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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

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Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#231

Post by crazypython »

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…

> you need to make a consumer-friendly distribution of the node software

https://bitcoinknots.org

It's a distribution of Bitcoin Core. It needs 5GB to store enough blockchain state to fully verify everything. AFAIK Bitcoin Core also has a convenient GUI interface.

I set up a node on my computer. I didn't touch the command-line once. It has a nice GUI and built-in wallet.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#232

Post by mvzvm »

jbverschoor wrote: post #55
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.

You should look at it as a public service of authenticity. Notary services / time stamping. But also noncustodian assets. Although still not usable for daily life, I think the more we move into digital, the more we will want and need better licensing/ownership of digital content. For example when blizzard bans your wow account, which is worth many hours and dollars. Big tech has too much control over these things, an…

Your example makes no sense. How would blizzard banning a wow account (I don't know the game particularly well, but let's just use this since you brought it up) be solved w/ Blockchain?

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#233

Post by bradleyjg »

djamrozik wrote: post #226
legulere wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need a blockchain for that? Gambling and Insurance existed both long before blockchains.

Polymarket is centralized, but one benefit of it is that you can sign up and fund your account anonymously (though you do require an email). Users are not restricted by state or national laws. On a true decentralized gambling app, email would not be needed, just wallet. It would also be difficult to regulate (the team behind it could be anonymous). And I'm not saying this is great or anything, but it shows how you ca…

It’s only as anonymous as the paper trail behind the funding coins, right?

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#234

Post by ec109685 »

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #222
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…

-Since it is a non productive investment without dividends or interests, making a profit entails someone else making a loss. It's a zero sum game. On average no money is made. -If you follow the herd, if you buy when people are talking it up positively, you are probably buying high and making less than average (less than zero). -Covid 19 probably made crypto investment frothy because of unprecedented amount of govern…

Are you missing the utility of transacting on the blockchain in your analysis?

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#235

Post by mosdl »

puranjay wrote: post #178
gricardo99 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean on a larger scale. The great promise of crypto, A billion plus “unbanked” people turning to a crypto enabled shadow banking system, will not happen without drawing the attention of the eye of sauron

Shouldn't the fact that central bankers want to ban crypto make you think that maybe there's something here more than ponzis and scams? If the eye of sauron wants to destroy something, surely it can't be all bad?

Or it's so bad everyone agrees.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#236

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

ec109685 wrote: post #234
BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-Since it is a non productive investment without dividends or interests, making a profit entails someone else making a loss. It's a zero sum game. On average no money is made. -If you follow the herd, if you buy when people are talking it up positively, you are probably buying high and making less than average (less than zero). -Covid 19 probably made crypto investment frothy because of unprecedented amount of govern…

Are you missing the utility of transacting on the blockchain in your analysis?

You're right. It's even less than zero sum.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#237

Post by c01n »

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…

Imagine a peer goes offline and stuff happens on the network while its offline, when the peer goes back online what state does it follow, remember that it is a decentralized network what peer does it trust? This is where the chain of verifiable transactions come in. Also with this setup it is kind of easy to prevent double spending.

> BTW cash does not have a recorded Tx history

Sorta... The central banks know every coin that has been created and notes that have been printed. When you fill in your Tax forms you are creating this Tx history manually.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#238

Post by ec109685 »

cinntaile wrote: post #50
narush wrote: post #38

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 a…

Induced demand is an argument frequently used against bigger roads but the reality is that the increase in road size takes many years before the road is at its maxed out capacity again so it definitely helps.

And it gave many more people the chance to make it from place A to place B in the process.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#239

Post by noxer »

vvillena wrote: post #219
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, mo…

Don't assume blockchains are bitcoin or BTC like systems.

I talk about the "current and undisputed or better indisputable (final) state". Bitcoin does not have this. Hence it can not function without history. This is a property of BTC not one of blockchains in general.

Plenty other systems have a current state and a final state and there is no "better state" that can comer around and replace it. Final really means final. Its often called a closed ledger. Other systems have checkpoints and what not to reach a similar goal.

BTCs "final" is just to wait some blocks its never final its just becomes incredibly unlikely to change the longer you wait. This is objectively worse than having a final state and on top of that it requires the history rather than just the last final state.

>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.

You have no choice. Either you agree with the current final state or you dont use the blockchain. Your choice is to use it or not. You choice is not to validate or not or validate and fix something if its wrong.

The act of validating doesn't do anything. No matter what your validating gives you in the end you can only accept the current final state of the running network or not use it at all.

Also its not created out of thin air. It was validated by the code. If there is a mistake it is there because of the code people used back when it happened. If you were there running your node it would have made the same mistake. whats the point to find it now? (beside the fact that it was already found and fixed) It doesn't change the state the state is final. Bugs happen. If you assume cheating however then well you should assume someone would have screamed back when it happens so you would already know that someone cheated somehow. Whats the point of validating it? you already know you dont want to use that chain. Zero reason to detect the cheating yourself.

We know pretty well from all incidents where blockchains had to be "fixed" there is no way someone would find an unknown incident by the placebo validation act.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#240

Post by ec109685 »

jude- wrote: post #104

So, what happens when one of the shards goes offline, or forks? What are the cascading consequences for validators of other shards, if any? Asking because I don't think there's a viable strategy for keeping all shard data around indefinitely, without giving up either scalability or durability: * If the system requires cross-shard state-transitions to be mirrored to on a "central" chain (e.g. the beacon chain) in orde…

Wouldn’t each shard itself be made up of thousands of nodes and thus not easily taken down? And there would be incentive to join the hampered shard to repair it given joining nodes would have a larger share of the hashing power than in non-hampered shards.
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