7 ms·
US academics say their shardy blockchain will be 10X faster than Visa
- g45y45 8y agoPrediction, sharded blockchains will never take off. With newer blockchain protocols like MimbleWimble, you do not need to store the full transaction details for all time. Too many things to go wrong, too brittle... This is a much better scalability technique on a single blockchain -- taking advantage of zk-proofs and EC point encoding. If you want distributed computation also, ala Eth/EOS, you could combine a zk-proof of computation with the MW tx encoding with no loss of generality.
- qnsi 8y agoprediction: blockchain will never take off
- g45y45 8y agosorry, but it already has. Censorship resistant money aka Bitcoin exists and works today!
- swarnie_ 8y agoBitcoin is something i only ever read about. I work in tech and consider myself quite savvy. Never have i needed to own crypto or to make a transaction using crypto as the exchange media. Explain how its "taken off already"?
- jacoblambda 8y agoNever have I needed to either however I almost always see a way to use some common cryptocurrency whenever I decide to pay for something or make a donation. In that sense I think it has taken off. You don't have to use it for anything however you can for most everything.
- UncleMeat 8y agoPGP exists and works. But hardly anybody uses it. That's not enough to "take off".
- darkpuma 8y agoBitcoin has taken off like the Spruce Goose.
- g45y45 8y agoI said, HOP IN! https://frinkiac.com/meme/S05E10/1212894.jpg?b64lines=IEhPUCBJTiEgQlVULCBTSVItLSBbCiBHYXNwcyBdIEkgU0FJRCBIT1AgSU4u https://frinkiac.com/meme/S05E10/1212894.jpg?b64lines=IEhPUC...
- acdha 8y agoThat's a serious citation needed. There's lots of speculation but if it disappeared tomorrow, almost nobody would be inconvenienced in any way other than having failed to cash out their speculative bets before it happened. Also, “censorship resistant” is the new marketing spin but it's never been true about Bitcoin. Anyone for whom that's valuable will be at risk if they fall for the spin.
- g45y45 8y agoCouple of points in response: Why would it disappear tomorrow -- it wont. Ill always run a full node. Many like me. This makes it valuable. Censorship resistance is not a marketing spin. Its absolutely true about bitcoin! There is no central controller, no government, how can anyone stop a valid private key holder from submitting a valid signature? Sure, we could block 8333/tcp on the great firewall, but thats why we have Satellites now!! As long as you have a communication channel that can reach the Bitcoin p2p network, it cannot die. The 'censorship resistance is marketing' attitude is spoken like a true first worlder. There are many places on this Earth where censorship resistant money is critical. There are many groups that cannot interact with the global banking system due to sanctions. Look around outside the US! and we havent even spoken about how destructive the centralization of banking has become: https://blog.bitmex.com/thetimes/ https://blog.bitmex.com/thetimes/ This blog post explains very clearly how the monetary base of our economy is inflated every day due to lack of diversity in banking.
- acdha 8y ago> Why would it disappear tomorrow -- it wont. Ill always run a full node. Many like me. This makes it valuable. My point was that nobody has a non-ideological reason to use it and there are many alternatives which are cheaper, faster, and safer to use. Saying it's already taken off is hard to justify when there's no particular pull other than speculation. As for “censorship resistance”, you might want to read more about what life is like in a repressive country before giving people dangerous advice. Bitcoin requires you to be on an active network, making your traffic easily visible and the design requires you to leave a permanent public record of every transaction you've ever made — which is great if you're the secret police but not anyone else. Satellite internet connections are expensive, slow, and trackable as soon as they care to make an effort. More importantly, start thinking bout what using it would be like: you need to get a client, hope that it's not compromised or flawed; find someone willing to convert money for you, hoping that they're not working for the police; find someone to buy/sell with, hoping that they're not working for the police; and hope that your devices are never searched. If you ever get any of that wrong, you've left a trail showing that you're interested in hiding something from the authorities — better hope that you can subsequently convince them that you're not hiding something even deeper than what they find…
- candiodari 8y agoprediction: (private, not publicly accessible) blockchains will become mandatory for all financial institutions. Easy prediction since to a small extent that is already true: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/08/10/practical-examples-of-how-blockchains-are-used-in-banking-and-the-financial-services-sector/#2ed8311c1a11 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/08/10/practica...
