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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

vitalik.ca

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Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#241

Post by mosdl »

DSingularity wrote: post #201
jeremycarter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but what problem is it trying to solve? It's a solution to a non existent problem.

Okay, decentralized currency is one idea. This can be used to implement some money with a monetary policy that is transparent and modified through consensus: eg bitcoin - deflationary via finite supply. Multi-party wallet is another. With this, cryptographic signatures from a majority of the owners is required to transfer currency/digital assets. Non-fungible tokens is another. This can be used to — as an example — p…

What stops the authority from blocking internet access they can't spy on..

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#242

Post by ec109685 »

mvzvm wrote: post #232
jbverschoor wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Guessing that those accumulated digital assets couldn’t be wiped away with a key press and instead transferred to someone else.

Still nothing stopping WOW from simply ignoring those assets as part of account deletion process, rendering them worthless.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#243

Post by atweiden »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #209
atweiden wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just a narrative, though. The practical reality is cryptocurrency valuation is driven by these narratives 100%. The other practical reality is the people pretending as if this reality doesn’t exist are increasingly perceived to be engaged in biased sophistry. Granted, low information people are still falling for it, but high information people increasingly aren’t, as evidenced by Ethereum failing to get even 3…

I really don't know what you are talking about. ETH hit its all time high a few weeks ago (May 10th) both in terms of USD and BTC. Its still double it's ATH from its peak in 2018, before the crypto crash. As to your other ramblings, mere snobbish tripe meant to demean and belittle those that disagree with your opinion. In other words, yours is a low information post.

> I really don't know what you are talking about. ETH hit its all time high a few weeks ago (May 10th) both in terms of USD and BTC. Its still double it's ATH from its peak in 2018, before the crypto crash.

> As to your other ramblings, mere snobbish tripe meant to demean and belittle those that disagree with your opinion. In other words, yours is a low information post.

ETH broke 0.12 ETH/BTC last narrative cycle. This is trivial to fact check. Sorry to disturb you.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#244

Post by c01n »

noxer wrote: post #183
tromp wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, n…

>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.

Well if I control enough nodes I can send you fake hashes (51% attack).

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#245

Post by DennisP »

samatman wrote: post #144
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…

Vitalik addresses that issue in the section on statelessness and state expiry.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#246

Post by jude- »

ec109685 wrote: post #240
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.

I don't think shards are powered by hashing? I think nodes participating in Ethereum 2.0 are assigned to shards by the beacon chain, and they work to grow the shard's transactions by deciding on transaction ordering and inclusion in a BFT manner.

Also, it's not clear to me that it's "thousands," nor is it clear to me that this even matters. If they're all in the same datacenter, and that datacenter temporarily gets disconnected from the other shards' nodes, then the shard is effectively dead as far as the rest of the network is concerned.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#247

Post by puranjay »

kaladin_1 wrote: post #217
puranjay wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You don’t have to use an exchange at all. Decentralized exchanges have been around for quite a while and have massive volume. And their governance is entirely controlled by DAOs

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#248

Post by jimmydorry »

noxer wrote: post #183
tromp wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, n…

The model you propose is weak to sybil attacks [1] and is based on trust, while the BTC model is based on zero-trust.

There is nothing stopping someone malicious from spinning up thousands of nodes that all say the current hash is Y (with transactions that break the rules of the blockchain) while the remaining minority of nodes say the hash is actually X (the original longest chain). It is only by calculating the hash yourself, based on the full transaction history, that your node can be satisfied that it is on the longest chain. _*After*_ you have confirmed that you have the valid chain, it is possible to prune all the history to just the balances and to only validate new blocks as they come in, but in the case of a fork or malicious actors, your node may end up out of sync.

There may be other ways of tackling this issue that I am not aware of, but this problem in particular is one of the fundamental problems that Blockchains / Bitcoin were designed to solve (consensus among peers that is not disrupted by hostile actors). I have yet to see a better solution for this particular problem.

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

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#249

Post by iudqnolq »

puranjay wrote: post #189
viraptor wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

> Nexus Mutual is run entirely by its members. Only members can decide which claims are valid.

This sounds like a high school popularity contest, not code as law

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#250

Post by space_rock »

Yes if users don't validate the chain themselves the network reverts to an very expensive, untrusted SQL database

Funny for vitalik to highlight this obvious fact. Vitalik has often been considered a fraud for promotion Ethereum which is a network too large and bloated for a user to validate

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