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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

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Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#271

Post by DSingularity »

mosdl wrote: post #241
DSingularity wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

That is a very different discussion altogether.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#272

Post by noxer »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #263
noxer wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

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. I'm a bit of a blockchain noob, but isn't this the opposite of how blockchain works? What I mean is, yes, you can design it the way you're saying, but doesn't that open you up to double-spend attacks and enforced centralization? You need a central ledger at that point, since you…

If you have a final state double-spend attacks are actually impossible. They are based on the fact that someone can insert a transaction then "overwrite" it by providing a longer chain where the transaction didn't happen or went somewhere else.

This is only ever possible if there is no final state.

Also not sure why you would need centralization for what. Simplified a final state is when a majority declares it as final not a central entity does that. A double spend would have to include both transaction into the final sate which obviously would violate the systems rules. You cant move the same balance again when you already move it away. So that just wont happen because the code does not allow it. The second Tx is simply invalid just like if you would try to move more coins than you have.

If you want to read more about final consensus see https://xrpl.org/consensus-network.html There are ofc other project with similar concepts this is just the oldest.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#273

Post by losvedir »

puranjay wrote: post #165
idlewords wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 needi…

I think money transfer was Blockhain Era 1.0 use case. The use case has advanced - very rapidly - to money automation. This is all really new stuff, much of it barely a year old, and it has come so fast that even I've been surprised. A smart contract can currently take your tokenized USD (we'll use USDC since its backed by Coinbase), use that as collateral to borrow ETH on AAVE.com (a lending protocol), use 50% of th…

Wat. But... why?

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#274

Post by DennisP »

jude- wrote: post #246
ec109685 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Why would they all be in the same datacenter? The beacon chain will periodically select staking nodes at random to go in each shard, and there's an economic incentive for stakers not to use the same infrastructure as everyone else.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#275

Post by vbuterin »

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…

When I talk to people in the world about what about blockchains they find exciting, the aspect of permanence really is one of the things that people find attractive. I agree it's use-case dependent, but the problem is that once you go down the use-case-dependence rabbit hole, developers and users have to really think "am I creating something permanent or not"? And once you have to think even a little bit, you lose 50%+ of the magic. Having properties that you just get by default that you don't even have to think to obtain is quite important.

The good news though is that you don't need permanent storage of history to be supported by the base protocol itself. Consensus nodes don't need to know about history to verify the current chain. There are plenty of other mechanisms for storing historical data: bittorrent, centralized archives, Filecoin-style networks, etc etc. You just need the blockchain's throughput to be not _too_ high, so that it's actually possible for these protocols to store what comes out.

Definitely nothing is permanent, but you can get pretty close to "permanent unless civilization collapses", and that's much better than "data could drop at any time if a few people just forget"!

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#276

Post by vbuterin »

jollybean wrote: post #91

The notion of 'decentraliztion' as presented by the blockchain community is basically extremist/absolutist, and it's ruining their own projects. Our entire civilization and everything in it depends on networks of trust. Without it, we'd fall down instantly. To require a system of 'absolute decentralization' when 'partial decentralization' would work just as well, doesn't make sense. We technical people have an odd wa…

Blockchain base layers have a stronger need to be close to absolutely decentralized than most other things. This is because base layers aren't applications, they're _the places where all the applications talk to each other_. So if a base layer has a trust dependency, that requires the entire ecosystem to be willing to agree on the same trust dependency.

Applications can be partially decentralized and that's often the best approach, sure.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#278

Post by cryptica »

The reason why there are so many scam projects in crypto is because big fiat power-brokers wanted to pump up the price of scam projects in order to draw attention to them in an effort to discredit the Blockchain/Cryptocurrency concept as a whole.

The problem is that they underestimated how much people hate the fiat monetary system and how far they are willing to deceive themselves in order to adopt and promote alternatives...

Some common cases of extreme self-deception:

- Bitcoin's measly 2 transactions per seconds is great, it's intentional to keep the size of the blockchain under control...

- Bitcoin consuming the same amount of electricity as an entire country is a good thing... It adds security, it uses mostly renewable energy and in fact, it speeds up the development of renewable energy technology.

- Proof of Work is better and more secure than Proof of Stake... The fact that everyone has to trust a tiny handful of companies who can produce Bitcoin mining hardware doesn't make it any less decentralized. The fact that the network can be hijacked by outsiders who have 0 stake in the network simply by buying or renting a lot of mining hardware doesn't impact security at all.

While this might sound like a critique of Bitcoin. I'm glad that people were able to do such extreme mental gymnastics to end up investing in Bitcoin because its success makes a mockery out of the entire financial system...

Bitcoin and Dogecoin are not so different. Their goal is to discredit the current financial system by showcasing its extreme inefficiency and stupidity. I chuckle to myself when I see Bitcoiners speaking about Dogecoiners in a condescending manner. They are both useful idiots.

Any intelligent person who understands what's going on can see that just about every aspect of our modern economy is at least as dumb as Bitcoin and that's the whole point. Satoshi was a comedian.

BTW, I'm bullish about crypto, but not about Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the other top scam coins which are hoarding all the attention away from genuine projects and starving them of funding.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#279

Post by base698 »

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.

Only if you consider the ability to afford food an improvement.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/world/middleeast/lebanon-...

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#280

Post by nootropicat »

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.

Defi is only about 2-3 years old. It's indeed fair to say that bitcoin has completely failed in getting any adoption beyond speculation.

>Nobody is using crypto as an alternative to fiat.

Ethereum is the best way to save in dollars outside of the developed world. High single digit or double digit yields (powered by speculators borrowing to speculate) vs ~0% in the banking system. Also much safer. Not compared to an American bank, but to Russian/Lebanese/Brazilian etc.

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