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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

vitalik.ca

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Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#311

Post by noxer »

c01n wrote: post #244
noxer wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

See other message. Listening to a nodes is voluntary and secret you dont know who or if at all anyone listens to your node. If you simply created a bunch you can be sure no one will listen to them. It doesn't matter how many % they make up.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#312

Post by wespiser_2018 »

TimJRobinson wrote: post #290
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…

When you put money in your bank account, where does it go? Who uses it? When you purchase shares, where do they come from? How many market makers were involved? How much profit did they make front-running your purchase? All these things are currently completely opaque to the average person. Decentralized Finance fixes this. Every transaction and system you interact with is completely open source, transparent, and fai…

> All these things are currently completely opaque to the average person. Decentralized Finance fixes this

Code is opaque to people as well, most SWEs struggle to understand distributed systems that are using consensus protocols much simpler than byzantine fault tolerance, or programming on environment are non-adversarial, unlike solidity. You can't just learn solidity and then trust smart contracts, it takes a lot of knowledge to avoid vulnerabilities.

> Code can't be corrupted in the same way.

If you think this, you might be in your a rude awakening. "Code" is being used in crypto-currencies for corruption all the time, and there is no inherent property of computers that protects you against malice, theft and vice.

I personally don't want to live in a world where I need to audit the code for every financial transaction I'm party to, and fortunately I live in a country with a mostly working legal system that already handles this for me.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#313

Post by wespiser_2018 »

brazzy wrote: post #176
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…

> I would reckon that alone should make HN bullish on crypto. When was the last time you worked at a tech company where Code was truly the Law? Hell the fuck no . Have you seen what kind of code people write? "Code is law" is the last thing anyone with real tech experience should ever want. It's a terrifying prospect. Code is buggy. I don't want my laws to be buggy and unfixable.

hard agree on that one: it's a recipe for a cypto-hellscape. You wouldn't know who to trust, and the time it takes to actually audit smart contracts for trust is enormous. What a joke.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#314

Post by wespiser_2018 »

parksy wrote: post #87
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.

A couple of points, the first is criticising lack of real-world use-cases for nascent technology is like criticising the web in the mid 90's. It's like expecting the cart to lead the horse. Having said that, there's plenty of projects big and small that have merit. Granted, a lot of published "case studies" are just marketing fluff to attract search traffic, that shouldn't be an indictment of the technology itself wh…

All of these commercial blockchains should really just be "traditional" databases. Byzantine fault tolerance is a ridiculous requirement for a project that runs inside a trusted networked, or between trusted peers. These companies are doing blockchain for PR and/or as projects with consultents, not as serious integrated software projects to solve actual supply chain management problems.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#315

Post by wespiser_2018 »

wmf wrote: post #92
mtreis86 wrote: post #43

Is there anything blockchains can do in less time complexity than traditional computations?

Inherently no; consensus requires redundant computation.

It's so incredibly redundant I think people lack a mental model for just how many messages need to be sent for every node participant to ensure all others are reliable (byzantine fault tolerance). The number of messages is is about n^3, so that's like asking 5 people to go to lunch with 125 emails. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thesaddestmo...

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#316

Post by zionic »

grubles wrote: post #298
narush wrote: post #22

Vitalik is consistently one of the most interesting people to follow in the blockchain space. Even his (5+ year) old writing is quite interesting, if nothing else to see how Ethereum's research thinking has evolved over time. A few questions re: why "Ethereum is not going further than quadratic [sharding]." The first reason given: there's a minimum number of nodes required for shard for safety guarantees. So, a coupl…

>Vitalik is consistently one of the most interesting people to follow Really? He has consistently argued for on-chain scaling and for people to not validate the blockchain state much like Elon Musk, with his seemingly 101-level understanding of blockchains. This post is a strange 180 from Vitalik's usual "do the opposite of Bitcoin because that is good marketing". Now Vitalik is aware of the importance of running a f…

Someone clearly didn’t read the article…

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#317

Post by natch »

I feel like the idea that "a million transactions per second ought to be enough for anybody" (not a quote, just a paraphrase echoing Gates for those who missed it) could come back as another storied mistaken estimate at some point.

Just taking the human population as a starting point, if we posit that in the future, non-human entities will also be doing transactions, and there may be orders of magnitude more of those entities than there are humans, and the entities will be networked and operating at machine speed… I don't know, but it seems like the thinking on scaling needs to be even more ambitious.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#318

Post by lynx234 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #233
djamrozik wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yea, but you can break the paper trail behind the funding coins if you want to. Would use something like Tornado or Monero.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#319

Post by TimJRobinson »

wespiser_2018 wrote: post #312
TimJRobinson wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you put money in your bank account, where does it go? Who uses it? When you purchase shares, where do they come from? How many market makers were involved? How much profit did they make front-running your purchase? All these things are currently completely opaque to the average person. Decentralized Finance fixes this. Every transaction and system you interact with is completely open source, transparent, and fai…

> All these things are currently completely opaque to the average person. Decentralized Finance fixes this Code is opaque to people as well, most SWEs struggle to understand distributed systems that are using consensus protocols much simpler than byzantine fault tolerance, or programming on environment are non-adversarial, unlike solidity. You can't just learn solidity and then trust smart contracts, it takes a lot o…

> Code is opaque to people as well, most SWEs struggle to understand distributed systems that are using consensus protocols much simpler than byzantine fault tolerance, or programming on environment are non-adversarial, unlike solidity. You can't just learn solidity and then trust smart contracts, it takes a lot of knowledge to avoid vulnerabilities.

It's open source vs closed source arguments again. I have personally never looked at the Linux Kernel or Ubuntu source code, but I trust it more than I trust Windows because I know many thousands of people have looked at it before me and said it's secure.

> "Code" is being used in crypto-currencies for corruption all the time, and there is no inherent property of computers that protects you against malice, theft and vice.

I'm sure it is, code can also be used to create viruses and malware but that doesn't mean Linux is insecure. It's about the transparency of the code and systems you use. More transparency = more trust = better outcomes. I'd rather live in a transparent, fair world, than one where those with more power and money get to set the rules and hide the internal workings from everyone else.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#320

Post by Sargos »

deadalus wrote: post #61
john_alan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monero. It’s provided a private money for the internet. That helps people. It’s valuable. A permissionless, censorshipless decentralised private money.

Are there any other significant untraceable cryptos other than Monero and Zcash(using privacy fetures)?

Ethereum via Aztec (zk.money)
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