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This is not my understanding at all. Blockchains (speaking broadly) are based on an incentive economy which often historically struggles to support itself via

This is not my understanding at all. Blockchains (speaking broadly) are based on an incentive economy which often historically struggles to support itself via its own transaction volume. What happens when a coin is no longer profitably mined, e.g. if no one wants to buy them? What happens if, one day, there is no node that feels like serving your request? The data is gone. All gone. There is no system that guarantees redundancy, just upload and pray that the economy sustains itself. I can appreciate this is much less of a problem for the more popular chains, but in any case, there are wayyy more than 1M tweets a day.

legutierr 4y ago
> What happens if, one day, there is no node that feels like serving your request? The data is gone. All gone. One stated objective of the Ethereum project is to ensure that a whole blockchain node can run on a consumer PC. This does limit how much data can be stored, but it also means that if you yourself are interested in keeping a copy of the data, you can run a node yourself. As it currently stands, there are tens of thousands of identical copies of the Ethereum blockchain that are distributed around the world. It seems very unlikely that the data will disappear within our lifetimes. > There is no system that guarantees redundancy, just upload and pray that the economy sustains itself. I don't know if there are any guarantees in life, but the ongoing availability of Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain data seem to be as close to it as you can get, given how many copies are already out there, and the ongoing incentive that exists to keep them up-to-date. Do you really trust, say, Google Cloud (or any Google product) to last as long, given their history of shutting things down arbitrarily? Even AWS's services are subject to prioritization decisions made inside Amazon. How can you really know whether or not the service you depend on is profitable enough to ensure that it won't be discontinued? Or that some corporate VP whose bonus depends on the success of a competing product won't make it his mission to shut your service down? > I can appreciate this is much less of a problem for the more popular chains, but in any case, there are wayyy more than 1M tweets a day. You can't run a service like Twitter on Ethereum, but you can timestamp more valuable content that is generated at a lower volume. A specialized Layer 2 application chain that runs on top of Ethereum could conceivably be built to handle larger volumes at lower cost, however.

legutierr 4y ago

> What happens if, one day, there is no node that feels like serving your request? The data is gone. All gone. One stated objective of the Ethereum project is to ensure that a whole blockchain node can run on a consumer PC. This does limit how much data can be stored, but it also means that if you yourself are interested in keeping a copy of the data, you can run a node yourself. As it currently stands, there are tens of thousands of identical copies of the Ethereum blockchain that are distributed around the world. It seems very unlikely that the data will disappear within our lifetimes. > There is no system that guarantees redundancy, just upload and pray that the economy sustains itself. I don't know if there are any guarantees in life, but the ongoing availability of Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain data seem to be as close to it as you can get, given how many copies are already out there, and the ongoing incentive that exists to keep them up-to-date. Do you really trust, say, Google Cloud (or any Google product) to last as long, given their history of shutting things down arbitrarily? Even AWS's services are subject to prioritization decisions made inside Amazon. How can you really know whether or not the service you depend on is profitable enough to ensure that it won't be discontinued? Or that some corporate VP whose bonus depends on the success of a competing product won't make it his mission to shut your service down? > I can appreciate this is much less of a problem for the more popular chains, but in any case, there are wayyy more than 1M tweets a day. You can't run a service like Twitter on Ethereum, but you can timestamp more valuable content that is generated at a lower volume. A specialized Layer 2 application chain that runs on top of Ethereum could conceivably be built to handle larger volumes at lower cost, however.