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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

• jeremycarter 5y ago
  Blockchain, Decentralization and Smart Contracts have had nearly a decade to prove their value and disrupt the marketplace. So far nothing but whitepapers, pipe dreams and exit scams - nothing my mother can use. What's the point? Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat. Prove me wrong.
  • bpodgursky 5y ago
    On January 29, 1886, Carl Benz applied for a patent for his “vehicle powered by a gas engine.” The patent – number 37435 – may be regarded as the birth certificate of the automobile. In July 1886 the newspapers reported on the first public outing of the three-wheeled Benz Patent Motor Car, model no. 1.
    • mvzvm 5y ago
      What a strange response. Did you respond to the wrong comment?
      • foobar502 5y ago
        It takes time.
        • mvzvm 5y ago
          In his own example, it went from patent to useful in a few months. Blockchain has not gone from idea to useful at all yet.
          • tummybug 5y ago
            That is a really hard to achieve definition of useful.
          • Asraelite 5y ago
            Very very few people were using cars at that time. If you apply that same low threshold of usefulness to blockchain then it became useful just as fast, if not faster.
    • dmitriid 5y ago
      Do quote everything, while you're at it. > The first production of automobiles was by Karl Benz in 1888 in Germany and, under license from Benz, in France by Emile Roger. There were numerous others, including tricycle builders Rudolf Egg, Edward Butler, and Léon Bollée. Bollée, using a 650 cc (40 cu in) engine of his own design, enabled his driver, Jamin, to average 45 kilometres per hour (28 mph) in the 1897 Paris-Tourville rally. By 1900, mass production of automobiles had begun in France and the United States. So, 11 years after production started, gas-powered cars were not only rather common, but there were rallies involving them. 11 years from introduction, no one has come up with a use-case for blockchain: https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100 https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-... and https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...
      • BeefWellington 5y ago
        > 11 years from introduction, no one has come up with a use-case for blockchain This seems an odd claim to make. Currently there's hundreds of Cryptocurrencies using blockchains as a foundation, and more than half a trillion dollars tied up in them. Right now it seems like they're at least speculative investments. If this does not count as a use-case then we'd better break the news to essentially all of finance. Years ago before the values jumped you could do plenty of actual currency things with cryptocurrencies: there were ATMs, you could buy beers at a pub or pay for server hosting (something I did myself), etc. Because of all of the speculation cryptocurrencies have generally become too volatile for that. Nobody wants to find out at the pub there was a market crash and they can't cover their outing. At the time though, it all worked and had incredibly low transaction fees. Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development. IMO it has absolutely established itself as a technology and like everything new people were quick to try to apply it to every problem and found it largely didn't fit most places. That doesn't mean it isn't useful.
        • vehementi 5y ago
          You can take any obscenely inefficient technology and apply it to anything and say "look, it's useful", but that doesn't make it a good idea or viable or really even not pointless. I heard it best put as: blockchain provides trustlessness at very high operational cost -- do we have a business case where trustlessness is a competitive advantage? If not, just use a database or equivalent So like yes, you can implement insurance and messaging and contracts with blockchain. Is there a need to do that? Does it make sense? Would that business work? (Zero percent of such businesses have worked) The sending money part is certainly a legitimate use. Unfortunately it's being totally broken by speculation on all the coins (not to mention high gas).
    • idlewords 5y ago
      And over the following years the automobile improved rapidly, becoming more capable, reliable, and gaining users as it went. It didn't spend its first 13 years up on blocks while its supporters yelled at the skeptical and embezzled money from everyone else.
      • sthnblllII 5y ago
        Yea. Its closer to the first 30 years of its existence doing pretty much nothing but being sport for rich people.
        • idlewords 5y ago
          It was at least able to roll from point A to point B without consuming a small country's worth of power.
  • RobertDeNiro 5y ago
    The original use case was for black markets such as silkroad. Then crypto made so much sense.
  • seibelj 5y ago
    I have responded to a thousand versions of your comment on HN. No matter what I write the haters never change their minds. HN is not an enthusiastic place for blockchain devs.
    • jeremycarter 5y ago
      I'm not a hater. I am just applying some critical thinking and design thinking to try to figure out where the value is in all of this to the customer. I am happy to say I'm wrong, and happy to backflip.
      • seibelj 5y ago
        Here is one of many comments I have written https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25641940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25641940 But again, to those reading this thread, HN is not a place where you will find a lot of people who patiently defend crypto and blockchain. It garners a lot of downvotes.
        • jeremycarter 5y ago
          I will read it without bias. Thank you.
        • kaladin_1 5y ago
          >> But again, to those reading this thread, HN is not a place where you will find a lot of people who patiently defend crypto and blockchain. It garners a lot of downvotes. Blockchain is a wonderful piece of technology. IMHO I do not think anyone really has personal beef with the technology. I think majority really want to understand, and if they're asking and posing questions it is because do not understand. There might be some that have their skin in it going south but I doubt that's the situation of many. People really want to understand its use case as money.
      • puranjay 5y ago
        Please see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27258671 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27258671 some links to complement the comment: https://curve.fi/ https://curve.fi/ - for exchanging different tokenized stable coins (such as USDC > EURO). Already has over $300M in daily volume exchange. https://yearn.finance/ https://yearn.finance/ - a platform where anyone can code and deploy an investment strategy, provided it is voted on by people who hold the platform's governance tokens. Already has over $3B in assets locked in. Good idea to look at their governance platform as well: https://snapshot.org/#/yearn https://snapshot.org/#/yearn https://aave.com/ https://aave.com/ - a platform to borrow or lend your tokenized assets. Already has over $9B in assets invested
  • k__ 5y ago
    I think, it will probably take another decade. I think, BC could go to 5 million before it stablizes.
    • kgwgk 5y ago
      Or 42 trillion. Sky is the limit.
      • throwaway829 5y ago
        If america has Zimbabwean inflation maybe.
    • wcoenen 5y ago
      The dynamics of mining make this impossible. If Bitcoin were worth millions, then miners could spend millions on electricity to find each block and still make a profit. And because they're competing with hashrate, they would do exactly that. If you do the math, you'll find that basically all electricity would go to mining. Before we would get to that point, the electricity price would start going up of course. For everybody. And guess what governments will do when the population starts rioting because they can't afford electricity? They'll ban all proof-of-work coins. Maybe all crypto just to be on the safe side.
      • k__ 5y ago
        I did some math and my idea was: If the max amount of Bitcoin is 21mio and we assume that a huge chunk of the economy will be payable with these Bitcoin. Then on Bitcoin has to be worth (at least) 1/21mio of that economy chunk.