- g45y45 8y agoPrediction: Private blockchains will fail, because they offer no advantage over a permissioned database. Public or GTFO
- candiodari 8y agoThey do: private blockchains do not require the participants, nor third parties to trust the root permissions on the permissioned database (because there aren't any).
- qaq 8y agoWould you provide a realistic real world use case for either or blockchain in general beyond bitcoin?
- lmpostor 8y agoData Storage Marketplace to answer your question on use case outside of bitcoin. Of course that relies on several assumptions that remain to be seen, first that the user-experience will be acceptable comparative to centralized solutions, 2nd that the cost will be cheaper. But again that is really the answer for any/most use-cases of blockchain, which is really just a socialized way through inflation (production of new tokens) for confirming data to be true (in this case that data is stored in a reliable/accessible manner). So as long as the application itself can meet that standard, there exists financial opportunity.
- candiodari 8y agoProviding trustworthy transaction logs that can be shared between multiple organizations that don't trust each other, which is of course the central part of the problem we call "banking". To be more detailed. Currently a lot of banks constantly create third-party companies whose only function is to get transactions from bank A, and transactions from bank B, and just record them, providing the logs when either the banks or the government/court requests them. Or when the banks want them. In some cases this is done by central banks, but central banks also do this amongst themselves. There's 2 problems here: 1) those companies are not always trustworthy 2) the jurisdictions those companies operate under are not always trustworthy (in the central bank cooperation use cases) smaller issues: those companies are usually expensive, and staffed by idiots. So cryptographically provably unchangeable logs (which is what blockchains are, at their core) certainly have their function within the banking system. Lots and lots of these are needed. Plus they're already used for that purpose.
- qaq 8y agoBanking sector is pretty bad example for many reasons, people implementing hyped up tech pure for the purposes of implementing hyped up tech. Top 3-4 banks will have enough compute to subvert it so trustworthy is not really applicable.
- baby 8y agoCan you expend on MimbleWimble? Because in bitcoin you don't need to store the full transaction details, just the root of the merkle tree. The best I've seen in this space is the coda protocol which only gives you a recursive proof of knowledge that the previous block was verified as well as proofs from previous blocks
- g45y45 8y agoOnly storing the merkle tree is useful for SPV nodes. The actual full nodes need to store the full chain to verify blocks (or else you could double spend). In mimblewibmle, the full nodes has visibility over interactive transactions only while joined of the network. The final artifact is a combined tx that spans the whole block -- ie: you throw away lots of tx detail and use the kernel for validation. The grin wiki explains the basis of MW protocol: https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin/blob/master/doc/intro.md https://github.com/mimblewimble/grin/blob/master/doc/intro.m... The original whitepaper is : https://github.com/mimblewimble/docs/wiki/MimbleWimble-Origin https://github.com/mimblewimble/docs/wiki/MimbleWimble-Origi... Two implementations of this (slightly different) today are: https://grin-tech.org/ https://grin-tech.org/ and https://www.beam.mw/ https://www.beam.mw/
- baby 8y agoAh I see. I guess you don't need many things besides the transaction hash, the UTXO amount, the timelock, the scriptpubkey
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago>it will be able to process as many as 10,000 transactions per second, which far surpasses Visa’s capability to process around 1,700. According to Visa VisaNet handles an average of 150 million transactions every day and is capable of handling more than 24,000 transactions per second. (https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/retail.html https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/...)
- justin66 8y agoCryptocurrency's reputation being what it is, they will hopefully come up with a descriptor that is less similar to "shady."
- mikestew 8y agoYeah, I was going to go with the ol' "I read it as..." and suffer the downvotes. But in this case I think it apropos. Because I did, in fact, read it as "shady blockchain" and where as I would normally stop and say, "wait, that can't be right...", in this case I just kept on reading without skipping a beat.
