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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

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Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#181

Post by puranjay »

kaladin_1 wrote: post #156
puranjay wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> In the serious crypto world, there is a maxim: Code is Law. Yeah, what's this thing of code is law. I was discussing with a friend today on how governments might have to come in to regulated some financial transactions with crypto based assets. And he vehemently kept repeating that no government can regulate crypto because "code is law". We went down to the physics level to see why it's not impossible to do. Only…

It essentially means that the Code is the product. Everything is visible and public. Every smart contract can be publicly viewed and verified. If the code isn't up to scratch, you can review it. If it has an exploit, you can detect it. Whatever it is doing, is transparent.

You can't say the same when you deposit money into, say, Robinhood. You don't know what the code is doing with that money.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#182

Post by puranjay »

seibelj wrote: post #171
Judgmentality wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You gave a hypothetical example, not something you use. And to answer your question in your original post - no, blockchain would not be more convenient than using my traditional bank. I can do it entirely on my phone inside an app. And every time I've compared it's significantly cheaper not to use blockchain to send someone actual money. You're giving me possible applications, not talking about you being an actual us…

Curve did $1 billion in volume over the past 24 hours https://curve.fi That isn’t hypothetical. It’s like you keep getting refuted and then ignore reality because it disagrees with you. “Blockchain is unused.” [a bunch of links with billions of dollars in actual daily usage provided] “Oh, well, I’ve never heard of that before so it doesn’t matter.” What kind of arguing is this?

Much of HN is stuck in 2017 Blockchain era. Most haven't looked it serious since that crash. Many still think of Blockchain and can only think of BTC, LTC, Doge and ETH. DeFi is so new that it even caught HN off guard.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#183

Post by noxer »

tromp wrote: post #106
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…

> There is absolutely no reason to recreate the whole chain to come to the current state. You either use the current state or you cant participate. If you would find an error in the chain whatcha gonna do about? Nothing. The current majority accepted state is all that matters. All that matters is the valid history with the largest weight (longest chain rule in PoW). If an invalid branch somehow acquires more weight,…

>All that matters is the valid history with the largest weight (longest chain rule in PoW).

No, that exactly the believe that comes from BTCs implementation and while it may be true for BTC its completely irrelevant for other systems.

Imagine there is a room full of people all have a paper with the exact same transactions in order on it. Now a new person joins and copies someones paper and then verifies all Tx. Ok, now he only has the chain for one person that's not enough he needs the chain form as much other people as possible to assure he has the longest. Its perfectly fine to ask the others to only tell him the hash of the whole thing to see if he has the same chain.

So why even copy the chain first he could just start asking for the hash of the whole thing and if they all have the same there is no point to copy the chain.

He just needs to copy the last state (balances) so he can add Tx as well. (BTC does not have accounts with balances so BTC does not have the concept of "only the last state" but instead of the whole chain only the ends of the tree can be used to reduce the size. but again this is ONLY relevant for BTC and BTC clones/forks its NOT a property of DLTs in general)

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#184

Post by n0mad01 »

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.

This is a very limited and short-sighted view on the emergence and development of new technologies.

From the first petrol engine (1879) to the Ford Model T (1908), the Arpanet (1969) to the Internet (1990), as also software development (Cyberpunk 2077 was developed over 8 years), these things have one thing in common: they need time.

When one day your every breath (and its payment) is recorded on a blockchain then you should be aware that such a technology capable to do so does not exist yet, but its basic features do.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#185

Post by lottin »

puranjay wrote: post #131
Judgmentality wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising. Particularly if it doesn't restrict me because of my location or capital or identity. Your entire argument is about the promise of blockchain and not the actual current applications people are using. Your argument is theoretical when OP is asking for practical use cases. You mention many hypotheti…

I literally gave a real world example: Curve.fi that's used to swap between stablecoins. You can literally go right now to swap between tokenized USD and EURO. Or you can go to the bank and pay their exchange rate. Maybe they'll ask you for your ID too. Another example of the second kind: www.Ape.tax, where anyone can deploy an investment strategy and beta users can try them out, and if they are successful, they can…

What do you mean is happening right now?

