Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

vitalik.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 465 posts

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#31

Post by seibelj »

narush wrote: post #22

Vitalik is consistently one of the most interesting people to follow in the blockchain space. Even his (5+ year) old writing is quite interesting, if nothing else to see how Ethereum's research thinking has evolved over time. A few questions re: why "Ethereum is not going further than quadratic [sharding]." The first reason given: there's a minimum number of nodes required for shard for safety guarantees. So, a coupl…

It is always preferred to require less resources. There must be a healthy balance. If Ethereum accomplishes what a lot of us hope, allowing home-hobbyists to run nodes and at least break-even in staking or profit a small amount will be crucial. Relying on goodwill from a small amount of technically-adept-yet-centralized operators is how we get to the Tor situation where everyone knows the government runs most of the exit nodes.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#32

Post by mvzvm »

DSingularity wrote: post #15
sktrdie wrote: post #13

This "blockchain" space is getting so complicated that I can't see anymore what it is about. Is it a database? Is it a p2p network? Is it a currency? Most of the "blockchains" listed on aggregators such as coinmarketcap.com are essentially clients communicating to a few nodes which, for all we know, sync up in a coordinated way to provide the illusion of a decentralized consensus system. Like maybe we need to take a…

It’s a network supporting both a decentralized data-store with a consistent view into valuable data and an a distributed computer with consistent results. What is so hard about this?

Hard? Nothing. Useful? Nope.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#33

Post by conception »

mvzvm wrote: post #26

Scam after scam, that's all blockchain is. Just another way to fleece the average consumer. There has not been a single valuable use, a single product, that actually improves anyone's day / process / life / anything. I am very open to changing my stance if someone presents evidence to the contrary.

Remittances are better/easier. That’s the only thing I’ve seen and the tech to do that is trivial now and Bitcoin is terrible for it specifically now.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#36

Post by RobertDeNiro »

jeremycarter wrote: post #16

Blockchain, Decentralization and Smart Contracts have had nearly a decade to prove their value and disrupt the marketplace. So far nothing but whitepapers, pipe dreams and exit scams - nothing my mother can use. What's the point? Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat. Prove me wrong.

The original use case was for black markets such as silkroad. Then crypto made so much sense.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#37

Post by crazypython »

Hi. Bitcoin.org contributor[0] here. You can start and run a fully validating Bitcoin node with 7GB of storage space and 128MB-256MB RAM. Download the official GUI Bitcoin software here[1]. Enable pruning to store just 7GB. This validates all blocks.

The ability to prune older blockchain data is an inherent feature of blockchain, as explained by Satoshi himself:

> Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash, transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash. Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do not need to be stored.

Only the recent several days need to be stored for security, which allows Bitcoin to run very securely with just 7GB of space.

[0]: https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/Bitcoin.org/pull/3624

[1]: https://bitcoincore.org/

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#38

Post by narush »

One thing blockchain scalability conversations often miss is the concept of induced demand [1].

City streets and computer hardware and blockchain throughput. We dream that 'make bigger, make faster' will alleviate congestion in all of these places, and make our commute and compute as fast and cheap as we want it to be.

But in practice, commuters are programmers are blockchain users.

For commuters, if more lanes get added to a local highway, driving to work becomes traffic free - so why not drive when you used to take the train? With all this extra capacity, there's traffic again.

For programmers, faster computers mean less need to be efficient. Less worry about writing efficient code, seemingly as much JSON parsing as one can tolerate, more dependencies, and higher level languages that make programming more pleasant but less efficient. And so computers are 100000X faster than they used to be, but opening a text editor is about as slow as it was 10 years ago.

For blockchain users, it will be the same. As block space increases, the applications users dream up to run on the blockchain will as well. And so transactions will end up costing the same.

That being said, the total capacity will be higher! So we are scaling - I just don't think it's gonna be the utopia it might appear at first glance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#39

Post by seibelj »

jeremycarter wrote: post #16

Blockchain, Decentralization and Smart Contracts have had nearly a decade to prove their value and disrupt the marketplace. So far nothing but whitepapers, pipe dreams and exit scams - nothing my mother can use. What's the point? Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat. Prove me wrong.

I have responded to a thousand versions of your comment on HN. No matter what I write the haters never change their minds. HN is not an enthusiastic place for blockchain devs.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#40

Post by jeremycarter »

gruez wrote: post #24
jeremycarter wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then what's the difference with the existing solutions involving central banks?

Because layer 2 solutions (eg. LN) are trustless. ie. it doesn't involve you depositing your coins with some third party and trusting that they don't run off with them.

And you've personally lost money from government regulated financial institutions?
Post reply on HN