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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 t

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
gph 8y ago
I think it's well past that point. Now that there's serious wealth tied up in these projects and people have become millionaires and even billionaires on an unproven technology the general tech community is not going to give it the benefit of the doubt. This isn't just some experiment between crypto-nerds anymore. It's big business. It must stand up to the scrutiny now, and those that support it and have invested heavily in it should want that too. I'm a bit ambivalent, there's clearly a lot of scams and way too high valuation. But something useful will likely come out of it all. And that something will likely be what can stand up against the backlash.
Nursie 8y ago
They've "showed promise" for almost a decade. For almost a decade, evangelists have flooded tech forums promising to change the world, and for almost a decade they have failed to deliver.
- leumas 8y ago
  Ethereum has been around for less than 4 years

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

gph 8y ago

I think it's well past that point. Now that there's serious wealth tied up in these projects and people have become millionaires and even billionaires on an unproven technology the general tech community is not going to give it the benefit of the doubt. This isn't just some experiment between crypto-nerds anymore. It's big business. It must stand up to the scrutiny now, and those that support it and have invested heavily in it should want that too. I'm a bit ambivalent, there's clearly a lot of scams and way too high valuation. But something useful will likely come out of it all. And that something will likely be what can stand up against the backlash.

Nursie 8y ago

They've "showed promise" for almost a decade. For almost a decade, evangelists have flooded tech forums promising to change the world, and for almost a decade they have failed to deliver.

leumas 8y ago
Ethereum has been around for less than 4 years