- tyingq 8y ago"hope it will be able to process as many as 10,000 transactions per second, which far surpasses Visa’s capability to process around 1,700" I think somebody got bad info about VISA's capabilities. 1700/tps is probably their average tps over a day...solely based on needs/demands...not what it could do. Not the peak, and not the edge of their performance envelope. It's likely they can already handle much more than the proposed 10k/sec of this sharded block chain. Edit: Yep...pretty sure someone started with "Visa does roughly 150M transactions a day"[1] then did 150,000,000 / 24 / 60 / 60 = ~ 1736 [1] https://mybroadband.co.za/news/security/190348-visanet-handling-100000-transactions-per-minute.html https://mybroadband.co.za/news/security/190348-visanet-handl...
- chill1 8y agoThose are old numbers. According to the VISA Annual Report from 2017, the VISA network does ~3500 transactions per second (tps) (average) [0] and a "FactSheet" put out by VISA claims 65,000 peak tps [1]. And AliPay had ~325,000 peak tps according to their 2017 annual report [2]. [0] https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/annual/2017/Visa-2017-Annual-Report.pdf https://s1.q4cdn.com/050606653/files/doc_financials/annual/2... [1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visanet-technology/aboutvisafactsheet.pdf https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan... [2] https://www.alibabagroup.com/en/news/press_pdf/p180201.pdf https://www.alibabagroup.com/en/news/press_pdf/p180201.pdf
- steve19 8y agoI wouldn't trust the Alipay stats. The aliexpress 11.11 pre-sale BS forces everyone's purchases to be ordered in advance for two weeks at one time of the year. The actual sales are often as little as 1% discount. They then claim insane one day sales figures when they batch process all those transactions through Alipay. https://aliexpressblog.com/the-november-11th-sales-is-now-open-to-pre-order-aliexpress-2018/ https://aliexpressblog.com/the-november-11th-sales-is-now-op...
- marknadal 8y agoIf you were able to quickly find these numbers, and if those "academics" can't get latest facts right... Good golly, articles like this drive me nuts. False future hyped promise. My team shipped over the last 4 years, and our system has already done ~3300 transactions per second (tps) (average) in production on $99 worth of P2P hardware. Internet Archive, top 300 global site, is also running it in production as well. I just gave a talk there about how to do distributed load testing in a decentralized network: https://youtu.be/hYH2Z1A0x3c?t=3635 https://youtu.be/hYH2Z1A0x3c?t=3635 More info about production-ready use cases at https://github.com/amark/gun https://github.com/amark/gun .
- _-___________-_ 8y agoIs Visa’s network not fast enough? I’ve never had problems with the amount of time the transaction takes when paying for something with my Visa cards.
- mcintyre1994 8y agoThey're probably comparing to it because it often comes up in critiques of current cryptos - which are incredibly slow compared to Visa.
- m-p-3 8y agoI guess adding some extra capacity to futureproof it doesn't hurt.
- deweller 8y agoI applaud this effort as an academic project. Hopefully it will help move forward the state of the art. But I reject the idea that a new cryptocurrency will "fix the bitcoin problem" by just being faster. But there are already several blockchains that promise high transactions per second such as Neo, Eos, Nano, etc. And Ripple, which has been around significantly longer than these, claims to be able to handle 50k transactions per second. Cryptocurrencies need a lot of adoption and real world use to be successful. Beware of premature optimization.
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoAlmost all those you listed are not decentralized at all. That’s where it gets hard- to provide both decentralization and speed. EOS and many others like that aren’t much different than a normal centralized server, so of course they have increased throughput.
