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The Stacks 2.0 blockchain implementation in Rust
- schmichael 5y agoSince it relies on Bitcoin this shares all of the horrifying carbon and ewaste characteristics of PoW. It also pretty liberally uses the phrase “layer 1” despite relying on another blockchain, Bitcoin, for “security.” Seems more like a layer 1.5 blockchain or something.
- keymone 5y agoThere is zero waste in PoW, it’s the most efficient decentralized trustless digital money ledger in existence. Your dislike of it doesn’t change laws of physics.
- troymc 5y agoCitation needed.
- simiones 5y agoThat's like saying that coal power plants are the least polluting non-radioactive solid fuel power generating plants in existence. It's true, but it's irrelevant: we don't need a decentralized trustless digital "money" ledger any more than we need non-radioactive solid fuel power plants. It would be nice to have decentralized trust-less digital money, but Bitcoin doesn't work as money, and it's not that nice compared to its no good very bad terrible energy waste.
- richardwhiuk 5y ago(Ignoring the fact that coal power plants spew radioactive dust)
- keymone 5y agoYou don’t need. I need and a few others too. Bitcoin works great. Edit: oh, and no, it doesn’t waste anything, all the energy is used with a purpose and maximum efficiency.
- simiones 5y ago> I need and a few others too A few people shouldn't get to use as much energy as a modern industrial country of millions for any purpose that only serves them. And calling this "maximum efficiency" when Visa can process the same amount of transactions on a few watts is quite comedic. Bitcoin is a speculative bubble + illegal goods exchange token. No more.
- keymone 5y agoI can use as much energy as i can afford to buy on an open market, just like any other market participant. > Visa can process the same amount of transactions on a few watts comedic is your misunderstanding of what Bitcoin uses energy for. hint: it's not at all related to transactions per watt, in fact, Bitcoin is already capable of processing orders of magnitude more transactions than Visa through Lightning network. > Bitcoin is a speculative bubble Bitcoin is speculative investment for sure, doesn't make you right about everything else. > illegal goods exchange token very much legal.
- simiones 5y ago> comedic is your misunderstanding of what Bitcoin uses energy for. hint: it's not at all related to transactions per watt, in fact, Bitcoin is already capable of processing orders of magnitude more transactions than Visa through Lightning network. Bitcoin uses energy to secure transaction processing. Every node in the network must prove that it has spent at least this much money/effort on electricity (the exact computational requirements to prove this are constantly adjusted upwards if the algorithm/hardware is becoming too efficient). This works as the signature of a block, which the miner applies to a block that it has verified contains only correct transactions. Now, the Bitcoin network limits the size of blocks, and each transaction has a size of its own - so being able to process N blocks per second (limited by the necessary work imposed by the burden of PoW) is directly proportional to a number of transactions per second that the Bitcoin network can confirm. Visa does the same by updating its ledger, roughly - no need to for the extreme cost of PoW, since you just trust the ledger. Lightning is a separate technology, with different guarantees. It has definitely not been tested on Visa's scale, so any claims about its scalability should be taken with a grain of salt. More importantly, Lightning offers precisely 0 of Bitcoin's guarantees of transaction validity. In fact, if a Lightning node goes offline, its trivial to double spend bitcoin on the Lightning network - with the only risk that you may lose all the bitcoin you added to the channel if the node later comes back online and verifies this before you can cancel. It's also trivial to do denial of service attacks on a Lightning node, as you can always advertise channels then drop them, reverting all transactions at little cost to you. > very much legal. There is no good/service that is (1) legal to acquire in country X but (2) can't be acquired more cheaply and easily with regular money than with BTC. Note that some goods/services that are illegal to acquire in country X may be perfectly moral to acquire - such as donations to wikileaks.
- WakiMiko 5y agoLol
- dontlaugh 5y ago
- integricho 5y agothis is probably sarcasm.
- keymone 5y agoNot at all! I can defend my position.
- cute_boi 5y agoI wish I hadn't read this comment :(
- ftlio 5y agoWe use almost as much energy to dry our clothes. You have to argue that Bitcoin isn't useful as well to argue that it's wasteful. Most people do this by saying there are alternatives to Bitcoin, but none of them have the same security profile. They're not equivalent. As someone who would be fine in recyclable coveralls a la The Dispossessed, I think clothes drying is a waste. Thankfully I'm not the arbiter of what's useful to everyone.
- e-clinton 5y agoIf Proof of work uses as much energy as drying clothes, I’d imagine it means processors are putting out as much heat as a dryer. Could we combine these? Bitcoin dryer, anyone?
- webkike 5y agoIf we’re going to compare bitcoin to dry clothes, I’d rather have dry clothes but ten orders of magnitude
- anonporridge 5y agoDo you care so little about the planet that you can't just hang your clothes and wait a little while longer for them to dry?