        • wcoenen 5y ago
          That is one way to estimate a maximum possible value. My point is that by assuming "Bitcoin cannot consume more than X % of all electricity or there will be trouble", you can calculate another maximum value which turns out to be much lower. In fact, if you assume Bitcoin can consume no more than 1% of all electricity (before regulatory trouble starts brewing) and electricity costs 0.05 USD/kWh, then you get a maximum price which is pretty close to the current price. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.05+USD%2FkWh+*+10+minutes+*+2100+gigawatt+*+0.01+%2F+6.25 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.05+USD%2FkWh+*+10+mi...
  • Robotbeat 5y ago
    Decentralization is good, but it’s almost by definition not profitable. It’s in centralization that you get profit (pre-mining is a bit like centralization). BitTorrent: good, somewhat decentralized. Not super profitable.
    • ric2b 5y ago
      By definition? Can you expand?
  • puranjay 5y ago
    Maybe I'm wrong but I see this perspective so often on HN. And I can't help but feel that this is because so many people on HN are already privileged - living in the first world, making software salaries, and generally have a world of opportunities available to them, especially when it comes to their money. But coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising. Particularly if it doesn't restrict me because of my location or capital or identity. If the internet broke geographical barriers, this tech can break barriers of capital and identity and credentialsm. While I won't talk about the idealized vision of blockchains, smart contracts can automate away a large number of fairly complex interactions. There is already a pretty thriving decentralized financial market that anyone can access from any part of the world with any amount of capital - no KYC or questions asked. A very basic usage: using Curve.fi to swap between tokenized USD (USDC) and tokenized EURO (EURS) with minimal slippage and fees, all permissionless, all freely accessible. If I was an American and wanted to have Euro to spend on my vacation, would this not be a better way to go about it instead of going to the bank, dealing with someone, and paying their exorbitant fees? The only missing part is the ability to easily spend this tokenized EURO, but that - I'm hoping - will come later. The core tech - smart contracts, blockchains - work. A more advanced use case: deploy tokenized USD into a vault that lends it out according to a set strategy, earning the lender interest passively. The individual who created the strategy, in term, earns a fee based on their returns generated. Again, this individual can be from anywhere and doesn't have to have a fancy office and degrees to get investment "clients". Nor does the lender have to deal with anyone to lend out their money. If this tech allows Raj from India to build a "hedge fund", and for Joe from America to invest with as little as $1, and the two never have to know each other, and can interact entirely with a smart contract available 24x7, what's there not to be excited about? In the serious crypto world, there is a maxim: Code is Law. I would reckon that alone should make HN bullish on crypto. When was the last time you worked at a tech company where Code was truly the Law? ===== Some links if anyone wants to explore this further: 1. Uniswap.org - anyone can set up trading between any two tokenized assets. Want to trade between the price of gold and Venezuelan Bolivar? Sure, go ahead and use the price oracles from Chainlink to create these two tokens, set up a trading pair, and allow anyone to speculate on these two assets. Or you can just be a market maker (something only big funds can do in TradFi) and earn fees on the trades. 2. Curve.fi - swap between tokenized stable coins, such as EURO > USD, without ever having to visit the bank or paying their fees or doing their KYC. 3. AAVE.com - Lend or borrow between tokenized assets
  • Sleepytime 5y ago
    The internet was around a lot longer than a decade before aol showed up and started pressing CDs.
    • fo0manchu 5y ago
      Sources on that claim?
    • idlewords 5y ago
      Imagine if after TCP/IP was invented, people hoarded IP addresses and they became worth millions of dollars, but no one used the internet. If you pointed this out, they got mad at you for being a luddite or a noiper. That's the situation we're in with crypto.
      • CryptoPunk 5y ago
        People use Ethereum.. https://etherscan.io/chart/gasused https://etherscan.io/chart/gasused
        • idlewords 5y ago
          They use it to speculate. In the words of Mark Cuban, "Traders borrow to buy Eth, used eth to borrow alt/stable coin, used that to LP a high APY Pair, took the SLPs and staked them to maxout yield." Whatever that means, this is the world they're building.
      • imtringued 5y ago
        The reverse is sort of happening with IPv4. ISPs are pushing more and more people behind CGNAT where multiple people share the same IPv4 address. This is a problem because some video games (Terraria) don't support IPv6.
    • qeternity 5y ago
      Crypto relies on the internet. It benefits from its adoption. It should be much faster. YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, App Stores, etc. All of these advancements experienced rapid growth. Hell, even PayPal. The internet built the network that made that rapid growth possible. Crypto is not reinventing the internet.
  • dehrmann 5y ago
    > nothing my mother can use In developed countries, I can tap with my phone or card to pay instantly, there's Venmo, and fees are low-ish. Currently, no cryptocurrency has competitive advantages to traditional payments...unless it's illegal, but even then, certain cryptocurrences are a really bad choice. Supposedly phone apps are used for payments in developing countries, but I'm not entirely sure.
    • scabarott 5y ago
      I'm a huge proponent of crypto and the many things it's going to make possible that were not previously possible. But the developing country angle is oversold usually by people just parroting it without really knowing what things are like in developing countries: 1. In many developing countries increasingly you can also use phone or card almost as conveniently as you can in the west. In fact some developing countries are more advanced as far as mobile payments go (out of necessity because of less developed banking systems) e.g Mpesa in Kenya. Generally visa/bank cards and payment apps are not as alien as you might think they are in many parts of Africa or India or South America 2. Using Bitcoins for transactions/moving money around with the current state of the art is a lot more difficult and less accessible than using western union and other financial services that are ubiquitous in these places. Since at present you can't really use Bitcoin for much you still have to convert it fiat which means using an exchange. Most exchanges have even more onerous kyc/id requirements than banks and many financial institutions in developing countries won't even touch bitcoin at all. And not even to talk of the relative technical sophistication required to use crypto services let alone maintain a wallet. As far as developing countries go crypto-currency at present is mostly a curiosity among the well-heeled and well-connected in the largest cities. It's going to be a long long time before the promise of crypto bringing salvation to the un-banked comes anywhere close to reality.
  • skinnyasianboi 5y ago
    NFTs disrupted the digital art marketplace.
  • n0mad01 5y ago
    This is a very limited and short-sighted view on the emergence and development of new technologies. From the first petrol engine (1879) to the Ford Model T (1908), the Arpanet (1969) to the Internet (1990), as also software development (Cyberpunk 2077 was developed over 8 years), these things have one thing in common: they need time. When one day your every breath (and its payment) is recorded on a blockchain then you should be aware that such a technology capable to do so does not exist yet, but its basic features do.
    • jeremycarter 5y ago
      Yes I know it is very short sighted, but I am very open to being persuaded. I'm not trying to be negative, just trying to look for the real world "value".
