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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

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Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#331

Post by tsimionescu »

atweiden wrote: post #303
noxer wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can have that type of finality with centralized protocols built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain — Lightning Network being the standout example. Whats the point? No one wants that beside that LN needs BTC on chain Tx which if you dont arbitrary define as final after some blocks makes it exactly the same - not final. PoS/PoW is rather irrelevant. we already have solutions to make blocks/ledgers final its doesn't…

I don’t quite catch your point. The chances your brain continues functioning over the next twelve minutes is not 100%, but 100% less some infinitesimally small fraction. 99.999999...% is as close physical reality ever comes to 100%. > PoS/PoW is rather irrelevant It’s an incredibly relevant fact that PoS blockchains pos1, pos2, pos3 cannot be compared without overtly trusting central authorities to give you the “corr…

All block chains in practice require trusting central authorities (trust the code, trust the protocol, trust the math behind it, trust the hardware, trust people to honor their off-chain transactions, trust authorities to help when they don't etc.) so this whole fantasy about 'trustless systems' is meaningless anyway.

You can't create trustless electronic systems for humans. There is simply too much complexity in even the simplest hardware and software for any single person to be able to understand without trusting others. And this doesn't just apply to the 'unwashed masses', but to every single CS researcher, OS programmer or Linus Torvalds.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#332

Post by CryptoPunk »

space_rock wrote: post #330
meowkit wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All the experts, including the numerous researchers who work on and have contributed to ETH 2.0, say Ethereum can scale. Any one with a passing familiarity with the cryptocurrency space knows that.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#333

Post by tsimionescu »

c01n wrote: post #237
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…

So you put the series numbers of each bank note on your tax forms? That must take a pretty long time...

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#334

Post by cromulent »

Animats wrote: post #277

There are some blockchains live that claim to be scalable. See [1]. Is that for real. And does "Elrond" have some connection to L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology? [1] https://docs.elrond.com/

"Elrond" is a character from Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings (as is "Arwen").

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#335

Post by CryptoPunk »

grubles wrote: post #300
samatman wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>the whole system is only as durable as the increasingly-enormous data centers which hold all that information. That is exactly what Ethereum's direction has been for years now. It is centralized on Amazon AWS via Infura's nodes (which they charge access to, mind you). It's not a world computer. It's EC2 with additional complexity (and fees).

Nothing consensus critical on Ethereum runs on Infura nodes. Plenty of people run full nodes on hosted services like Infura, but that applies equally to the original cryptocurrency and current number 2 coin.

The delegation of node operation to third party services is done more for convenience/up-time guarantees than any node operation cost considerations, and Ethereum would be fine if these third party services were all coopted or forced to shut down, because again, Ethereum's consensus protocol has zero dependencies on them.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#336

Post by CryptoPunk »

noxer wrote: post #163
samatman wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The blockhcain may be "forever" but the history is definitely is not. Its a lie because the most likely outcome are that Ethereum dies because the history cripples it to an unusable system (its a lie then) or the the history dependency is removed so it can keep working (its a lie then as well because which part of the history is preserved is up to whoever does want to preserve it and no longer "guaranteed by the syst…

State expiry/rent is being worked on in Ethereum, and would totally solve the problem of indefinite state size growth. This article, courtesy again of the hard-working Buterin, details the designs under consideration:

https://hackmd.io/@vbuterin/state_expiry_paths

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#337

Post by stickfigure »

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…

> Definitely nothing is permanent, but you can get pretty close to "permanent unless civilization collapses"

Let's be honest here and acknowledge that we're talking about "permanent unless your particular fork of one particular blockchain collapses". There's a vast chasm between that and all of civilization.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#338

Post by space_rock »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #332
space_rock wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All the experts, including the numerous researchers who work on and have contributed to ETH 2.0, say Ethereum can scale. Any one with a passing familiarity with the cryptocurrency space knows that.

Yes everyone with a passing familiarity knows this. People knowledgeable see the obvious scaling problems

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#339

Post by CryptoPunk »

space_rock wrote: post #338
CryptoPunk wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the experts, including the numerous researchers who work on and have contributed to ETH 2.0, say Ethereum can scale. Any one with a passing familiarity with the cryptocurrency space knows that.

Yes everyone with a passing familiarity knows this. People knowledgeable see the obvious scaling problems

The only people who claim Ethereum can't scale are those who claim Lightning Network can scale, and have aggressively silenced any one who says otherwise within the Bitcoin space for the last six years, while declaring themselves to be the only experts on the issue.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#340

Post by Dzugaru »

tsimionescu wrote: post #331
atweiden wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t quite catch your point. The chances your brain continues functioning over the next twelve minutes is not 100%, but 100% less some infinitesimally small fraction. 99.999999...% is as close physical reality ever comes to 100%. > PoS/PoW is rather irrelevant It’s an incredibly relevant fact that PoS blockchains pos1, pos2, pos3 cannot be compared without overtly trusting central authorities to give you the “corr…

All block chains in practice require trusting central authorities (trust the code, trust the protocol, trust the math behind it, trust the hardware, trust people to honor their off-chain transactions, trust authorities to help when they don't etc.) so this whole fantasy about 'trustless systems' is meaningless anyway. You can't create trustless electronic systems for humans. There is simply too much complexity in eve…

This is blatantly false. Bitcoin doesn't require anything at all besides the idea of a most work chain humanity produced. You just pick it and that's it. You cant pick wrong, there is no chain bigger.

All other cryptos are a fantasy and cannot provide any comparable guarantees.

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