3 ms·

This is like two homeless people arguing who is richer. Yes both PoW, PoS solve the double-spend problem, but in a brute-force way. And they never really get r

by EGreg 5y ago

This is like two homeless people arguing who is richer. Yes both PoW, PoS solve the double-spend problem, but in a brute-force way. And they never really get rid of the ambiguity of which chain is the one to go by. They just aggregate all the little ambiguities into one or another consistent version of history (a chain) and let them duke it out by massive electricity or stake or whatever. But at any moment, someone could have been mining a chain in “secret” and will emerge to thwart the rest of the network for a while. There is a better way. Blockchains are actually quite centralized since to make any progress every N seconds you need to send all transactions in the entire world to one miner, and the block is limited in size. Actually it’s worse than that in Proof of Work — because you don’t know who will solve the silly problem, you have to gossip every transaction to every miner! Oh yeah, and if you store UTXOs then you have to store the history of everything. And even if you didn’t, you have to store the current state of everything. Oh how nice and decentralized! LMAO

betwixthewires 5y ago
> LMAO I don't get your criticism. Why does requiring gossip to every node cause centralization? Why does everyone having the current state of everything cause centralization?
- EGreg 5y ago
  To make progress, every few seconds or minutes, all transactions in the world must be gathered in ONE place, and placed in ONE block, as the network and adoption grows this becomes more and more expensive for everyone. There are various aspects of centralization. This is one major aspect: a bottleneck. Just like when all Web 2.0 conversations in the world would have to go through a centralized server. Even if it was a different server each time, it’s still an extremely centralized topology for that state transition. It means that there can only be one transaction at a time for the whole world, no matter how many computers join the network. No concurrency — it is also why you can have flash loans. This is why Ethereum is called “the world computer” and why Bitcoin failed at being a peer to peer cash system and became a store of value.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    I think you have some fundamental misunderstandings of the term "centralization". And also of the way bitcoin works. All transactions are not gathered in one place, ever. All nodes receive all transactions independently. All nodes are capable of providing a copy of the ledger for verification. Transactions don't go through a server. Historical record gets finalized by any one participating node. These two things are not the same thing. The transactions that will be mined are publicly known by all nodes before they are mined. Mining only ensures that nobody can change them after the fact. There is no concurrency, this is true. The systems we have currently are single threaded systems, and from a classical standpoint, hugely inefficient single threaded systems. But this is not the same thing as centralization.
    - EGreg 5y ago
      I hate to argue from authority but here is @vbuterin saying the same thing about centralization: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c92b76a274 https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali... “Blockchains are politically decentralized (no one controls them) and architecturally decentralized (no infrastructural central point of failure) but they are logically centralized (there is one commonly agreed state and the system behaves like a single computeR” I think you’re mistaken that I don’t know how Bitcoin works. Not only do I know, but I have spoken to many teams doing work in the last 10 years in various alternative systems, and I have even designed alternatives myself. I used the word server in my analogies. The transactions are, however, all going through one COMPUTER which receives them, puts them in a envelope, and finds the right PoW input to “seal” the envelope, and sends it out to everyone. Whoever does that first, gets the rewards on that chain. If the transactions do not make it into the block, they don’t count on-chain. Therefore, every 10 minutes, ALL TRANSACTIONS IN THE WORLD must be gathered by one computer, the one that will happen to mint the next block. This is a bottleneck, and it is the cause of the skyrocketing fees whenever the system sees any on-chain adoption. But it’s actually worse than centralized — because we don’t know who will mint the next block so we have to send everything to on everyone. Imagine if all BitTorrent nodes seeded every file in the world. Bitcoin failed as a peer to peer cash system because of this topology and people on the group were telling Satoshi this back in the day.

by EGreg 5y ago

betwixthewires 5y ago

> LMAO I don't get your criticism. Why does requiring gossip to every node cause centralization? Why does everyone having the current state of everything cause centralization?

EGreg 5y ago
To make progress, every few seconds or minutes, all transactions in the world must be gathered in ONE place, and placed in ONE block, as the network and adoption grows this becomes more and more expensive for everyone. There are various aspects of centralization. This is one major aspect: a bottleneck. Just like when all Web 2.0 conversations in the world would have to go through a centralized server. Even if it was a different server each time, it’s still an extremely centralized topology for that state transition. It means that there can only be one transaction at a time for the whole world, no matter how many computers join the network. No concurrency — it is also why you can have flash loans. This is why Ethereum is called “the world computer” and why Bitcoin failed at being a peer to peer cash system and became a store of value.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I think you have some fundamental misunderstandings of the term "centralization". And also of the way bitcoin works. All transactions are not gathered in one place, ever. All nodes receive all transactions independently. All nodes are capable of providing a copy of the ledger for verification. Transactions don't go through a server. Historical record gets finalized by any one participating node. These two things are not the same thing. The transactions that will be mined are publicly known by all nodes before they are mined. Mining only ensures that nobody can change them after the fact. There is no concurrency, this is true. The systems we have currently are single threaded systems, and from a classical standpoint, hugely inefficient single threaded systems. But this is not the same thing as centralization.
  - EGreg 5y ago
    I hate to argue from authority but here is @vbuterin saying the same thing about centralization: https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentralization-a0c92b76a274 https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali... “Blockchains are politically decentralized (no one controls them) and architecturally decentralized (no infrastructural central point of failure) but they are logically centralized (there is one commonly agreed state and the system behaves like a single computeR” I think you’re mistaken that I don’t know how Bitcoin works. Not only do I know, but I have spoken to many teams doing work in the last 10 years in various alternative systems, and I have even designed alternatives myself. I used the word server in my analogies. The transactions are, however, all going through one COMPUTER which receives them, puts them in a envelope, and finds the right PoW input to “seal” the envelope, and sends it out to everyone. Whoever does that first, gets the rewards on that chain. If the transactions do not make it into the block, they don’t count on-chain. Therefore, every 10 minutes, ALL TRANSACTIONS IN THE WORLD must be gathered by one computer, the one that will happen to mint the next block. This is a bottleneck, and it is the cause of the skyrocketing fees whenever the system sees any on-chain adoption. But it’s actually worse than centralized — because we don’t know who will mint the next block so we have to send everything to on everyone. Imagine if all BitTorrent nodes seeded every file in the world. Bitcoin failed as a peer to peer cash system because of this topology and people on the group were telling Satoshi this back in the day.