    • dmitriid 5y ago
      For some reason bitcoin apologists always use cars, and the internet, and other actual disruptive technologies and inventions. Even though with each passing day it looks more like radioactive health products [1] [1] https://interestingengineering.com/9-interesting-failed-inventions-past https://interestingengineering.com/9-interesting-failed-inve...
      • n0mad01 5y ago
        it is noticeably peculiar to compare one of the most significant technical inventions of our century with a half-baked hair dryer. such innovations only appear now and then, one should have the intuition to recognize them as such, otherwise he will miss the opportunities of such developments.
        • dmitriid 5y ago
          > one should have the intuition to recognize them as such, otherwise he will miss the opportunities of such developments. That's the narrative of scam artists since before time.
          • 5y ago
  • nootropicat 5y ago
    Defi is only about 2-3 years old. It's indeed fair to say that bitcoin has completely failed in getting any adoption beyond speculation. >Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat. Ethereum is the best way to save in dollars outside of the developed world. High single digit or double digit yields (powered by speculators borrowing to speculate) vs ~0% in the banking system. Also much safer. Not compared to an American bank, but to Russian/Lebanese/Brazilian etc.
    • atweiden 5y ago
      > Defi is only about 2-3 years old The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins). And what the cool kids are calling “defi” today was called “appcoins” and “utility coins” several years ago. It’s all just marketing spin. > It's indeed fair to say that bitcoin has completely failed in getting any adoption beyond speculation. Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store of value. Gold itself is a speculative SoV. For Bitcoin, that’s a sign of success — which is reflected in its market price. There is not one single cryptocurrency on the market today which isn’t a speculative store of value primarily by real world usage. Rather there is Bitcoin which is upfront about this, and then there are other coins whose skilled sophists promote it as being something other than a speculative store of value as a hollow front. Peak behind the curtain and you’ll find a speculative store of value in 100% of cases, absolutely without exception. If anything has failed here it’s the moral compass of altcoin promoters globally, and investors for being so easily misled by hype entrepreneurs.
      • nootropicat 5y ago
        >The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins). I disagree. Defi started with lending and borrowing dapps. If just tokens themselves are 'defi' then bitcoin itself is defi, which would make the definition pointless. Finance requires lending and borrowing. >Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store of value. Gold itself is a speculative SoV. For Bitcoin, that’s a sign of success — which is reflected in its market price. The title of the bitcoin whitepaper is 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' which means it objectively failed in its stated goal. Of course, it had to, as bitcoin is not backed by anything and money must be backed by something. Now it's just a ponzi scheme that continues to make people poorer while fooling them that they're getting rich. The only way to make a profit on bitcoin is to take someone else's wealth - it's zero sum by itself. On top of that there's mining, which ensures bitcoin continuously destroys wealth and makes bitcoin buyers poorer as a group compared to everyone else.
  • Geee 5y ago
    I am using Bitcoin as money and there are a lot of people like me. Just by saving in Bitcoin is using it. The primary purpose of money is to save your purchasing power. From my viewpoint, it is inevitable that Bitcoin replaces fiat currencies. Given free markets, people will eventually choose the most sound money.
  • mattdesl 5y ago
    I would argue that many NFT platforms (such as Hicetnunc.xyz[1]) have already successfully "disrupted" traditional artist marketplaces (such as Etsy, Shopify, Bandcamp, etc), despite being only popular for a short few months. I think many other participating artists would agree, if these decentralized platforms continue to be more profitable for creators than traditional options, there is no need to 'go back' to centralized fiat marketplaces. I think the real question is whether this will continue long-term, and whether decentralized paradigms (digital ownership, DAOs, trustless execution, etc) can still hold value for the average user even if there was no high economic return. [1] - https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-marketplace/ https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-brazils-diy-nft-art-mark...
• maxrev17 5y ago
  This is a really good read. More of this and less of Elon's chatter needed!
  • laurent92 5y ago
    I was trying to summarize, for an employee who got caught in “Elon Musk shouldn’t have manipulated the BTC” (!) (obviously the employee lost 25% of his savings), I was trying to summarize the list of dangers of having savings in BTC. - Laws of any big country could change and trigger the sale for a lot of sellers of a country, - Especially given BTC is used by Iran to bypass petrol restrictions, used by ransomware and all sort of dealers, as well as Chinese who want to flee, - Currencies are in theory regalian = only emitted by the central bank; - Once any country gets upset with this, they could blame terrorism on BTC and ask owners to prove their origin of wealth, which would be a major hurdle if the law was strict. I’m adding this to the list. Volatility is desired because “you can make it big”, but the rest is only dangers.
    • javert 5y ago
      Bitcoin is about giving the world honest money (someday), not about getting rich. Don't put "savings" in bitcoin.
      • tromp 5y ago
        I feel honest money should be rather more hoarding resistent...
      • UncleMeat 5y ago
        That ship sailed with the bch split.
    • maxrev17 5y ago
      Yeah savings vs investment. Crypto is a very high risk investment and should be used as the high risk cherry on top of any portfolio pie! Unless you are minted and don't mind losing a tonne in which case go all in on eth :p
    • 5y ago
• javert 5y ago
  You could also just not scale the blockchain, and instead use layer 2 solutions, which is the bitcoin approach.
  • jeremycarter 5y ago
    But then what's the difference with the existing solutions involving central banks?
    • gruez 5y ago
      Because layer 2 solutions (eg. LN) are trustless. ie. it doesn't involve you depositing your coins with some third party and trusting that they don't run off with them.
      • jeremycarter 5y ago
        And you've personally lost money from government regulated financial institutions?
        • gruez 5y ago
          1. I'm fortunate to live in a country with a stable enough banking system that I haven't ...yet. Others are not so lucky. 2. whether you "lost money" is also the wrong question to ask. eg. if there was a massive bank failure and the government decided to bail them out by printing massive amounts of cash, you'd technically gotten your money back but you still "lost" money. 3. this feels like a derail/moving the goalposts and eventually devolving to arguments about monetary policy, intrinsic value, and whether the state should have a monopoly on currencies.
        • mistrial9 5y ago
          my USA bank re-arranged the order of my checks and ATM on a certain day in december of 2007 to create an overdraft, which then was charged large fees, several times. At a similar time, around dec 2007, I stood next to a BofA customer being told that his cash deposit at the BofA window, would be credited on the next business day. I believe that there are documented cases much, much larger, but involving commercial transactions, that ended up with large losses also.
