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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

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Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#141

Post by UncleMeat »

javert wrote: post #4
laurent92 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to summarize, for an employee who got caught in “Elon Musk shouldn’t have manipulated the BTC” (!) (obviously the employee lost 25% of his savings), I was trying to summarize the list of dangers of having savings in BTC. - Laws of any big country could change and trigger the sale for a lot of sellers of a country, - Especially given BTC is used by Iran to bypass petrol restrictions, used by ransomware an…

Bitcoin is about giving the world honest money (someday), not about getting rich. Don't put "savings" in bitcoin.

That ship sailed with the bch split.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#142

Post by bronzeage »

In other words, there's no chance in the horizon that crypto will ever replace fiat, because the design of crypto requiring full verification by most nodes will never deal with the scale required by fiat currency.

Anyone saying the fight is between crypto and fiat doesn't realize crypto loses big time.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#143

Post by dehrmann »

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.

> nothing my mother can use

In developed countries, I can tap with my phone or card to pay instantly, there's Venmo, and fees are low-ish. Currently, no cryptocurrency has competitive advantages to traditional payments...unless it's illegal, but even then, certain cryptocurrences are a really bad choice.

Supposedly phone apps are used for payments in developing countries, but I'm not entirely sure.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#144

Post by samatman »

noxer wrote: post #85

This has some really questionable assumptions. Like the part about permanence. "An important property of a blockchain that users really value is permanence. A digital asset stored on a server will stop existing in 10 years when the company goes bankrupt or loses interest in maintaining that ecosystem. An NFT on Ethereum, on the other hand, is forever." This is wrong 2 times. First, there is no general requirement of…

I agree with this, a durable record of every transaction ever performed is in fact an anti-feature for a digital ledger.

Mimblewimble[0] is one interesting solution to this. Unfortunately, the requirement in current implementations (such as Grin) that both wallets be online to complete a transaction, eliminates some valuable types of transaction, such as sending coin to a cold wallet.

I do think for a 'world computer' like Ethereum, being able to ignore a substantial amount of old state is going to be critical for long-term use.

I also think that "blatant lie" is unnecessarily harsh. A blockchain is aspirationally forever, and it is a massively replicated data structure: it's certainly durable, and I would expect it to last a long time relative to, say, a random torrent.

This is my major concern with the direction Ethereum is going, which I could caricature as "scale up massively and keep everything forever": it becomes so expensive to keep copies of all data, that only large institutional players will bother, and not many of them. This makes blockchain integrity a "take my word for it" kind of thing, and the whole system is only as durable as the increasingly-enormous data centers which hold all that information.

[0]: https://scalingbitcoin.org/papers/mimblewimble.txt

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#145

Post by puranjay »

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…

I see it as a global, decentralized market anyone can participate in without restrictions.

For instance, if I feel my country's currency is heading towards hyperinflation, I can buy up tokenized USD as a hedge. There is no limit to how much I can buy nor do I ever need to visit a bank and comply with an oppressive regime - think Venezuela.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#146

Post by puranjay »

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.

I can buy any amount of an asset that I think is more stable than my local currency.

Say, switching my Venezuelan Bolivar for USD, without restrictions.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#147

Post by nivexous »

crazypython wrote: post #71
nivexous wrote: post #53

So many reputations and projects in blockchain rest on this flawed idea that users need to run nodes. Users do nothing to extend the chain! If a group of miners wants to change the protocol, it takes another group of miners to counter it. And there always will be another group, because miners compete. From the bitcoin whitepaper: "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules". And let's get serious: users…

> So many reputations and projects in blockchain rest on this flawed idea that users need to run nodes. BSV obviates the idea completely. Any mistake the miners make, is forever. Without this, miners could increase the money supply by indefinitely postponing the block reward. > "He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules" > If a group of miners wants to change the protocol, it takes another group of min…

Users forced miners to activate Segwit in 2017

Honestly, you don't know this. Users != nodes. A single individual could have spun up tons of nodes to vote for Segwit. Given the stakes and how manipulated social media was at the time, I consider this what likely happened. This is also what proof of work solves.

and almost all hashpower is still with Bitcoin.

Everyone knows the game by now. Whoever keeps the ticker keeps the hashpower. We saw this with BCH/BSV and also BCH/BCHA. Because most users don't follow these details. It doesn't mean users won.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#148

Post by idlewords »

puranjay wrote: post #124
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.

Maybe I'm wrong but I see this perspective so often on HN. And I can't help but feel that this is because so many people on HN are already privileged - living in the first world, making software salaries, and generally have a world of opportunities available to them, especially when it comes to their money. But coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely pr…

The insoluble problem is that any system of the kind you describe where the final tokens are ultimately spendable will be swamped by criminal use.

If you make an end run around the existing regulatory system through code, the people who are inhibited from transfering money by the current regulatory regime will all use your new system. And that traffic will be overwhelmingly criminal.

The amount of illicit money needing to move is overwhelmingly larger than the sums that honest people are prevented from transferring by corrupt governments or unjust restrictions. That is going to doom any attempt at creating a parallel money transfer system that works at scale.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#149

Post by skinnyasianboi »

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.

NFTs disrupted the digital art marketplace.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#150

Post by fo0manchu »

Sleepytime wrote: post #134
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 internet was around a lot longer than a decade before aol showed up and started pressing CDs.

Sources on that claim?
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