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Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

plasma.io

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Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#51

Post by darawk »

mrep wrote: post #36
darawk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has done it because it's inefficient right now, and the ecosystem is still only trusted by a relatively small minority of nerds like myself and others here. This proposal is a solution to one of those problems.

When will it ever be efficient? All blockchains rely on re-computing the same transaction across many different entities due to mistrust. However, despite the common sentiment that computers are cheap; at scale, the are definitely not. Every additional computation to validate something increases the cost of business and 99% of businesses are cutthroat when it comes to cost. Add in the other downsides/costs of crypto.…

Proof of stake and the contents of this paper are solutions to that exact problem.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#52

Post by darawk »

weego wrote: post #32
darawk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody has done it because it's inefficient right now, and the ecosystem is still only trusted by a relatively small minority of nerds like myself and others here. This proposal is a solution to one of those problems.

Why will the future change the level of inefficiency?

That's what the link in the OP is all about. Plasma + Proof of Stake should mean an efficient, scalable blockchain for smart contracts.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#53

Post by tscs37 »

runeks wrote: post #41

As far as I can see, a billion tx/s blockchain can never work if the P2P network is sufficiently large. Imagine a 10,000-node network, where each node has to handle 1 billion messages per second. Firstly, if we assume a single VM can handle 1 million messages per second, it would require that each node rent ~1000 VMs (for a total of 10 million VMs for the entire P2P network), which they obviously can’t do without com…

Sharding intents to solve this by splitting the billion messages into a 1000 (or more) smaller problem space. Thusly only requiring 1 VM per node. (tho you need more nodes for equivalent security)

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#54

Post by Zardoz84 »

mmckeen wrote: post #46

Plasma is already the name of KDE's desktop interface. Reusing the name of an already known project is confusing.

Yeah, I just click thinking that was something about KDE. Bad feeling give mes, someone that "steals" some popular opensource name for his business.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#55

Post by pepesza »

runeks wrote: post #41

As far as I can see, a billion tx/s blockchain can never work if the P2P network is sufficiently large. Imagine a 10,000-node network, where each node has to handle 1 billion messages per second. Firstly, if we assume a single VM can handle 1 million messages per second, it would require that each node rent ~1000 VMs (for a total of 10 million VMs for the entire P2P network), which they obviously can’t do without com…

Plasma is not for payments. It is a counterpart of Lightning Network, but for code. With LN you can do a lot of extremely cheap payments. With Plasma you can do the same for arbitrarily complicated code. Idea is - take some tokens to domain specific plasma chain, do your interaction with possibly byzantine actors, settle on parent chain when you are done.

Today even timestamping is expensive in decentralized world. Plasma actually allows you to do that cheaply.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#56

Post by Slartie »

mthoms wrote: post #34
flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking the same thing over the last few months... I see all of these "prediction markets" and "gambling platforms" being launched and claiming that they are "fully autonomous". Well where do they get the outcome information from? It must be from a person. You cannot program a smart contract to know who has the most reliable sports scores or political information. AI does not exist yet. If I bet that Hilla…

By participating you're agreeing with whatever mechanism has been coded into the contract (which you can read for yourself). Obviously, you'd be stupid to participate in a contract that relies solely on twitter for resolution. But, for sports scores the contract could be coded to check all three of espn.com, nfl.com and abcsports.com (just for example). Same with the election results: usa.gov, cnn.com, foxnews.com, b…

Actually, it can't. In no existing blockchain-based smart contract system is contract code able to request random data from websites and act upon it. Websites as external sources are not deterministic, and determinism is necessary for the computations to result in the exact same result on any of the nodes that are part of the network in question. This also includes - and this is forgotten quite often - determinism across an eternal timespan! It can't matter when I want to recompute a certain contract transaction - it always has to return the same result.

The only known solution for these problems is to have an oracle inject the necessary "knowledge" into the blockchain itself and then have the smart contract code work with this data, that is then stored on the chain forever and thus makes everything deterministic again. But the oracles come with their own sets of problems, like them just being another "trust anchor" (and they're one that you can't validate the code of, since the oracles themselves by definition have to reside outside of the blockchain, it's just the data that ends up within it) or the giant pollution of the blockchain with data that they cause.

Even these very simple examples don't pass the reality check on close inspection.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#58

Post by rothbardrand »

doktrin wrote: post #57

The emperor has no clothes, or at very best is parading around the street in a loincloth made up of cryptocurrency whitepapers.

I'm very glad to see this is being recognized more and more. Technically strong people can see it, but there are legions of ethereum fans who cannot.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#59

Post by runeks »

tscs37 wrote: post #53
runeks wrote: post #41

As far as I can see, a billion tx/s blockchain can never work if the P2P network is sufficiently large. Imagine a 10,000-node network, where each node has to handle 1 billion messages per second. Firstly, if we assume a single VM can handle 1 million messages per second, it would require that each node rent ~1000 VMs (for a total of 10 million VMs for the entire P2P network), which they obviously can’t do without com…

Sharding intents to solve this by splitting the billion messages into a 1000 (or more) smaller problem space. Thusly only requiring 1 VM per node. (tho you need more nodes for equivalent security)

Maybe my imagination is too limited, but I fail to see how sharding is any different from just reducing the number of nodes in the P2P network.

Re: Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts

#60

Post by runeks »

pepesza wrote: post #55
runeks wrote: post #41

As far as I can see, a billion tx/s blockchain can never work if the P2P network is sufficiently large. Imagine a 10,000-node network, where each node has to handle 1 billion messages per second. Firstly, if we assume a single VM can handle 1 million messages per second, it would require that each node rent ~1000 VMs (for a total of 10 million VMs for the entire P2P network), which they obviously can’t do without com…

Plasma is not for payments. It is a counterpart of Lightning Network, but for code. With LN you can do a lot of extremely cheap payments. With Plasma you can do the same for arbitrarily complicated code. Idea is - take some tokens to domain specific plasma chain, do your interaction with possibly byzantine actors, settle on parent chain when you are done. Today even timestamping is expensive in decentralized world. P…

> With LN you can do a lot of extremely cheap payments.

The cost of transactions on a Lightning Network has yet to be determined, because no working LN (with merchants accepting payments) exists yet. We all agree than LN is pretty fast, but the ultimate test is cost per transaction.

Allow me to remind you that if you want to send 1 BTC through 10 LN nodes, each of these 10 LN nodes need to bind 1 BTC in a payment channel (totaling 10 BTC in capital costs to transfer 1 BTC). And if just a single of these channels/hops are exhausted, and thus need to touch the blockchain, the LN payment is no cheaper than an on-blockchain one.

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