• sktrdie 5y ago
  This "blockchain" space is getting so complicated that I can't see anymore what it is about. Is it a database? Is it a p2p network? Is it a currency? Most of the "blockchains" listed on aggregators such as coinmarketcap.com are essentially clients communicating to a few nodes which, for all we know, sync up in a coordinated way to provide the illusion of a decentralized consensus system. Like maybe we need to take a step back and ask "what problem are we actually trying to solve?". Is an uncontrollable & anonymous currency truly the next big thing we need? Did we even stop to think of the potential issues of a system like that? To me the future should be more audacious. Maybe we don't need some kind of unalterable decentralized database where capitalism can thrive from. Maybe we need to rethink society where money is not as crucial as it is today. Hoping that the "next" cryptopunks can think of these ideas to really change the world for the better rather than ways to scale an unalterable database which, for all I can tell, just provides a distributed way to track who owes what to whom.
  • DSingularity 5y ago
    It’s a network supporting both a decentralized data-store with a consistent view into valuable data and an a distributed computer with consistent results. What is so hard about this?
    • jeremycarter 5y ago
      Yes but what problem is it trying to solve? It's a solution to a non existent problem.
      • DSingularity 5y ago
        Okay, decentralized currency is one idea. This can be used to implement some money with a monetary policy that is transparent and modified through consensus: eg bitcoin - deflationary via finite supply. Multi-party wallet is another. With this, cryptographic signatures from a majority of the owners is required to transfer currency/digital assets. Non-fungible tokens is another. This can be used to — as an example — publish land deeds and property deeds online and make them easily transferred as opposed to the current systems which are not fool-proof and are not as user friendly (look at selling a house and how expensive it is for no good reason). Or what about decentralized finance? A user can literally borrow money against Bitcoin without the need of an authority which can discriminate against him for no good reason. How nice is it that we can now operate such systems that are robust to censorship. But you will just dismiss all these ideas. Same way people dismissed all the ideas people were imagining when the internet is young. If you want to broaden your mind— just detach the idea of blockchain from the price of Bitcoin. Yes, it’s insane to the point of being obscene.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• narush 5y ago
  Vitalik is consistently one of the most interesting people to follow in the blockchain space. Even his (5+ year) old writing is quite interesting, if nothing else to see how Ethereum's research thinking has evolved over time. A few questions re: why "Ethereum is not going further than quadratic [sharding]." The first reason given: there's a minimum number of nodes required for shard for safety guarantees. So, a couple hundred shards, each with 1000 users seems like a limit. But I wonder: 10 years from now, if the blockchain (maybe pipe?) dreams succeed, then why do we expect 1000 * 500 = 5M nodes? This seems like it's quite small. Especially if running a node on a phone ever becomes reasonable, or at least participating in the data availability process is possible here, then why would we not go further? The second reason for non-super-quadratic sharding is data permanence. But here, couldn't we design different shards with different appetites for data permanence. Sure, NFTs currently are forever, but I can think of many applications where users do not give a damn about data permanence, and even some applications where users would prefer if data was just forgotten about. In which case, what's stopping us from saying "these shards, we save. The other ones, who cares about." We would want users to opt into such guarantees, of course, but it seems reasonably possible. Of course, let's get a good sharded blockchain before we optimize for more. I'm excited to see how sharding research continues to involve and drives the cost per TX (economic and environmental) down. Consider me a cheerleader rooting for you all!
  • seibelj 5y ago
    It is always preferred to require less resources. There must be a healthy balance. If Ethereum accomplishes what a lot of us hope, allowing home-hobbyists to run nodes and at least break-even in staking or profit a small amount will be crucial. Relying on goodwill from a small amount of technically-adept-yet-centralized operators is how we get to the Tor situation where everyone knows the government runs most of the exit nodes.
    • dannyw 5y ago
      Genuine question: can crypto economics provide incentives for a more decentralised Tor? I'm talking about being paid crypto for hosting a tor node, and charged crypto for using a tor node. Using privacy technologies like ring signatures of course.
• crazypython 5y ago
  This is precisely what happened in 2017. Miners and exchanges unanimously supported increases Bitcoin's blocksize limit from 4MB to 8MB, in Segwit2x. However, users stopped them.
  • lawn 5y ago
    No, the miners did not fork away, so it's not at all like what's described here.
• mvzvm 5y ago
  Scam after scam, that's all blockchain is. Just another way to fleece the average consumer. There has not been a single valuable use, a single product, that actually improves anyone's day / process / life / anything. I am very open to changing my stance if someone presents evidence to the contrary.
  • conception 5y ago
    Remittances are better/easier. That’s the only thing I’ve seen and the tech to do that is trivial now and Bitcoin is terrible for it specifically now.
    • mvzvm 5y ago
      Are they? I've had no issues with remittances outside of blockchain. In places where I have heard remittances are difficult, it is usually due to regulation, something this does not solve either.
      • noxer 5y ago
        Its difficult because it requires parked money (nostro accounts) in foreign currencies. This imposes a risk and act as "dead capital". At some point the cost to maintain the corridor is higher than the profit so the corridor is closed. Transaction then are routed trough other corridors which means multiple currencies swaps. More loses and more parties who want their cut. + it can takes days and the system are one-way so you have to ask the recipient if he got it to know. Public ledgers can make a difference See https://ripple.com/ripplenet/on-demand-liquidity/ https://ripple.com/ripplenet/on-demand-liquidity/
      • splintercell 5y ago
        My Spanish teacher in Peru has to travel one hour by bus to reach the destination for Western Union money transfer. With crypto using local crypto exchange, he receives the money directly into his bank account.
    • lottin 5y ago
      How are remittances better/easier exactly? With BTC you need to exchange currencies at least 2 times, as opposed to one.
• magila 5y ago
  Not mentioned in the bandwidth section is that residential connections in the US usually have a monthly data cap of ~1TB. Users are unlikely to tolerate a blockchain client using more than half of that. So if a full node sustains much more than 200KB/s then vanishingly few users in the US are going to run one.
  • bartimus 5y ago
    But can we expect the future cryptocurrency of the world to be bottlenecked by average users needing to run full nodes on average laptops? Considering Bitcoin only has a total of 27 million addresses, couldn't we introduce some special blocks that consolidate the transaction history during a certain timespan so that nodes don't need to download the entire history?
