago
  Those are just brilliantly written, thank you. What a contrast in journalistic style to today! "And the energetic gentleman laughed in the same strain in which the cat was heard when she feelingly exclaimed, 'Hi, Hi! I have eaten the canary!'" "The 'etherealized vaporic force' which was so liberally poured into the ears of a large and gullible public..." I can't get enough. It's wonderful.
- asciimo 8y ago
  Reminds me of that guy who pretends to be Satoshi Nakamoto: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/craig-wrights-proof-that-he-invented-bitcoin-fuck-off-im-not-going-to-jump-through-hoops/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/craig...
kang 8y ago
Haha, “Vitalik’s project immediately before Ethereum is that he was collecting investments from people to fund building a computer program to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, supposedly by simulating a quantum computer."
- drcode 8y ago
  He was like 16 years old when he was working on that thing and has a solid track record since then... let's cut him a break.
  - nope96 8y ago
    He tried and failed to scam people when he was 16, but now has a successful scam so we should cut him a break? "solid track record" meaning cloning bitcoin and giving yourself and friends a bunch of free tokens worth $7,764,000,000: "12 Million Ether were created to the development fund, most of it going to early contributors and developers"
  - kang 8y ago
    "solid track record" Can you name one thing he built/invented that does anything? Beyond collecting bitcoin.
    - paulmd 8y ago
      Speaking of which, Ethereum is not really novel either. Bitcoin includes its own VM which has opcodes that allow smart contracts too... just most of them are disabled because the reference implementation had bugs at the time Satoshi abandoned the project, and the development process is currently so calcified and politicized that development has essentially ground to a halt. The concept of memory-hardness is not really novel either, see: bcrypt/scrypt.
      - lojack 8y ago
        Vitalk was originally a bitcoin developer who proposed extending the op codes to make a more general purpose computer, and only started Ethereum after he encountered resistance to the idea. I don’t think anyone was claiming bitcoin wasn’t prior work.
narrator 8y ago
Yeah, I looked at the original Ethereum spec and thought this thing isn't going to scale. Boy, did I miss out on making a lot of money. I still don't know what practical use people actually use Ethereum for besides as a currency and ICO scams.
- asciimo 8y ago
  There's a decentralized Twitter clone that runs on the Ethereum blockchain. https://peepeth.com/welcome https://peepeth.com/welcome
- ENGNR 8y ago
  One use case that's already operational and doesn't need additional transactions - distributed domain resolution The entire .eth registar runs in a smart contract. You put your ETH in to claim the domain, others also bid during the bidding period, the winners ETH is locked away and returned when they release the domain, the rest get refunded. Considering DNS is continually politicized and still subject to points of failure (the CAs), distributed ENS is a far better design IMO
drcode 8y ago
As someone deeply involved in this community, I sort of agree about the "Rube Goldberg" feel of his ideas, but Vitalik et al have delivered pretty reliably: I think both ethereum and casper are pretty safe bets at this point (yes, I'll likely get some comments telling me I'm wrong and how horrible ethereum and casper are) The sharding stuff, however, is still iffy at the moment (I've studied it pretty closely) ...but if vitalik is confident he can make it work, I'll bet on v every time.
- nextos 8y ago
  Ethereum is, so far, missing a key element for me to take it really seriously: Formal Methods. There are some small efforts, but I'd rather have formal methods from the beginning, not as an afterthought. The problem is that market forces favor releasing early rather than releasing correct things. It's the MIT vs NJ paradox again, or worse is better. But this time the potential risks are much bigger.
  - drcode 8y ago
    Well it was a ton of work to get ethereum out the door... Adding a couple more years to formally prove everything first sounds like the perfect way to be stuck in development limbo forever. As you say, formal methods are being applied after the fact to some degree at least.
    - nextos 8y ago
