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No, blockchains are not the future, they are really the reason why one transaction can happen at a time in the whole world. Even Ethereum 2.0 will have shards
by EGreg 6y ago
No, blockchains are not the future, they are really the reason why one transaction can happen at a time in the whole world.
Even Ethereum 2.0 will have shards which will do away with this anomaly. The only reason flash loans even work with no collateral is because you can be sure nothing else is running on the “world computer” while your transaction runs, so you can roll it back with no risk except gas fees. Vitalik himself acknowledges this, the guy is quite honest and straightforward about its limitations:
Vitalik Buterin: Using Ethereum is expensive, and its blockchain is ‘almost full’ He also said blockchain's 'problem' is that every computer verifies every transaction
Actually blockchains are a first-generation technology that do global consensus for every block, which literally means all transactions in the world must go through one computer in the world (the miner) although it’s a different one each time. And the situation is actually worse, since you don’t know who would mine the next block in advance, every transaction must be sent to every potential miner! Imagine if BitTorrent had every computer store and seed every movie instead of using DHT.
The ability to send or loan arbitrarily large amounts for a fixed fee is a symptom of centralization. In a fully distributed network, transaction fees would have to be proportional to transaction size!
Almost every other protocol on the Internet does not have such bottlenecks in its design. No one asks how many emails or websites can be served per second. Blockchain is trying to secure every transaction using the entire network! That is why so much electricity is wasted just to do 7 transactions per second. The next generation of crypto will actually be able to power payments using embarrasingly parallel architecture. Until then, we have blockchain.
Ethereum is nicknamed the “world computer” for a reason. Gas fees are super high for small transactions like paying for coffee or voting in a secure election. Just one app KryptoKitties can clog up the entire network.
As one example, we built Intercoin apps on top of Ethereum (https://intercoin.org/applications https://intercoin.org/applications) but we are not going to wait around for Ethereum 2.0 - which is blockchain also. Kik Messenger and others have long gotten off. Ripple, MaidSAFE and Solana use different technologies.
- andreaorru 6y agoWhat's your opinion on Layer 2 technologies like ZK and Optimistic Rollups?
- EGreg 6y agoI think they definitely have a chance, but sharding is the best idea. Unfortunately Bitcoin with Proof of Work will be around for a very long time as mining will be extremely lucrative for 100 years. Wasting more and more electricity for a legacy system to do store of value.
- loceng 6y ago"Almost every other protocol on the Internet does not have such bottlenecks in its design. No one asks how many emails or websites can be served per second." I think blockchain can be a good answer to problems that Bitcoin solves, however the blockchain used needs to not be designed as an MLM scheme with a financial incentive for its adoption, and designed to avoid other unavoidable pitfalls Bitcoin creates that we need to avoid. I think the current iteration of blockchain as Bitcoin only became the incumbent because of the MLM scheme, and that there is a non-MLM solution that can gain adoption - it just has to be understood by democratically elected decision makers first (save regulatory capture which will most certainly happen with the weight of the "army/mob of HODLers."
- ItsMonkk 6y agoYou touched on something that I have been trying to work out but don't nearly have the expertise to create. Bitcoin requires PoW because it's implemented as back-pointers, where the global software states that everyone coalesces behind the tallest chain. But why not just implement a linked list, where the next link is written into the current block, and whomever writes to that next block wins? You would end up with endless blocks, but we can use what we learned with ext2 fs, where we have a circular queue. Once the data has been consumed by the main datastore, it is consumed and is available to be written to again. You can still store the entire chain in some cheap s3, and anyone who wants to ensure that every command was executed could do so, but most would not. I would love to see this implemented with torrent technology, such that I could host a website database solely by paying a seedbox company.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]