    • atweiden 5y ago
      Or we could simply not use a blockchain for Doritos purchases. If we’re willing to do that — if we’re able to trade off “Fort Knox” security for Doritos — we can get dramatically higher speed and efficiency for those transactions, and the options we have for implementing this significantly widen. Those options also tend to be inherently safer than their on-chain counterparts, because they both operate on an abstract level, and don’t impact the majority of investment capital entrusted to the network, which tends to lie dormant unmoving in cold wallets regardless. But if we’re only willing to put Doritos purchases on-chain for some reason because we stubbornly refuse to give up Fort Knox security, and demand a permanent record of our Doritos transactions until the heat death of the universe, we end up with a lot less decentralization, and our options for scaling narrow and become increasingly complex (e.g. sharding). Worse still, Visa does 50,000+ tps — and that’s just one credit card company. Storing every financial transaction every human in the world ever makes on a blockchain requires infeasibly large block sizes well in excess of 1GB. Meanwhile end users already struggle somewhat to keep up with 1MB blocks on consumer hardware with residential network connections. (Bear in mind most people interested in extreme on-chain scaling like this have historically also wanted on-chain scaling to handle all forms of cash and credit transactions, plus derivatives trading, “NFTs”, “decentralized exchanges” etc etc, which would demand still more transactional capacity). Bitcoin could conceivably only increase its block size by a factor of 10-100 before nodes become only possible to run in datacenters. Condemning nodes to forever run in datacenters — lest we forget gargantuan blocks can never be discarded by full nodes — would only allow Bitcoin to hit a measely couple thousand transactions per second at best. What’s the point of doing that at all? (The choice was obvious to highly technical people at the time of the block size debate, but their voices were drowned out by populist appeals. Also sorry, forgot this was a thread about Ethereum.)
• crazypython 5y ago
  Hi. Bitcoin.org contributor[0] here. You can start and run a fully validating Bitcoin node with 7GB of storage space and 128MB-256MB RAM. Download the official GUI Bitcoin software here[1]. Enable pruning to store just 7GB. This validates all blocks. The ability to prune older blockchain data is an inherent feature of blockchain, as explained by Satoshi himself: > Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash, transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash. Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do not need to be stored. Only the recent several days need to be stored for security, which allows Bitcoin to run very securely with just 7GB of space. [0]: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/Bitcoin.org/pull/3624 https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/Bitcoin.org/pull/3624 [1]: https://bitcoincore.org/ https://bitcoincore.org/
  • dmitriid 5y ago
    > Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. Everyone should have this quote ready when there's an inevitable "but there's no tampering of the log, and all transactions are kept forever and can be verified!"
    • crazypython 5y ago
      Yes, the blockchain data structure ensures that if you verify the older transactions, the newer transactions on top of it are verified. If the old version was valid, the newer block built on top of it is too.
      • dmitriid 5y ago
        > Yes, the blockchain data structure ensures that if you verify the older transactions, the newer transactions on top of it are verified. That is not enough. Blockchain is proposed for various things like, for example, land registries. They have to be kept around indefinitely long. In many countries financial institutions are required by law to keep financial transactions around for 4 years. Ans so on. But yeah, sure, go ahead and remove all historical data "because new transaction is mathematically valid".
• narush 5y ago
  One thing blockchain scalability conversations often miss is the concept of induced demand [1]. City streets and computer hardware and blockchain throughput. We dream that 'make bigger, make faster' will alleviate congestion in all of these places, and make our commute and compute as fast and cheap as we want it to be. But in practice, commuters are programmers are blockchain users. For commuters, if more lanes get added to a local highway, driving to work becomes traffic free - so why not drive when you used to take the train? With all this extra capacity, there's traffic again. For programmers, faster computers mean less need to be efficient. Less worry about writing efficient code, seemingly as much JSON parsing as one can tolerate, more dependencies, and higher level languages that make programming more pleasant but less efficient. And so computers are 100000X faster than they used to be, but opening a text editor is about as slow as it was 10 years ago. For blockchain users, it will be the same. As block space increases, the applications users dream up to run on the blockchain will as well. And so transactions will end up costing the same. That being said, the total capacity will be higher! So we are scaling - I just don't think it's gonna be the utopia it might appear at first glance. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
  • cinntaile 5y ago
    Induced demand is an argument frequently used against bigger roads but the reality is that the increase in road size takes many years before the road is at its maxed out capacity again so it definitely helps.
    • ec109685 5y ago
      And it gave many more people the chance to make it from place A to place B in the process.
  • SubiculumCode 5y ago
    And that is why scaling solutions like Polygon have a future if Ethereum has a future.
    • 5y ago
• mtreis86 5y ago
  Is there anything blockchains can do in less time complexity than traditional computations?
  • wmf 5y ago
    Inherently no; consensus requires redundant computation.
    • wespiser_2018 5y ago
      It's so incredibly redundant I think people lack a mental model for just how many messages need to be sent for every node participant to ensure all others are reliable (byzantine fault tolerance). The number of messages is is about n^3, so that's like asking 5 people to go to lunch with 125 emails. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thesaddestmoment.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thesaddestmo...
      • billytetrud 5y ago
        Lol, nice link. Why do you think number of messages is n^3? Each message only needs to be sent once to each network participant, that's n messages. Additional messages will be needed to tell their connections which messages they've received, but this can be a single metadata message talking about many primary messages. So if you send 1000 messages through a network of 3000 people, that's not 3000^3*1000 messages, it's 1000*3000 + a*3000 where a is how many metadata messages are sent per message (which likely would be more related to the rate at which messages are sent, rather than any kind of constant).
        • wespiser_2018 5y ago
          Because that's how many messages are required to solve for consensus given byzantine failures, at least with relatively simple algorithms like pratical byzantine fault tolerance (p-BFT). The exact bound is O(m*N^2) for pBFT, where m is the number of rounds, at up to 1/3 of N. Blockchains use a different consensus mechanism, but the consensus mechanism is still incredible inefficient compared to something like 2PC which drives Paxos, and can make decisions in O(N) messages like you said. http://www.cs.albany.edu/~maniatty/teaching/os/bft/lectnotes.pdf http://www.cs.albany.edu/~maniatty/teaching/os/bft/lectnotes...
• slver 5y ago
  Blockchains subject to laws of logic and physics, confirmed.
• nivexous 5y ago
  So many reputations and projects in blockchain rest on this flawed idea that users need to run nodes. Users do nothing to extend the chain! If a group of miners wants to change the protocol, it takes another group of miners to counter it. And there always will be another group, because miners compete. From the bitcoin whitepaper: "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules". And let's get serious: users will hear about such a protocol war on news outlets, not by watching their node. Then they can choose which fork to buy, sell, and use.
  • dmitriid 5y ago
    > Then they can choose which fork to buy or sell. Funny how this is now the only activity for this: buy and sell forks in a vacuum. Because in actual real world scenarios users definitely don't chose that. Just go into a shop and watch people not chosing anything, but, you know, just paying.
    • nivexous 5y ago
      Even granting that, it's still not user nodes that matter. We've seen from history (BCH/BSV/BCHA) that applications and exchanges decide which fork gets the ticker.
      • xorcist 5y ago
        It was the other way around. Several exchanges publicly went all-in on various Bitcoin forks, only to turn around on them when all users and economic activity stayed with "regular" Bitcoin. Many prominent people predicted the mainline Bitcoin chain dead when so many important exchanges and custodians promised to change the consensus rules. In retrospect it may sound like empty threats, it doesn't make much business sense to go up against economic activity, but at the time it was considered a real threat.