      I think it is a common misconception that formal methods will lead to an extremely slow development cycle. That is only the case if you go for the best guarantee of correctness: Theorem Proving. There are more agile options. For example, model checking all protocols is pretty easy in comparison to theorem proving. Still a significant effort, but perhaps an order of magnitude easier.
  - rickycook 8y ago
    well, that would be tooling though. you wouldn’t say that x86 is missing formal methods therefor you shouldn’t use it right... solidity, etc sure maybe... but at that point, releasing early is probably a good thing so that you can get a whole community working on things and getting ideas and collaboration from a large group of people *edit: unless you mean like geth, or some minimal reference client should be formally proven
nope96 8y ago
> Something about Ethereum feels like a 19th century perpetual motion machine. Funny you'd say that: "Vitalik's project immediately before Ethereum is that he was collecting investments from people to fund building a computer program to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, supposedly by simulating a quantum computer." http://archive.is/8wHvq http://archive.is/8wHvq "Buterin later said he had “greatly overestimated” the likelihood of the team breaking mathematics" https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/buterins-quantum-quest/ More: http://bitcoinerrorlog.com/2016/08/vitaliks-quantum-quest/ http://bitcoinerrorlog.com/2016/08/vitaliks-quantum-quest/
- ttul 8y ago
  All sufficiently successful entrepreneurial “geniuses” are eventually shown to have been lucky for the most part. - Proverb
- DalasNoin 8y ago
  Simulating a quantum computer on a regular computer to speed up np-complete problems is insanity. Trying to break mathematics is insanity. I tried to verify your sources, it seems to go back to Gregory Maxwell and an anonymous source, BitcoinErrorLog. David Gerard cites BitcoinErrorLog. zero proof.
  - nope96 8y ago
    https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/906189639802859520 https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/906189639802859520 Jorge Timón was pitched it > Was he soliciting investment though? > Jorge Timón @timoncc Yes, he and another guy were claiming the classical computers simulating quantum would be a mining revolution.
    - DalasNoin 8y ago
      i'm honestly trying to verify this. i'm quiet skeptical about the character of some developers of bitcoin, i dont know about peter todd. bitcoinerrorlog is linking to this video of him talking about quantum computers as a proof. this is the closest i have come to hard evidence of this extreme claim. i have listened to the first half of the video, just him talking about quantum computers. Very impressive talk for a 19 year old. https://youtu.be/DkUpZkeqhF4?t=16m46s https://youtu.be/DkUpZkeqhF4?t=16m46s
tCfD 8y ago
Or the epicycles of the heliocentric era, where the focus then as now was on futile ever finer retweaking of conclusions to fit unexamined and faulty premises.
zodiac 8y ago
I'm sorry, but I feel this is really lazy and nonconstructive criticism. Perpertual motion machines violate a law of physics, and the bells and whistles attached to it were at best misguided attempts that didn't address the fundamental issue, or at worst attempts to defraud investors. I can't tell what you are claiming here; is it that 1. Sharding is fundamentally impossible; in any public blockchain, all computers must validate all transactions, and the scalability trilemma cannot be avoided, or 2. Sharding is possible, but the solutions outlined in the FAQ are unnecessarily complicated; a much simpler solution exists You haven't provided arguments for either, and I can't even tell which argument you're making. On a higher level, I could agree with the general sentiment that complicated solutions tend to be wrong or at least very suboptimal, but only as a heuristic. It's a heuristic that doesn't even hold very well in this space; in the space of PoW fork-choice rules, bitcoin-style longest-chain is simpler than Somplinsky's GHOST rule (https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf), which is in turn simpler than ethereum's current "modified GHOST", but in each case the added complications really were necessary and lead to better properties.
- pavlov 8y ago
  More explicitly, my position is this: Ethereum's claims of an upcoming blockchain-powered "Web 3.0" revolution are so overblown that they're indistinguishable from perpetual motion peddlers. The Ethereum designers don't want to recant their outlandish promises, so they keep proposing increasingly complex bells-and-whistles fixes that sound impressive in a 10,000 word FAQ but won't bring the "global supercomputer" substantially any closer to reality.