- webkike 5y agoSometimes it’s raining
- anonporridge 5y agoCool! So you hang your clothes otherwise, right? Or are you just a hypocrite that will readily use an unnecessarily energy wasteful product for some light convenience while berating something that uses energy that other people, but not you, consider to be valuable. Or do you want to have an actual adult conversation about how we can actually solve GHG emissions by properly internalizing the costs of polluting via these dirty sources, rather than wasting political and social capital on a thing that uses <1% of the worlds energy, and if it disappeared tomorrow would have almost zero effect on our planet's climate trajectory?
- k__ 5y agoFor Bitcoin maxis PoW is the creed.
- DeepYogurt 5y agoCan we stop with the blockchain spam?
- mastax 5y agoIf you have any Rust in your GitHub profile, you're going to get cold emails about Blockchain jobs.
- brabel 5y agoCan confirm. WebAssembly also does the trick.
- eminence32 5y agoIt seems like there are so many new blockchains out there these days, it's a full-time job to keep up with them. How many of them are novel, or are working on solving some known blockchain problem? How many are straightforward re-implementations of existing chains? How many are targeting financial instruments, versus things like file storage? Is anyone maintaining a "tl;dr" summary for all of these chains?
- tromp 5y agoThe most novel ones implement a new design from scratch; as listed here (click on Running Mainnet tab): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1geg5HHgDO-ht0u6CSTHplJudr9kSGQYAoJvaKnfRhI4 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1geg5HHgDO-ht0u6CSTHp...
- vmception 5y agoThere is a cambrian explosion still occurring, but there are a few genealogies to keep up with and concepts to look for or to do yourself. There is the Bitcoin and UTXO ecosystem. These exist in silos of each other and everything else. There is the Cosmos/Tindermint ecosystem. These typically have some form of interoperability with each other. There is the EVM ecosystem. These have high degrees of interoperability and where the most development occurs. There are other niches that are mostly development dead ends, or possibly just completed. Won't name them as its not the point: All of the above rely on low to medium performance hardware and internet infrastructure, and base the idea of consensus relying on reaching most of the other nodes that also have poor infrastructure. Outside of that category there are a few that tweak the concept by raising the performance bar on all nodes. Solana simply has extremely high performance requirements. Radix follows that model while simply going multithreaded. People often re-launch blockchains that follow one of the above concepts, with the purpose of having a different distribution of the cryptocurrency associated with it. For example, many people don't like that Ethereum or Solana have a large group of holders from prior investment pre-launch. So someone would just launch another one without the pre-allocation, hoping their new one gains traction. Anyway, looking at just this sector does exclude many other potentially interesting ones. There isn't a good way to get a summary but fortunately lots of youtubers give summaries these days, so you can watch something once a week. The sad thing about that approach is that it is easy to tell what communities someone is in or influenced by, based on the crypto networks they talk about or have heard of.
- vinniejames 5y agoStacks is really going off in the wrong direction here. If they aren't building an EVM compatible chain, they are going to fall quickly behind in the space and never recover
- SkyMarshal 5y agoThat’s a shame because EVM is technological trash, a hurriedly designed code base full of security holes and other problems. It gives me heartburn that so much financial value is being built on top of it.
- vinniejames 5y agoPeople used to say the same thing about JavaScript, now it runs most of the internet. No reason EVM can't evolve to be less cumbersome
- vmception 5y agoI agree about that as well as how its getting pushed on local governments. Stacks is pushing all these CityCoins (or vice versa, hard to tell) to municipalities and to gullible mayors who are trying to seem fintech trendy and it is embarrassing. None of these coins have a demand system, it is just supply inflation exclusively. Its just too bad that this less optimal experience is going to burn so many municipalities as their first exposure to crypto.
- TekMol 5y agoStacks 2.0 is a layer-1 blockchain that connects to Bitcoin for security and enables decentralized apps and predictable smart contracts. I am often surprised that this is not a more common approach. To hook into Bitcoin to make it easier to implement crypto projects. By hashing the state of whatever project every - say - hour on the Bitcoin chain, it would be nicely finalized with no way to be tampered with, right?
- anonporridge 5y agoNot really, because if you just hook into bitcoin as your foundational layer, it's much harder to premine and then pump and dump your new cryptocurrency on the uninformed masses and become a billionaire off a whitepaper and a github prototype. Also, more legit projects actually DO use bitcoin as it's base layer. See Microsoft's ION project, the bitcoin lighting network (just rolled out in CashApp), and the upcoming RGB protocol.
- josefrichter 5y agoBesides political discussion, has anyone noticed the lisp-y smart contract language in there?