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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

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Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#321

Post by hilbertseries »

puranjay wrote: post #192
akarma wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed and it's expected, but the question posed was whether there's actual current instances of crypto helping people in the third-world, or whether it's just a bunch of hypothetical future promises of value.

Speaking as someone from the third world, absolutely. I just implore anyone here to approach this with an open mind. There's lots of fraud, but that's also leading people to come up with newer, more exciting solutions. Like on-chain insurance ( https://nexusmutual.io/ ) or tranches to compartmentalize risk ( https://saffron.finance/ ) or creating entirely synthetic assets on-chain ( https://synthetix.io/ ) It's a wei…

What’s the advantage here over mpesa?

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#322

Post by contingencies »

vbuterin wrote: post #275
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…

In anthropology I believe it is accepted truth that when you ask people questions regarding motivations or rationalisations for their behavior, particularly group behavior, answers given do not necessarily equate to observed reality, ie. "Oh yeah I'm fully in to decentralisation and taking down the establishment." -> "I want a lambo."

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#323

Post by meowkit »

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…

Provide sources please. This post is full of odd conclusions and non-sequitors.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#324

Post by dlubarov »

noobly wrote: post #302
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 dont care how my coins was moved 10 years ago. The only storage that is relevant for me, now, for value transfer is the current undisputed state I don't have anything to add, but this has always struck me as inelegant, especially for Ethereum, which is more of a dApp platform. Can someone point me towards something that can run dApps and maintain current state with distributed consensus _without_ a blockchain (or…

> Also, what's wrong with truncating the chain after X blocks?

I would say nothing. Truncating history isn't explicitly built into the protocol, but that's what most users do in practice. I believe Geth and Parity both prune old state by default. There are "achive" nodes that store all history, but they're in the minority.

Bitcoin Core also has options for pruning old state, and for disabling some validation of old history. Though, unfortunately, it will still download blocks from the genesis even if both options are enabled.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#325

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#327

Post by lawn »

crazypython wrote: post #23

This is precisely what happened in 2017. Miners and exchanges unanimously supported increases Bitcoin's blocksize limit from 4MB to 8MB, in Segwit2x. However, users stopped them.

No, the miners did not fork away, so it's not at all like what's described here.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#328

Post by qeternity »

puranjay wrote: post #252
qeternity wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curve is just leverage for speculation: deposit token A, withdraw token B, earn the appreciation on both token A and B. Speculation is still the only use case. DeFi provides absolutely nothing novel. Nobody said it wasn’t used. They asked for a non speculative, “real” use case.

By that standard, majority of Wall Street has no use case either, since much of the money is made entirely on speculation. Is betting on whether oil price will go up or down really that much of a use case? Unless you count making money as not enough of a use case. I give up though. HN will willfully ignore crypto and miss out not only on life changing money, but one of the few places in tech that is still fun and exc…

> By that standard, majority of Wall Street has no use case either, since much of the money is made entirely on speculation. Is betting on whether oil price will go up or down really that much of a use case?

Absolutely. Price is the single encapsulation of all information in a market. But this is only the case because oil is a scarce resource, which needs allocating, and efforts are made to ensure that markets are fair. That is not true for crypto.

However, your presumption about “mostly speculation” also isn’t true and just reeks of someone who has no finance experience. I’ve spent my career as a hedge fund trader, focused in commods. Oil markets exist principally for bonafide hedgers to exchange risk. I cannot tell you how important hedging is to global market efficiencies.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#329

Post by roofwellhams »

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…

For each one of these successful cases, there are million ones that nobody heard of it.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#330

Post by space_rock »

meowkit wrote: post #323
grubles wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Provide sources please. This post is full of odd conclusions and non-sequitors.

It's literally the only comments on Ethereum there have been from knowledgeable people. Show me a source from an expert that thinks Ethereum would scale
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