cocktailpeanuts 8y ago

Good for them for nerding out with all the esoteric tech to solve the decentralization problem. But evidently all this means nothing if it's possible to mutate the blockchain itself through social and political engineering.

spacenick88 8y ago
But if that mutation needs majority (from miners or stake holders) how is it any worse than a democratic country deciding to change a law or print money or whatever?
- doubledad222 8y ago
  Presumably it's a lot harder for a group of evil-doers to get a country into changing laws or printing more money. Your opinions may vary. I have my faith in (some) countries.
- gph 8y ago
  Wasn't the main part of the allure to blockchain/crypto to be better than democratic societies and institutions? After all that's what they are trying to replace right? Governments can't be trusted and all that?
- spookthesunset 8y ago
  It's far worse because it lacks any kind of controls or process to make sure everybody gets a fair shake. A good government answers to all citizens. Blockchains answer to those with the most hash power (i.e. $$$$). You are effectively saying you'd prefer mob rule over due process.

barbegal 8y ago

The section I particularly have a problem with is "How is the randomness for random sampling generated?" Everyone seems to think this is a solved problem but the reality is it is extremely difficult to solve. (The same problem exists for proof of stake schemes) There is lots of complex cryptography, game theory and economics involved in working out if a robust solution really exists. The most commonly stated solution is something called a "Threshold Signature Scheme". Threshold signatures schemes (and threshold cryptography in general) have two main problems. Firstly they don't scale well. As you add participants you need lots of extra rounds of communication and computation. Secondly they aren't resistant to Sybil attacks. The proposed way around this is to link participation to a stake of coins (yep back to proof of stake) such that launching a Sybil attack requires lots of coins. This is not trivial however because of the "Nothing at Stake" problem where stake can be used to participate in many forks of a scheme at the same time.

drcode 8y ago
Ethereum POS is already running on a test net, you're welcome to go over there and see what happens when you try to use your stake on "many forks at the same time". Spoiler: you won't be able to do so without losing your stake very quickly.
- barbegal 8y ago
  Well not quite. The test net is actually a hybrid of proof of work and proof of stake [1]. Proof of work is used as the main decider in the case of a fork, however if long forks are seen then checkpoints validated by proof of stake are used. The slashing function is in the contract [2] but there is actually no incentive to duplicate votes on the testnet since there is only rewards for voting (block rewards are given to proof of work miners). [1] https://github.com/ethereum/casper/blob/master/IMPLEMENTATION.md https://github.com/ethereum/casper/blob/master/IMPLEMENTATIO... [2] https://github.com/ethereum/casper/blob/master/casper/contracts/simple_casper.v.py https://github.com/ethereum/casper/blob/master/casper/contra...
  - drcode 8y ago

seibelj 8y ago

One theory I have on the hate towards Ethereum (and cryptocurrencies / blockchain in general) on HN is that it's a radically different way of solving problems, something that is alien to software engineers who have put decades of time becoming experts at solving problems a certain way. So rather than invest more than 15 minutes learning about it, they say "Blockchain is just a distributed database and it's useless!" or attack it from a variety of minimum-thought / minimum-effort angles. There is genuine innovation in this space and it is going to impact a lot of areas. Decentralization, immutability, protocols monetized with market forces, fee-less payments that cannot be prevented, to name but a few interesting areas. And of course there are numerous downsides. Difficulty of keeping keys safe, bugs that cost millions of dollars, issues with scaling. But these are problems that people are solving right now. As a technologist, you should be looking at the possibilities! Now is the time to start a new company or project, not 5 or 10 years from now when the tech has matured.

dmitriid 8y ago
As a technologist I look at vaporware and call it vaporware. I look at get-rich-quick schemes and call them get-rich-quick schemes. I look at how blockchain don't solve a single problem that hasn't already been solved more efficiently on much grander scales, and I call them out as such. Your words, and images of grandeur, and promises of great things to come are just that: words, and images, and promises, and I call them as such. Blockchain is not "the next Internet that haters cannot see", as the overused saying goes. So far it's nothing but the next Tomagotchi or Pets.com, and nothing that's happening in blockchain can prove it otherwise. And so, we call it as such.
- jMyles 8y ago
  > I look at how blockchain don't solve a single problem that hasn't already been solved more efficiently on much grander scales, and I call them out as such. This position is the most confusing of all the blockchain FUD out there. It's easy to show that it's false: today, people are able to purchase proscribed plants and medicines in a way that completely subverts the efforts of state to prevent that. Now, I'm not saying that's sufficient to prove the kind of meaning you're looking for, but doesn't it give you the slightest bit of pause? Doesn't it make you say, "Wow - that's something people have been trying to do since the garden of eden and nothing has ever done it so successfully. I wonder what else this thing can do?" I think that for most open-minded observers, something like this thought process is what keeps our attention. I think that undermining drug prohibition is a wonderful thing and an obvious net good for the world. But I also think that it's a sign that there are more mundane / lawful-good elements that will arise in time. Porn has largely driven the internet forward at various critical junctures. But if we had stopped and said, "oh, is this thing just about porn? How useless," then we'd be in a much worse place. Give it some time and an open mind.

markkat 8y ago

TBH part of what makes me so bullish on Ethereum is how much of an emotional reaction it produces, both for and against the technology, all the while it continues to gain mindshare and utility.