For example, you mention foreign currency exchanges. According to Wikipedia, trading in foreign exchange markets averaged $6.6 trillion per day (April 2019). [1] Is there any indication that foreign exchange markets are moving towards adopting this trading of tokenized currencies that apparently is so much better than the system they're using now?

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

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#186

Post by akarma »

puranjay wrote: post #180
akarma wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> coming from a third world country, the promise of a decentralized, permissionless market seems extremely promising > A very basic usage: using Curve.fi to swap between tokenized USD (USDC) and tokenized EURO (EURS) with minimal slippage and fees, all permissionless, all freely accessible. As a sibling comment noted, this is hypothetical usage, and a future 'promise,' not actual usable by or providing value to the a…

Bad UX in early technology is kind of expected, isn't it? I'm sure lots of first-world, college-educated people were equally bewildered by email in 1995.

Agreed and it's expected, but the question posed was whether there's actual current instances of crypto helping people in the third-world, or whether it's just a bunch of hypothetical future promises of value.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#187

Post by jeremycarter »

n0mad01 wrote: post #184
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.

This is a very limited and short-sighted view on the emergence and development of new technologies. From the first petrol engine (1879) to the Ford Model T (1908), the Arpanet (1969) to the Internet (1990), as also software development (Cyberpunk 2077 was developed over 8 years), these things have one thing in common: they need time. When one day your every breath (and its payment) is recorded on a blockchain then yo…

Yes I know it is very short sighted, but I am very open to being persuaded. I'm not trying to be negative, just trying to look for the real world "value".

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#188

Post by c01n »

jollybean wrote: post #157
c01n wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But with fiat there is no trust between the people, the trust is provided by the banks, they act as the arbitrators because humans cannot trust each other. When we used to barter we stopped because it was sometimes unfair (convert bread to chickens?) so we invented money (gold) which is natural occurring and rare so we trust it more. Later on we invented banks which are a third party we use them as arbitrators becaus…

First - the notion that 'we don't trust the banks' is false. We, you, everyone, trusts that system every single day, with all of our financing. There is an incredible amount of oversight in that system, the Fed publishes it's actions and balance sheets. The banks have immense scrutiny. While we should never trust banks 'infallibly' we have layers and layers of protections. We have 'backups' for regular people like FD…

Thank you for the reply. I think you misread my comment, I never said 'we don't trust the banks', I wrote that we invented banks to act as third party arbitrators because we (humans) don't trust each other.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#189

Post by puranjay »

viraptor wrote: post #179
puranjay wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I tell you that I'm totally going to follow what a program tells me and you should give me your money to earn interest. Are you excited about the possible interest from this uninsured, pinky-swear promise exchange? It's a smart contract. You can review it publicly. If there are vulnerabilities, if the ownership is not renounced, it would be visible. Can you say the same about your investment bank? You don't have to…

But the smart contact cannot interact with real world. It's the party on the other side that ultimately gets the funds and acts on your behalf. That party can just take the money and go away. Unless we're talking about purely on-chain strategies. But in that case why wouldn't you copy their public investment contract and execute it yourself? > Can you say the same about your investment bank? My investment bank has a…

All real and legit concerns. Fraud remains a big problem which is why returns are so high right now - we're all early adopters.

But there are new developments constantly. On-chain insurance against smart contract failure and hacks is a thing (see: https://nexusmutual.io/). More sophisticated insurance strategies to compartmentalize risk are coming up (see https://www.unn.finance/). Protocol design to reduce risk exposure are being experimented with (see: https://saffron.finance/).

It's all new and all very exciting. It's moving very fast and its really fun to be in. I haven't been this excited by anything since the early web.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#190

Post by jeremycarter »

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…

I can see where you're coming from. It is an opinion I have from privilege - I don't live a privileged life but I don't struggle either (middle income bracket).

After reading your use cases I do have empathy for people in those situations, where governments and centralized agencies are corrupt etc - just not entirely sure this solves any of that.

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