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> like the public blockchain Since this thread is about an article celebrating UPI's 10B transactions/month: That means between 4133 (28 days/month) and 3733 (

> like the public blockchain Since this thread is about an article celebrating UPI's 10B transactions/month: That means between 4133 (28 days/month) and 3733 (31 days/month) transactions per second on average. Bitcoin is at 7 transactions per second. The bitcoin blockchain takes ~500GB these days. At UPI's transaction volume, it'd take 250TB by now, replicated at various sites. Whatever you think of blockchain, it has some serious work ahead.

ETH_start 3y ago
That's an excellent point, as scalability has been the critical handicap of public blockchains to date. This article is nearly two years old, but provides a good overview of the latest techniques devised for achieving scalability in public blockchains: https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-modular-blockchains-introductory-meta-post-5a1e7a60119d https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-... Since then, layer 2s (which are the principal execution layer of the modular blockchain stack the article above expounds upon) have seen exponential growth in adoption, and mounting innovations bringing them progressively closer to their theoretical potential of 100,000 transactions per second: https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity
- chx 3y ago
  > scalability has been the critical handicap of public blockchains to date. Also, the blatant scam nature of them is a bit of a problem. While there's a lot of hype, the Washington Post already printed the truth in 2015 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitcoin-isnt-the-future-of-money-its-either-a-ponzi-scheme-or-a-pyramid-scheme/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitco... which an economy professor have nicely expanded on in two blog posts https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon... https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-pon...
  - ETH_start 3y ago
    The only fundamental difference inherent to the respective designs of blockchains and traditional banking, is censorship resistance through genuine self-custody. The former is designed to provide this quality, and the latter is not. Put another way, there is nothing inherently scammy in using a distributed blockchain to record balances, and cryptography to authenticate updates to the balances. While opening the door to financial contracts to every one in the world with a computing device may make scam offerings more common, it's overly simplistic and lazy to resort to a caricature of crypto tokens being, as a rule, scams. Articles like the ones you linked above want a return to serfdom, under the control of officialdom. There is no other conceivable reason why someone would not want people to have at least the option of taking custody over their own money, in a form more useful than physical cash.
    - oblio 3y ago
      Most of what you wrote presumes anonymity. In long lived immutable digital systems, guess what, that doesn't exist. Talk to your actual scientist cousins, crypto-graphers. If we're at the "totalitarian government" stage, "easily readable immutable data source" is EXACTLY what they'd dream of.
      - ETH_start 3y ago
        Even without anonymity, it raises the cost for the government to enforce broad restrictions, because the chokepoints—which are intermediaries like financial institutions—are gone. In any case, anonymity is a gradient. It's a question of how much resources a state has to expend to track a user, and that value can be increased with better privacy technology, so that the state has to eschew broad-based restrictions on mutually voluntary interactions and focus its investigative resources on only the most dangerous actors, who engage in genuinely predatory behavior (murderers, thieves, etc).
    - chx 3y ago
      > is censorship resistance through genuine self-custody. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-but-bitcoin-is-like-the-early-internet/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... > Ordinary person: “Your weird Internet money sucks to use. It’s slow and expensive. I lost my coins by mistake and it can’t be fixed. If I get hacked it can’t be fixed either.” > Bitcoin advocate: “But everyone wants [list of ideological aims held only by weird people]! Everyone I know, anyway.” But in specifics, censorship resistance? I just read that in an article. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sex-workers-crypto-failing-them https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sex-workers-crypto-failing-t... > “You get on an exchange for as long as you can, until they shut your ass down,” says Knox. “You quickly [run out of exchanges], so you sit on a lot of useless money. The whole ‘crypto is permissionless and censorship-resistant’ thing is a bunch of bullshit.”
spraveenitpro 3y ago
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ETH_start 3y ago

That's an excellent point, as scalability has been the critical handicap of public blockchains to date. This article is nearly two years old, but provides a good overview of the latest techniques devised for achieving scalability in public blockchains: https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-modular-blockchains-introductory-meta-post-5a1e7a60119d https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-... Since then, layer 2s (which are the principal execution layer of the modular blockchain stack the article above expounds upon) have seen exponential growth in adoption, and mounting innovations bringing them progressively closer to their theoretical potential of 100,000 transactions per second: https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity

chx 3y ago
> scalability has been the critical handicap of public blockchains to date. Also, the blatant scam nature of them is a bit of a problem. While there's a lot of hype, the Washington Post already printed the truth in 2015 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitcoin-isnt-the-future-of-money-its-either-a-ponzi-scheme-or-a-pyramid-scheme/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitco... which an economy professor have nicely expanded on in two blog posts https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-ponzi.html https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon... https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-ponzi.html https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-pon...
- ETH_start 3y ago
  The only fundamental difference inherent to the respective designs of blockchains and traditional banking, is censorship resistance through genuine self-custody. The former is designed to provide this quality, and the latter is not. Put another way, there is nothing inherently scammy in using a distributed blockchain to record balances, and cryptography to authenticate updates to the balances. While opening the door to financial contracts to every one in the world with a computing device may make scam offerings more common, it's overly simplistic and lazy to resort to a caricature of crypto tokens being, as a rule, scams. Articles like the ones you linked above want a return to serfdom, under the control of officialdom. There is no other conceivable reason why someone would not want people to have at least the option of taking custody over their own money, in a form more useful than physical cash.
  - oblio 3y ago
    Most of what you wrote presumes anonymity. In long lived immutable digital systems, guess what, that doesn't exist. Talk to your actual scientist cousins, crypto-graphers. If we're at the "totalitarian government" stage, "easily readable immutable data source" is EXACTLY what they'd dream of.
    - ETH_start 3y ago
      Even without anonymity, it raises the cost for the government to enforce broad restrictions, because the chokepoints—which are intermediaries like financial institutions—are gone. In any case, anonymity is a gradient. It's a question of how much resources a state has to expend to track a user, and that value can be increased with better privacy technology, so that the state has to eschew broad-based restrictions on mutually voluntary interactions and focus its investigative resources on only the most dangerous actors, who engage in genuinely predatory behavior (murderers, thieves, etc).
  - chx 3y ago
    > is censorship resistance through genuine self-custody. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-but-bitcoin-is-like-the-early-internet/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu... > Ordinary person: “Your weird Internet money sucks to use. It’s slow and expensive. I lost my coins by mistake and it can’t be fixed. If I get hacked it can’t be fixed either.” > Bitcoin advocate: “But everyone wants [list of ideological aims held only by weird people]! Everyone I know, anyway.” But in specifics, censorship resistance? I just read that in an article. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sex-workers-crypto-failing-them https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sex-workers-crypto-failing-t... > “You get on an exchange for as long as you can, until they shut your ass down,” says Knox. “You quickly [run out of exchanges], so you sit on a lot of useless money. The whole ‘crypto is permissionless and censorship-resistant’ thing is a bunch of bullshit.”

spraveenitpro 3y ago

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