doubledad222 8y ago
I've had a couple friends try to enroll me into their ponzi schemes. They were really emotional both during the sale and after I remained in "no". I think emotions are just the communication of the base animal part of people. No need to imbue it with prescience or exceptional intelligence.
- markkat 8y ago
  Ponzi schemes are terrible. Many ICOs aren't much more. However, blockchain enables digital scarcity. That's an interesting piece of technology right there. Using it as a state-machine is a very interesting application of it. IMHO many negative emotional responses come from scamming applications, many positive ones from new possibilities created by the technology, some of both are just due to the transformative nature of its application.
  - spookthesunset 8y ago
    > However, blockchain enables digital scarcity. Eh? Scarcity? Ever looked at all the forks of bitcoin? Blockchain absolutely does not enable scarcity. This has been proven time and time again...
    - tuesdayrain 8y ago
      You say that as if Bitcoin forks are unquestionable proof of increasing supply, which many people will disagrewle with. I consider them to be completely separate products, seeing as the forks are not backed by Bitcoin's hashpower.
      - 8y ago

boffinism 8y ago

'FAQ' seems like the wrong term. I doubt that "What are some trivial but flawed ways of solving the problem?" is frequently asked...

hobofan 8y ago
Eh, having had quite some discussions on the topic, a lot of the "flawed ways" come up as "why don't we just do this?" suggestions.
adrianmonk 8y ago
Yeah, this is more like the Socratic method but one-sided and with leading questions. Being a method for uncovering the truth, I guess that's OK if the question you're trying to investigate is "What is the proposal?".

goodroot 8y ago

Please HN... Can we approach this with an open-mind? These technologies have major promise. I do not see the use in being reactively closed mind and negative towards the efforts here. As an Ethereum - not a "crypto" - supporter, I feel brow-beat each time one of these threads comes up. Let's take a deep breath, explore it, and try to help it realize its potential instead of instilling doubt and criticizing. This is a community for forwarding thinking builders...

snissn 8y ago
I feel the same way, I'm skeptical to post anything crypto related here anymore, meanwhile I'm busy "buidling" and keeping up with crypto / ethereum communities on discord
barbegal 8y ago
On a positive note sharding technology does have great promise because of the problems that it can potentially solve. With Bitcoin you can only validate a transaction by having all of the unspent transactions in memory [1]. With a sharded system you only need to have a subset of those transactions in memory. At a fundamental technological level you are increasing the size of available memory by using the memory of other nodes. And there are ways you can query other nodes about their subset of unspent transactions by using a merkle tree. If you trust the root of a balanced merkle tree you only need O(log(n)) computations [2] to prove that a leaf belongs to it. This sharding mechanism could be added to bitcoin where the root of the merkle tree of the unspent transactions is added to each block. Nodes on the network can store a sub-tree of arbitary size and validate part of each block. Whether this scheme would be robust to dishonest miners is still an open question though. [1] http://gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh http://gavinandresen.ninja/utxo-uhoh [2] https://gist.github.com/maaku/41b0054de0731321d23e9da90ba4ee0a#inclusion-proofs https://gist.github.com/maaku/41b0054de0731321d23e9da90ba4ee...
- hobofan 8y ago
  > With Bitcoin you can only validate a transaction by having all of the unspent transactions in memory. I'm somewhat sceptical of that claim, for the reason pointed out in the blog post, and I think you can get away with much simpler solutions for quite some time. - You can use many heuristics to decide which UTXO data to keep in memory. LRU + deprioritizing addresses where the balance is too low to pay the current transaction fees seems like a good start. Research shows that there is a high percentage of stale data[0]. - With a block time as high as 10min, you can definitely spend 1ms on read latency for retrieving UTXO data from disk. - Even if you don't manage to retrieve UTXO data from disk quickly, that just means that the transaction missed its chance to be included in the current block. It could still be ready in time for the next one. Overall, UTXO set growth is, of course, a problem since it increases centralization, but I don't think the problem of _in-memory_ UTXO sets is as big as it is often made out to be. [0]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1095.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1095.pdf

ilaksh 8y ago

I personally think that sharding is going to work great because for starters 100% trustlessness was, in my opinion, never a real requirement. If it was then nothing in our society would work. People are going to look back and say that the HBO show 'Silicon Valley' was 'prescient', but really they are just catching up to developments in Ethereum and similar projects. Long live the real PiperNet (well they have some significant differences but also some similarities).