  • crazypython 5y ago
    > So many reputations and projects in blockchain rest on this flawed idea that users need to run nodes. BSV obviates the idea completely. Any mistake the miners make, is forever. Without this, miners could increase the money supply by indefinitely postponing the block reward. > "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules" > If a group of miners wants to change the protocol, it takes another group of miners to counter it. No one is going to mine on a chain that produces worthless coins users don't accept. Users forced miners to activate Segwit in 2017, and almost all hashpower is still with Bitcoin.
• s17n 5y ago
  If Vitalik is correct that the only viable defense against the attack described in this article is users validating nodes en masse, then blockchain is doomed, because you're never going to convince more than a small percentage of users to validate blocks. Personally, I think that custodial entities such as Coinbase (or in the future, banks) can probably be relied on to not do anything too controversial.
  • Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    If a decentralized technology has to rely on centralized custodians for scaling, then it is not decentralized (It might still be useful, but you can’t call it decentralized or censorship-resistant or whatever)
  • Closi 5y ago
    So back to centralisation of power?
  • greg7mdp 5y ago
    Looking forward to the bright future where we rely on centralized exchanges and banks!
  • wmf 5y ago
    I don't think you're disagreeing as much as you think. A small percentage could still be 10,000 nodes or more which seems like a healthy number. (Of course, even a billion nodes can't prevent attacks if they have no economic weight...)
    • s17n 5y ago
      Yeah, I'm disagreeing with the notion that it matters whether you can run a full node on a laptop. Users casually running nodes on the hardware they have lying around is not a realistic model. Those 10000 nodes, to matter, will have to be representing economic interests that can't simply be ignored, and as such, will be able to afford whatever hardware is necessary.
• noxer 5y ago
  This has some really questionable assumptions. Like the part about permanence. "An important property of a blockchain that users really value is permanence. A digital asset stored on a server will stop existing in 10 years when the company goes bankrupt or loses interest in maintaining that ecosystem. An NFT on Ethereum, on the other hand, is forever." This is wrong 2 times. First, there is no general requirement of permanent storage. Its not important at all. It solely depend on the use case. Thats why it is very much inefficient to use a DLT with that property to move value (btc/eth etc.). I dont care how my coins was moved 10 years ago. The only storage that is relevant for me, now, for value transfer is the current undisputed state (aka the balances). Sure the Tx history has use cases and people who need them should store them but making that a technical requirement is only going to degrade performance and drive up Tx cost. BTW cash does not have a recorded Tx history who thought "p2p cash" should? Its only because of the way BTC works (chain of all Tx) that this "believe" became common. Its technically not needed at all. There is absolutely no reason to recreate the whole chain to come to the current state. You either use the current state or you cant participate. If you would find an error in the chain whatcha gonna do about? Nothing. The current majority accepted state is all that matters. The "validation" is placebo it does nothing. And by running the exact same software as anyone else your validation would simply do the same error if there would be one. Second, the "forever" is a blatant lie. There is no way to know. Its will exist for however long at least someone is willing to store it. Exactly the same is true if storing is optional. But without the downside of crippling the performance and impose cost on the people running the DLT. The cost for storage should be paid by the user of the storage. If I can impose cost on all participants of a decentral system for all eternity with a one time payment then the system is deeply flawed. The possibility for abuse can be limited by simply making it expensive at any given time. But this obviously reduces the usefulness of the whole system especially for value transfer. The idea of an internet of value is to make value move like data, dirt cheap and decentral so no one takes a cut.
  • tromp 5y ago
    > There is absolutely no reason to recreate the whole chain to come to the current state. You either use the current state or you cant participate. If you would find an error in the chain whatcha gonna do about? Nothing. The current majority accepted state is all that matters. All that matters is the valid history with the largest weight (longest chain rule in PoW). If an invalid branch somehow acquires more weight, it simply gets ignored (except by SPV clients in bitcoin, which trust others to validate). Exchanges/pools that accept an invalid branch are completely untrustworthy and should similarly be ignored.
• SubiculumCode 5y ago
  I used to be a skeptic of blockchain, but then I actually investigated what is going on in the industry. Yes there is a lot of fud, poor ideas, etc, but there are also lots of interesting cool ideas that just will not go away. Reminds me of the dotcom boom, actually.
  • legulere 5y ago
    Which ideas do you think will not go away?
    • SubiculumCode 5y ago
      Gambling is a given...paired with oracles (e.g. Link) for real world outcome verification to decide smart contract outcomes. I think applications to supply chain manufacturing would be useful to cut down the tons of fraud that happen in manufacturing. It is already finding use in cargo logistics. I believe Egypt has recently incorporated blockchain to imports (https://theloadstar.com/egypt-authorizes-cargox-as-the-blockchain-document-transfer-gateway-for-the-advance-cargo-information-system/ https://theloadstar.com/egypt-authorizes-cargox-as-the-block...). There are some interesting ideas about using it for increasing throughput for video streaming (see theta.tv). Non fungible tokens (NFT)are too hyped, but will find some permanent niches for digital trading economies and games..and perhaps uses that we do not foresee. In real estate, there is some movement to adopt blockchain to streamline an inefficient and byzantine process of title transfer and centralized solutions of final authority are not likely to be accepted by parties.
      • mexicanandre 5y ago
        The above examples are really not useful real world examples I think. Ultimately, there still is a single source of truth, which why not use a tech called MySQL for? If fraud happens, the blockchain wont stop it. Its the systems in the real world that do. The fraud will just happen on the blockchain.
• jollybean 5y ago
  The notion of 'decentraliztion' as presented by the blockchain community is basically extremist/absolutist, and it's ruining their own projects. Our entire civilization and everything in it depends on networks of trust. Without it, we'd fall down instantly. To require a system of 'absolute decentralization' when 'partial decentralization' would work just as well, doesn't make sense. We technical people have an odd way of falling into these kind of traps - we're trapped in theory, unable to map to the real world pragmatically. DNS on the internet works on the basis of 'partial decentralization' and it works very well. There wouldn't be that much point in making it 'fully decentralized'. We could push it maybe a few inches more that way, but there's zero requirement to go 'fully decentralized' for it. You get vastly diminishing marginal returns to effort when you start to go absolutist. Much like Rust, which has some very nice outcomes but trades absolutely everything for those outcomes, some small tradeoffs in decentralization for Blockchain would yield probably some big benefits.
  • wmf 5y ago
    There are a ton of newer blockchains using "progressive decentralization" or "minimum viable decentralization".
