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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

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Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#211

Post by idlewords »

sthnblllII wrote: post #135
idlewords wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And over the following years the automobile improved rapidly, becoming more capable, reliable, and gaining users as it went. It didn't spend its first 13 years up on blocks while its supporters yelled at the skeptical and embezzled money from everyone else.

Yea. Its closer to the first 30 years of its existence doing pretty much nothing but being sport for rich people.

It was at least able to roll from point A to point B without consuming a small country's worth of power.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#212

Post by qeternity »

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.

Crypto relies on the internet. It benefits from its adoption. It should be much faster. YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, Spotify, App Stores, etc. All of these advancements experienced rapid growth. Hell, even PayPal.

The internet built the network that made that rapid growth possible. Crypto is not reinventing the internet.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#213

Post by wizzwizz4 »

javert wrote: post #69
bob33212 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is saying that fiat money is perfect. This is a logical fallacy to jump to "Fiat has issues, therefore I will only own bitcoin". That is like saying "McDonalds is unhealthy, therefore I will only eat sand"

I didn't say that. You're attacking a straw man.

You brought up fiat in a way that implied a dichotomy.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#214

Post by Ar-Curunir »

znpy wrote: post #167

For a blockchain to be decentralized, it's crucially important for regular users to be able to run a node, and to have a culture where running nodes is a common activity. you don't convince users to do stuff. you bribe them. introduce a small form of reward for running a validating node and voila, nodes popping up everywhere.

That’s not very Sybil-resistant: how do you prove that the node is actually verifying things?

The only remotely viable way would be to use recursive SNAKRs to prove that you verified block proofs in block chains like Mina

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#215

Post by kingo55 »

dehrmann wrote: post #170
idlewords wrote: post #115

The really obvious weakness in any blockchain setup is the software. Whoever controls the software upgrade channel will always have potential control of the blockchain, whether that's the official entity in charge, or some intermediary. If you want really widespread distribution of full nodes, you need to make a consumer-friendly distribution of the node software, and package it and keep it updated in a way that regu…

Miners control bitcoin more than people realize.

And at the same time less than some realise. E.g. UASF.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#216

Post by wizzwizz4 »

znpy wrote: post #167

For a blockchain to be decentralized, it's crucially important for regular users to be able to run a node, and to have a culture where running nodes is a common activity. you don't convince users to do stuff. you bribe them. introduce a small form of reward for running a validating node and voila, nodes popping up everywhere.

Decentralised communities used to exist without such bribery. I wonder why that's not really happening much any more. (Of course, the old ones still exist, and there are replacements to the ones that went defunct, but precious few new things work this way.)

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#217

Post by kaladin_1 »

puranjay wrote: post #181
kaladin_1 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

>> You can't say the same when you deposit money into, say, Robinhood

How do you know what the major exchanges are doing as well?

By the way, how did the exchanges wind up becoming so powerful and rich. Becoming almost a parallel Wall Street, just a smaller one, in a system that was supposed to ultimately democratise power. Some people with resources managed to emerge at the top in decision making...

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#218

Post by imtringued »

idlewords wrote: post #152
Sleepytime wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet was around a lot longer than a decade before aol showed up and started pressing CDs.

Imagine if after TCP/IP was invented, people hoarded IP addresses and they became worth millions of dollars, but no one used the internet. If you pointed this out, they got mad at you for being a luddite or a noiper. That's the situation we're in with crypto.

The reverse is sort of happening with IPv4. ISPs are pushing more and more people behind CGNAT where multiple people share the same IPv4 address. This is a problem because some video games (Terraria) don't support IPv6.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#219

Post by vvillena »

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…

Blockchains don't have a concept of a "current undisputed state". If you managed to create a longer (and valid) Bitcoin chain on your own than the longest one there is at this very moment, and publish it, all other clients will start using it as the new longest chain. And if two equally long chains are published at about the same time, and clients get split, things will probably get resolved in the next block. So, most of the time, the current longest chain won't probably change, and if you discount, say, the 6 newest blocks (using bitcoin as an example), then it will definitely not change. So, the "undisputed state" and the "current state" are actually separate concepts in a PoW blockchain.

Regarding storage, you argument that transactions shouldn't matter, since the important thing is the state. But then we're back to the fundamental problem. Why should we trust a state created from thin air that has no proof of how it was created? That's just a distributed database, which has is uses, but it's not a distributed blockchain.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#220

Post by imtringued »

puranjay wrote: post #174
idlewords wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and imagine further that people were bidding up the price of IP addresses in a speculative frenzy instead of actually using them.

People did bid up the price of domain names at least in a speculative frenzy instead of actually using them

New TLDs are a money grab as well. You're hoping that big companies like google buy your domains just to make sure nobody else has them.
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