Slivvvy 8y ago

more like sharting am I right boys?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mst 8y ago

Having just attempted to read and comprehend this, my total conclusions are: (a) I have a headache (b) I have absolutely no idea if this is going to work. (if anybody has more useful conclusions, I'd love to hear them, most of the threads seem to be alternating "blockchain yay" and "blockchain boo" comments, neither of which tend towards being desperately informative)

oceanman888 8y ago
I feel the same, the arguments about blockchain is one of the more fruitless one about technology(scams and over-hype makes it worse). Meanwhile the doers is trying to figure out how to make it useful. Once some infrastructure and successful examples are done(For example block chain collection done right or oracles that publish user or sensor data for other smart contract to use at a cost). We will have much more stuff to start arguments from.

voidmain 8y ago

I think maybe you could improve on this sort of approach by weakening the invariants. Instead of trying to make sure that only valid "collations" get on the main chain, let anyone willing to pay for it put collations on the main chain but define the first honest one on the chain to be valid. You can't tell which ones are valid at a glance but you can with O(shard history) resources.

DennisP 8y ago
If you can figure out the details on that, they'd probably be interested.

Animats 8y ago

What's the need for a high transaction rate? "10,000 TPS". Right. Nobody uses cryptocurrencies for small transactions any more. It's just a speculative investment. Bitcoin being stuck at 7 TPS is embarrassing, but if they could get up to a few hundred TPS, that would probably be adequate.

crowbahr 8y ago
The end game goal of Eth is to become the main way to process transactions globally, overtaking Visa et al. Not only are cryptos still used for transactions (the dark web marketplaces are still used after all) but they have ambitious goals for widespread adoption through dapps and larger financial integrations.
immad 8y ago
Ethereum is also a DAPP platform. In theory you could build a decentralized Twitter/Facebook using Ethereum but without 10k+ TPS there is no practical way to get enough users using it.
- stjohnswarts 8y ago
  Honest questions why would you need a blockchain for this? I can understand for money transactions/contractual signing but for Facebook? Does anyone really care that there is a ledger for Facebook?

Density 8y ago

Sorry for being ridiculously inappropriate, but the cryptocurrency topic calls for me to leave this more appropriate title here: Ethereum Sharting FAQ. Have a nice day!

homakov 8y ago

Interestingly Ethereum has hit in a sweet spot: tech crowd that learns EVM quickly and enjoys playing with it (like a new raspbery pi) & has sizable spare cash to invest in ether/erc20. Bitcoin is nowhere as fun to learn, the VM is quite boring. I wonder if any other blockchain can hit into this sweet spot.

hardwaresofton 8y ago

I'm really really really not qualified but: TLDR, split up a blockchain into a bunch of smaller blockchains sharded by something (let's say address), and then a different tier of nodes which only operate at the shard level can exist -- they call these "collations". collation-internal transactions can be managed by only the nodes in the collation, and they even lay out an initial proposal for how to do cross-collation transactions, leaning on merkle proofs for verification. They also propose making it transparent as a part of an auto-loadbalancing part of the blockchain so developers wouldn't feel any difference. This paper was actually pretty interesting. It's pretty thoroughly researched, and the solution that they come up with (sharding) is actually pretty promising as a solution to the centralization + throughput issues of the blockchains up until now. I certainly learned a lot about blockchain systems by reading it, and more importantly learned the current problems with the state of the art and how this group plans to address them. At this point, I also look at blockchain as a generic distributed database problem -- so I get the feeling these finndings will benefit the field some day. Surely something will come out of the research energy that's being dedicated to blockchain right now that will be beneficial to future researchers.

dlubarov 8y ago
That's pretty accurate. One minor thing: > developers wouldn't feel any difference The details haven't been decided yet, but developers will need to deal with some kind of locking or "yanking" [1] mechanism in order to communicate with accounts on foreign shards. [1] https://ethresear.ch/t/cross-shard-contract-yanking/1450 https://ethresear.ch/t/cross-shard-contract-yanking/1450

thisisit 8y ago

I wonder what effect PoS will have on the Ethereum ICO system. If coins are needed to stake and mine, large holders might have more incentives to hold Ethereum instead of any assets?

decentralised 8y ago

Sharding will enable Ethereum to scale without compromising on the decentralised and permissionless nature of it's blockchain implementation. Really excited about this!