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4. Consensus Algorithms Are Wack The popular blockchains only don’t offer transaction finality i.e you will never be 100% sure that you have gotten funds. You

4. Consensus Algorithms Are Wack The popular blockchains only don’t offer transaction finality i.e you will never be 100% sure that you have gotten funds. You can only be probabilistically to a high degree (but with zero guarantee) that you have received your funds. This is because in major consensus algorithm called Nakamoto Consensus, the miners elect the chain with the most computational work that are with in the same protocol i.e consensus rules. For instance imagine your bank tells you that you that, “there is a 95% chance that we might have your life savings, however you may also not poses it in 5 years in case we discovered that the chain with the most work does not have your transaction in it” Yes, I don’t think anyone wants to keep their life savings in such a bank. Sure, and the probability that all of your atoms will teleport one foot forward is not zero. But it's sufficiently zero that we say it's zero, and we're rarely proven wrong. It took awhile to become comfortable with probabilistic algorithms, but some (small) familiarity with physics helped. Nature is probabilistic, and seems to work. This isn't a great counterargument, but honestly none of these arguments seem very persuasive. I'm not a blockchain fan, but it's like... "if someone steals your wallet, they'll get all of your money!" Well, duh. Everyone knows this and seems fine with it. 1. Scalability Issues The current bandwidth, i.e the data that can be transmitted through a blockchain with in a given time is simply too bounded for main stream adoption. Ethereum for instance does a maximum of 13 transactions per second. Visa on the other hand can do 24,000 Transaction per second and peak over 40,000 transactions per second. No mention of Lightning network to solve this. I've been out of the crypto game for years and even I know "Lightning is supposedly the solution." Did that ever pan out? 6. Price Volatility Very few people simply don’t have the stomach to hold a financial instrument that drops by over 50% with in a few months. https://i.imgur.com/WWzTlGb.png https://i.imgur.com/WWzTlGb.png

cesaref 6y ago
> Nature is probabilistic, and seems to work. I think what you mean is that the currently most successful model of the physical world is probabilistic, but this doesn't mean that nature is.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Mm. That's an interesting way of looking at it. But the assumptions are laid out by Feynman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRE0GxT6Zbw&list=PLgRI7D_FXEnrCM8T1czHfJsvbQd4V1jRc&ab_channel=L%27Universitaire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRE0GxT6Zbw&list=PLgRI7D_FXE... Although I'd love to urge everyone to sit through all six hours, I recognize this isn't too practical. So -- with apologies to Feynman -- I'll have to do a poor job of translating: - The scientific method means that we are never certain we're right; we're only certain we're wrong. But (as with Newton's laws) it's pretty incredible we can last so long before we're proven incorrect! - The world seems to obey mathematics. But math != physics. One helps the other; discoveries in math have applied to physics, and vice-versa. - The heart of nature seems to be a purely mathematical construct, from which there is no escape. Many people have tried to model gravity as something other than the gravitational equation, e.g. suppose at every point in time there are particles shooting every direction simultaneously. Then gravity is merely us blocking these particles -- earth with respect to the sun blocks a certain fraction of particles towards the sun, and in fact inversely as the square of the distance. No math necessary! Unfortunately, doesn't quite work -- if it were true, the earth would have slowed in its orbit due to blocking the particles, and it wouldn't have lasted ~billions of years. So that's the end of that theory. - The double slit experiment seems to prove that the world has no other model other than probabilistic (see lecture 6). There is some fundamental limitation preventing us from narrowing down nature further than this threshold. - Every test designed to break this assumption has failed. Therefore, I say that the physical world is probabilistic, and I will wager any sum of money you'd like to bet that it will still be true within, say, 200 years. There is one interesting alternative: if everything in the universe is pre-destined. The complete absence of any kind of free will whatsoever. Every atom, every electron, every single subatomic particle, all predestined from the moment of the big bang til now. That seems to be the only way that it can't be probabilistic.
- psychoslave 6y ago
  Yes, I completely agree. I think however that the point was that whatever we build out of our best available physical theories ultimately relies on probabilistic grounds. Now on the other hand, we don't use quantum physics for every single human project out there, and for many human scale phenomena, we can act without concious probabilistic representations.
ketzu 6y ago
> Everyone knows this and seems fine with it. Are you sure? I believe a lot of people interact with blockchains through services like coinbase, without managing their own wallets.
davidgerard 6y ago
>WARNING >Before you proceed, please understand that the Lightning Network is still in the experimental stage. Do not put the money you can't afford to lose. There is a high risk of you losing the money. https://docs.btcpayserver.org/LightningNetwork/ https://docs.btcpayserver.org/LightningNetwork/ and a pile of other places - and particularly when someone points out that LN doesn't work very well, and that money gets lost to bugs way too often to trust. The purpose of the Lightning Network is to serve as an excuse for Bitcoin's dismal performance. It is not a production-ready payment system, even to the degree that Bitcoin is.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Thanks! I've wondered how the lightning network fared over the years. Judging by the still-experimental state, the answer is "not well."