  • c01n 5y ago
    But with fiat there is no trust between the people, the trust is provided by the banks, they act as the arbitrators because humans cannot trust each other. When we used to barter we stopped because it was sometimes unfair (convert bread to chickens?) so we invented money (gold) which is natural occurring and rare so we trust it more. Later on we invented banks which are a third party we use them as arbitrators because we don't trust each other. Now we invented blockchains (distributed ledgers) so we can see all the changes being made on the ledger because we don't trust each other.
    • jollybean 5y ago
      First - the notion that 'we don't trust the banks' is false. We, you, everyone, trusts that system every single day, with all of our financing. There is an incredible amount of oversight in that system, the Fed publishes it's actions and balance sheets. The banks have immense scrutiny. While we should never trust banks 'infallibly' we have layers and layers of protections. We have 'backups' for regular people like FDIC insurance so when that trust invariably gets broken here and there - there are backups. How often has FDIC had to be used? Very rarely. When someone steals your blockchain stash - which happens - where do you turn? Nowhere. Commerce is subject to the Judicial system meaning that when there is a problem, we can backtrack and make ammends, people can sue one another there is accounting etc.. Second - it's well established that none of the cryptos thus far are usable as forms of currency, and frankly, they are poor stores of value. Your local corner store does not accept BTC for the same reason they don't take Euros - because prices fluxuate wildly, far beyond their profit margin. To accept BTC is tantamount to wild currency speculation which, over time, is guaranteed to put them out of business. There's a 100% chance that BTC 'will go down' over some period below their operating credit and will kill them. They could feasibly accept BTC and immediately transfer to USD, but what would be the point? You do that, it's your risk. And then it's 'not a currency'. Third - the 'never talked about' Elephant in the room is Monetary Policy. The ability to control currency is extremely valuable - it's dangerous, yes - but also powerful. Using 'Gold' implies 'no monetary policy' but arguably more trust, however, we'd probably all be broke. 'Wars and Pandemics' illustrate this quite well - when a nation faces existential calamity, it definitely needs monetary policy above and beyond normal operations. The economic devastation of COVID without monetary policy would have knocked down the economy like a sequence of dominos and left nothing standing. 'No Monetary Policy' is like building 'Brick Homes in San Francisco'. Brick is 'stronger than wood' you say? Hello 7.7 earthquake, which is guaranteed to happen over time, and, which will knock down brick homes and leave the wood framed homes standing. 'Hard' things are often 'brittle' and without flexibility a single 'hard punch' will break it. And those are just the obvious points. So - instead of building something which is 'infinitely decentralized', you could feasibly build something that is partially decentralized and gain basically all of the advantages. Viatalin's notion of 'individuals running nodes' is essentially fundamentally flawed. Individuals should be 'running their own nodes' like they should be 'installing their own wiring, flooring, plumbing, adding their own additions without Engineering approved drawings'. Yes - you can do your own electrical work, but nobody does, because we have very effective division of labour and 'electricians' do that very well which is immensely valuable. Let 3rd parties 'run nodes'. Make it so the tech requires minimal oversight. But there will never be 'no oversight', it's not feasible, and it never was. I'd go so far as to argue that 'trust based systems' are probably a kind of biological development based on some kind of actual efficiency optimization: we 'trust our electrician' just like we 'trust the authority of the bank'. Neither are infallible, but it's better than doing it all yourself.
• mrkramer 5y ago
  "It's crucial for blockchain decentralization for regular users to be able to run a node" Yea just like Larry Page is running Google server in his bedroom to help scale Google's infrastructure. Nodes need to be in specialized server farms and compete with each other for profit. Capitalism is all about specialization and competition in order to improve quality not everybody doing the same thing and amounting to nothing at the end.
• xalava 5y ago
  - Why 10% margins on average? What is exactly the risk profile? - Why consider that a group of diverse group of developers is a governance danger while a group of users would be fine? - What are the incentives to run a full node for an average user?
• jude- 5y ago
  So, what happens when one of the shards goes offline, or forks? What are the cascading consequences for validators of other shards, if any? Asking because I don't think there's a viable strategy for keeping all shard data around indefinitely, without giving up either scalability or durability: * If the system requires cross-shard state-transitions to be mirrored to on a "central" chain (e.g. the beacon chain) in order to stave off unavailability, then that central chain's capacity is the scalability bottleneck. * If the system requires cross-shard state-transitions to be mirrored instead to both shards in order to stave off unavailability, then ultimately all shards will host a non-trivial fraction of each others' state, meaning that the scalability bottleneck is the most-loaded shard. * If the system requires some nodes to store full replicas of all shards in order to avert shard unavailability, then the system is no more scalable than the nodes required to carry this burden.
  • ec109685 5y ago
    Wouldn’t each shard itself be made up of thousands of nodes and thus not easily taken down? And there would be incentive to join the hampered shard to repair it given joining nodes would have a larger share of the hashing power than in non-hampered shards.
    • jude- 5y ago
      I don't think shards are powered by hashing? I think nodes participating in Ethereum 2.0 are assigned to shards by the beacon chain, and they work to grow the shard's transactions by deciding on transaction ordering and inclusion in a BFT manner. Also, it's not clear to me that it's "thousands," nor is it clear to me that this even matters. If they're all in the same datacenter, and that datacenter temporarily gets disconnected from the other shards' nodes, then the shard is effectively dead as far as the rest of the network is concerned.
      • DennisP 5y ago
        Why would they all be in the same datacenter? The beacon chain will periodically select staking nodes at random to go in each shard, and there's an economic incentive for stakers not to use the same infrastructure as everyone else.
• idlewords 5y ago
  The really obvious weakness in any blockchain setup is the software. Whoever controls the software upgrade channel will always have potential control of the blockchain, whether that's the official entity in charge, or some intermediary. If you want really widespread distribution of full nodes, you need to make a consumer-friendly distribution of the node software, and package it and keep it updated in a way that regular users can run it and forget it. This same convenience introduces a centralization problem that obviates the whole point of running a distributed ledger. This is a point so obvious I hesitate to make it, but I've learned that in blockchain territory there is no flaw too obvious to point out.
  • wmf 5y ago
    That's why some blockchains have multiple implementations and don't use auto-updates. There's also some work on taking governance out of developer's hands (e.g. Tezos where users vote on new features).
  • sp332 5y ago
    Most transactions and legitimacy come from exchanges, not individual clients. I think they will have more clout than the client writers.
    • idlewords 5y ago
      Then the exchanges will become the point of control (even more so than they are now).
  • dehrmann 5y ago
    Miners control bitcoin more than people realize.
    • kingo55 5y ago
      And at the same time less than some realise. E.g. UASF.
    • 3np 5y ago
• bronzeage 5y ago
  In other words, there's no chance in the horizon that crypto will ever replace fiat, because the design of crypto requiring full verification by most nodes will never deal with the scale required by fiat currency. Anyone saying the fight is between crypto and fiat doesn't realize crypto loses big time.
