5 ms·
One thing blockchain scalability conversations often miss is the concept of induced demand [1]. City streets and computer hardware and blockchain throughput. W
by 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 agoInduced 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 agoAnd it gave many more people the chance to make it from place A to place B in the process.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoAnd that is why scaling solutions like Polygon have a future if Ethereum has a future.
- atweiden 5y agoThat’s just a narrative, though. The practical reality is cryptocurrency valuation is driven by these narratives 100%. The other practical reality is the people pretending as if this reality doesn’t exist are increasingly perceived to be engaged in biased sophistry. Granted, low information people are still falling for it, but high information people increasingly aren’t, as evidenced by Ethereum failing to get even 3/4s of the way to its previous bitcoin-denominated valuation high over the most recent market cycle, despite ludicrous levels of hype.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoI really don't know what you are talking about. ETH hit its all time high a few weeks ago (May 10th) both in terms of USD and BTC. Its still double it's ATH from its peak in 2018, before the crypto crash. As to your other ramblings, mere snobbish tripe meant to demean and belittle those that disagree with your opinion. In other words, yours is a low information post.
- atweiden 5y ago> I really don't know what you are talking about. ETH hit its all time high a few weeks ago (May 10th) both in terms of USD and BTC. Its still double it's ATH from its peak in 2018, before the crypto crash. > As to your other ramblings, mere snobbish tripe meant to demean and belittle those that disagree with your opinion. In other words, yours is a low information post. ETH broke 0.12 ETH/BTC last narrative cycle. This is trivial to fact check. Sorry to disturb you.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoYou are correct re BTC, but not it has well exceeded that re USD. Why BTC has some special place in terms of the utility of smart contract blockchain is questionable.
- atweiden 5y ago
- billytetrud 5y agoInduced demand is often misrepresented. Like any resource, the more of it there is, the cheaper it is to obtain, and the more of it people use. Roads are no different. "Induced demand" is just a biased way to talk about how normal supply and demand works.