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> Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it This only makes sense if blockchains can ca

> Eventually the computational capacity will reach the levels that virtually any app can be replicated inside of it This only makes sense if blockchains can catch up to traditional methods, because applications in the real world will just continue to get more complex as compute power allows. A defining feature of blockchain computation models is that the same calculation must be run many, many times to verify it. Given that each individual one must run on the hardware that blockchain is competing with direct usage of, there's no plausible story for blockchain to close the gap. > with a much lower fee for the developers/owners/users and often having full open source code for the components. See above - how could running the same calculation many, many times, plus the networking costs to communicate, ever compete on price with just running it once? At least one, and more likely all, of the parties must lose in the blockchain model. > The blockchain development environment is fundamentally less terrible than the centralised database world Terrible in what way? It can't compute on price or compute power/latency/etc. > eventually the computational differences between the two will be so low Again - how? See above. > that centralised databases will be less desirable just because do the warp in the social contract. I can't come up with a way to parse this that has any meaning, so I'm not sure what to say about it. > Databases encourage centralisation of power to developer/owners, with aggressive bent towards monopoly. Blockchain encouraged opennesss and portability. It’s simply a better social contract. This seems to be your only real argument - some vague social benefit. But how do we get there? See above - blockchains are far, far more expensive to run, so why would anyone migrate real applications to them? Even if this benefit were real, which I doubt, you don't seem to have any mechanism for making it work in the face of the very real costs of doing so. Regulation seems like the only plausible way, but anti-regulation and anti-government is a pretty explicit goal of most blockchain folks.

garbanz0 4y ago
> A defining feature of blockchain computation models is that the same calculation must be run many, many times to verify it. Given that each individual one must run on the hardware that blockchain is competing with direct usage of, there's no plausible story for blockchain to close the gap. This is not true - zero knowledge proofs allow you to verify work much more cheaply than the original computation, and they're used heavily in upcoming ethereum L2s.
- thedufer 4y ago
  That doesn't materially change the situation, though. It can't be cheaper to a) do the computation, b) generate a proof, and c) validate the proof many, many times than to just do the computation. You can cut down the number of orders of magnitude worse it is, but it'll still never be as inexpensive (let alone cheaper, as the original comment suggested).

garbanz0 4y ago

> A defining feature of blockchain computation models is that the same calculation must be run many, many times to verify it. Given that each individual one must run on the hardware that blockchain is competing with direct usage of, there's no plausible story for blockchain to close the gap. This is not true - zero knowledge proofs allow you to verify work much more cheaply than the original computation, and they're used heavily in upcoming ethereum L2s.

thedufer 4y ago
That doesn't materially change the situation, though. It can't be cheaper to a) do the computation, b) generate a proof, and c) validate the proof many, many times than to just do the computation. You can cut down the number of orders of magnitude worse it is, but it'll still never be as inexpensive (let alone cheaper, as the original comment suggested).