cesaref 6y ago

> Nature is probabilistic, and seems to work. I think what you mean is that the currently most successful model of the physical world is probabilistic, but this doesn't mean that nature is.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
Mm. That's an interesting way of looking at it. But the assumptions are laid out by Feynman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRE0GxT6Zbw&list=PLgRI7D_FXEnrCM8T1czHfJsvbQd4V1jRc&ab_channel=L%27Universitaire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRE0GxT6Zbw&list=PLgRI7D_FXE... Although I'd love to urge everyone to sit through all six hours, I recognize this isn't too practical. So -- with apologies to Feynman -- I'll have to do a poor job of translating: - The scientific method means that we are never certain we're right; we're only certain we're wrong. But (as with Newton's laws) it's pretty incredible we can last so long before we're proven incorrect! - The world seems to obey mathematics. But math != physics. One helps the other; discoveries in math have applied to physics, and vice-versa. - The heart of nature seems to be a purely mathematical construct, from which there is no escape. Many people have tried to model gravity as something other than the gravitational equation, e.g. suppose at every point in time there are particles shooting every direction simultaneously. Then gravity is merely us blocking these particles -- earth with respect to the sun blocks a certain fraction of particles towards the sun, and in fact inversely as the square of the distance. No math necessary! Unfortunately, doesn't quite work -- if it were true, the earth would have slowed in its orbit due to blocking the particles, and it wouldn't have lasted ~billions of years. So that's the end of that theory. - The double slit experiment seems to prove that the world has no other model other than probabilistic (see lecture 6). There is some fundamental limitation preventing us from narrowing down nature further than this threshold. - Every test designed to break this assumption has failed. Therefore, I say that the physical world is probabilistic, and I will wager any sum of money you'd like to bet that it will still be true within, say, 200 years. There is one interesting alternative: if everything in the universe is pre-destined. The complete absence of any kind of free will whatsoever. Every atom, every electron, every single subatomic particle, all predestined from the moment of the big bang til now. That seems to be the only way that it can't be probabilistic.
psychoslave 6y ago
Yes, I completely agree. I think however that the point was that whatever we build out of our best available physical theories ultimately relies on probabilistic grounds. Now on the other hand, we don't use quantum physics for every single human project out there, and for many human scale phenomena, we can act without concious probabilistic representations.

ketzu 6y ago

> Everyone knows this and seems fine with it. Are you sure? I believe a lot of people interact with blockchains through services like coinbase, without managing their own wallets.

davidgerard 6y ago

>WARNING >Before you proceed, please understand that the Lightning Network is still in the experimental stage. Do not put the money you can't afford to lose. There is a high risk of you losing the money. https://docs.btcpayserver.org/LightningNetwork/ https://docs.btcpayserver.org/LightningNetwork/ and a pile of other places - and particularly when someone points out that LN doesn't work very well, and that money gets lost to bugs way too often to trust. The purpose of the Lightning Network is to serve as an excuse for Bitcoin's dismal performance. It is not a production-ready payment system, even to the degree that Bitcoin is.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
Thanks! I've wondered how the lightning network fared over the years. Judging by the still-experimental state, the answer is "not well."