• znpy 5y ago
  For a blockchain to be decentralized, it's crucially important for regular users to be able to run a node, and to have a culture where running nodes is a common activity. you don't convince users to do stuff. you bribe them. introduce a small form of reward for running a validating node and voila, nodes popping up everywhere.
  • Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    That’s not very Sybil-resistant: how do you prove that the node is actually verifying things? The only remotely viable way would be to use recursive SNAKRs to prove that you verified block proofs in block chains like Mina
    • dannyw 5y ago
      Eth2 has the concept of slashing. If you see a validatoe acting maliciously, you can publish a proof and slash them. You receive a portion of the penalty. So running full nodes will have a monetary benefit. Running two will only give you more benefit if they have improved network reachability and latency.
  • wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Decentralised communities used to exist without such bribery. I wonder why that's not really happening much any more. (Of course, the old ones still exist, and there are replacements to the ones that went defunct, but precious few new things work this way.)
    • znpy 5y ago
      except we're talking about a monetary system, not a community.
      • wizzwizz4 5y ago
        Potato potato. The set of people using the monetary system forms a community. “All Bitcoin miners” is a community, of sorts – one whose members trust SHA-256 but rarely each other, but a community nonetheless. (I do believe some of the more influential miners agreed that they wouldn't provide more than 30% or so of Bitcoin's computational power; that's the kind of move that naïve profit-seeking doesn't give you, so Bitcoin's miners already do act like a community.)
• EGreg 5y ago
  I love that Vitalik is always being honest and admits when something is overpriced, or the fact that Blockchains have inherent limits to scalability. The problem is the global consensus. It's a very expensive operation to do per block.
• space_rock 5y ago
  Yes if users don't validate the chain themselves the network reverts to an very expensive, untrusted SQL database Funny for vitalik to highlight this obvious fact. Vitalik has often been considered a fraud for promotion Ethereum which is a network too large and bloated for a user to validate
• cryptica 5y ago
  The reason why there are so many scam projects in crypto is because big fiat power-brokers wanted to pump up the price of scam projects in order to draw attention to them in an effort to discredit the Blockchain/Cryptocurrency concept as a whole. The problem is that they underestimated how much people hate the fiat monetary system and how far they are willing to deceive themselves in order to adopt and promote alternatives... Some common cases of extreme self-deception: - Bitcoin's measly 2 transactions per seconds is great, it's intentional to keep the size of the blockchain under control... - Bitcoin consuming the same amount of electricity as an entire country is a good thing... It adds security, it uses mostly renewable energy and in fact, it speeds up the development of renewable energy technology. - Proof of Work is better and more secure than Proof of Stake... The fact that everyone has to trust a tiny handful of companies who can produce Bitcoin mining hardware doesn't make it any less decentralized. The fact that the network can be hijacked by outsiders who have 0 stake in the network simply by buying or renting a lot of mining hardware doesn't impact security at all. While this might sound like a critique of Bitcoin. I'm glad that people were able to do such extreme mental gymnastics to end up investing in Bitcoin because its success makes a mockery out of the entire financial system... Bitcoin and Dogecoin are not so different. Their goal is to discredit the current financial system by showcasing its extreme inefficiency and stupidity. I chuckle to myself when I see Bitcoiners speaking about Dogecoiners in a condescending manner. They are both useful idiots. Any intelligent person who understands what's going on can see that just about every aspect of our modern economy is at least as dumb as Bitcoin and that's the whole point. Satoshi was a comedian. BTW, I'm bullish about crypto, but not about Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the other top scam coins which are hoarding all the attention away from genuine projects and starving them of funding.
• Animats 5y ago
  There are some blockchains live that claim to be scalable. See [1]. Is that for real. And does "Elrond" have some connection to L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology? [1] https://docs.elrond.com/ https://docs.elrond.com/
  • cromulent 5y ago
    "Elrond" is a character from Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings (as is "Arwen").
• johndoe42377 5y ago
  Why do we even take this punk seriously? I would like to read something from really bright and qualified people like Lamport, who have studied distributed systems for decades.
• corxi 5y ago
  All of the issues and limitations stated in this article have been resolved by Kadena.io . Over
• corxi 5y ago
  All issues and limitations described in the article have been resolved by Kadena.io project. Over
• natch 5y ago
  I feel like the idea that "a million transactions per second ought to be enough for anybody" (not a quote, just a paraphrase echoing Gates for those who missed it) could come back as another storied mistaken estimate at some point. Just taking the human population as a starting point, if we posit that in the future, non-human entities will also be doing transactions, and there may be orders of magnitude more of those entities than there are humans, and the entities will be networked and operating at machine speed… I don't know, but it seems like the thinking on scaling needs to be even more ambitious.
  • billytetrud 5y ago
    Ambition isn't magic. The point of the post is that there are physical limits of how much you can scale up without compromising the integrity of the system.
• billytetrud 5y ago
  Some really good points in there. Bottle necks are basically whack a mole. I wrote a related paper on scalability in the context of bitcoin: https://github.com/fresheneesz/bitcoinThroughputAnalysis https://github.com/fresheneesz/bitcoinThroughputAnalysis
• dugo 5y ago
  Try running a full node for ETH on a beefy desktop and you quickly run into the limits. There is also the maximimum speed of light, which will make scaling interplanetary a bit difficult on high speed block times.
• oooo90 5y ago
  Cardano
• oooo90 5y ago
  cardano
• artfulhippo 5y ago
  Bold of Vitalik to mention CryptoKitties for two reasons. Not only did CryptoKitties overload he Ethereum chain in 2017, breaking usability for everyone, the founders of CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs, were forced to make their own blockchain, Flow, to actually serve customers the experience that’s become the first “mainstream” blockchain app, NBA Topshot. That was bold, and his claim that Ethereum nodes need to be runnable on old laptops on residential internet is confused. Ethereum, worth many billions of dollars, most of which is controlled by whales and nerds with beefy gaming rigs, is deliberately sacrificing desperately needed scalability for a superficial narrative of “decentralization”. I would almost get it if the post included a picture of some skinny African children; is “decentralization” just a euphemism for “diversity and inclusion” now? Sometime soon, the DeFi “yield farming” free-money well is gonna run dry, and when it does, the Ethereum ecosystem will wake up in the freezing cold of a “dark forest” of their own creation. But what about sharding? Sharding, like roll-ups, sidechains, and layer 2s including any of the forms of “Plasma”, are fundamentally less valuable than a high-scalability main chain. Reason being that transactions on the main chain are arbitrarily composable, while cross-shard communication with reasonable latency is an open problem. And composability is important. Composability is an intrinsic aspect of DeFi, and the part that will remain even when the yields are brought down to parity with traditional finance.