- baby 8y agoHere's what you need: * faster processing (and confirmation if you're forking) * smaller blockchains (solved by coda protocol) * insurances for light-weight wallets (solved by coda protocol) * not computationally heavy (solved by algorand) After that, real-world use-cases will follow. If bitcoin had been invented before online banking, it would have boomed. The fact that it came later puts a lot of pressure on innovation in this space. If it fails to innovate, we won't hear about blockchains in the future.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- loomstate 8y agoProjects like Zilliqa have a massive head start
- JohnJamesRambo 8y agoYes I thought this article was going to be about Zilliqa, which is also created by academics, has sharding, and is releasing its mainnet at the end of this month.
- deckar01 8y agoThis article does not explain why sharding the history reduces the time it takes for a transaction to end up in a block. It also does not mention that this delay is exacerbated by the standard practice of waiting for several blocks to be mined on top of a transaction to reduce the chances of a fork that renders it invalid.
- deckar01 8y agoThis article is less informative than the one it is citing. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/mit-stanford-academics-design-cryptocurrency-to-better-bitcoin https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/mit-stanf...
- StacyC 8y ago“The mainstream public is aware that these networks don’t scale.” The mainstream public is barely aware that these networks exist.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoMore importantly I don't see any reason why VISA couldn't scale arbitrarily to accommodate however many transactions.
- ceejayoz 8y agoExactly. They've presumably already had to do so a number of times as ecommerce took off and we've moved quite a bit towards a cashless society.
- cle 8y agoIn distributed systems, there are almost always bottlenecks hiding right behind the system's empirical limit.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoMy point is that scale and speed of transaction doesn't seem to be VISA's problem. VISA et. al. have scaled massively over the last 20 years, in ways that would have been unimaginable before. Given that a VISA is just a 'number' with some 'info' on it, I don't see what any existential bottlenecks might be. Maybe some things were centralized, but now are distributed ... But given that each VISA is issued by a financial entity like a bank, which can manage it like any other account ... I just don't see the problem here. I don't want to trounce creative thinking but most of this blockchains stuff is just academic for now.
- dontreact 8y agoI don’t think this is true anymore. This poll claims 80% of Americans are aware of Bitcoin. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ccn.com/80-of-americans-are-aware-of-bitcoin-study-reveals/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ccn.com/80-of-americans-are...
- sonnyblarney 8y agoBlockchain solves yet another non-problem! Next up: "Blockhain makes it easier to press the button on your blender"
- baby 8y agoIf Bitcoin was released before online banking, would you have said the same?
- sonnyblarney 8y ago"If Bitcoin was released before online banking, would you have said the same?" That's a non-sequitor, because as long as the world is 'online' there can effectively be 'online banking'. And of course we need 'online' to have Bitcoin. Are you suggesting people did Bitcon by mail? One day we might find something useful for it to do, but not for a while. Let's stop wasting vast amounts of electricity until we figure out something useful for it to do, as of today, there are none.
- baby 8y ago> That's a non-sequitor, because as long as the world is 'online' there can effectively be 'online banking'. Of course, but online banking has been bad for a very long time (it's still bad in the US, you can't easily transfer money around compared to Europe). Bitcoin was effectively better than banking before a certain point in history, and worked out of the box without all the banking infrastructure, it would have won back then. > Let's stop wasting vast amounts of electricity until we figure out something useful for it to do, as of today, there are none. It shows that you know nothing about cryptocurrencies. The innovation and current research in the field tackles, among other issues, the energy issue of bitcoin. (Check Algorand for an example.)
- gammateam 8y agoITT: my favorite blockchain that my favorite youtube guru happened to expose me to first is the best solution, and all others are scams because I was exposed to them second so basically religion.
- exrook 8y agoFor anyone interested in more information, I found the research paper[0] and website for the currency named "Unit-e"[1]. The paper seems to be quite extensive at 168 pages long and covers a lot more than the blockchain design. [0] https://dtr.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/2019-01-16-Decentralized-Payment-Systems-Principles-and-Design.pdf https://dtr.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/2019-01-16-Decent... [1] https://dtr.org/unit-e/ https://dtr.org/unit-e/
- blunte 8y agoI guess my unpleasant exposure to this domain has affected my brain, because I first read "shady blockchain"... Aren't most of them? Whoops!