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The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

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Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#351

Post by 1ark »

puranjay wrote: post #182
seibelj wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curve did $1 billion in volume over the past 24 hours https://curve.fi That isn’t hypothetical. It’s like you keep getting refuted and then ignore reality because it disagrees with you. “Blockchain is unused.” [a bunch of links with billions of dollars in actual daily usage provided] “Oh, well, I’ve never heard of that before so it doesn’t matter.” What kind of arguing is this?

Much of HN is stuck in 2017 Blockchain era. Most haven't looked it serious since that crash. Many still think of Blockchain and can only think of BTC, LTC, Doge and ETH. DeFi is so new that it even caught HN off guard.

Much of HN is also middle of the curve and don't care/know about finance. Finance, financial engineering and P2P is a different beast compared to deploying bloated Docker containers running React frontends. It's a shame because there are a lot of smart people here that could help working on sustainable economics for fun and profit.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#352

Post by dannyw »

rauljordan2020 wrote: post #286
idlewords wrote: post #115

The really obvious weakness in any blockchain setup is the software. Whoever controls the software upgrade channel will always have potential control of the blockchain, whether that's the official entity in charge, or some intermediary. If you want really widespread distribution of full nodes, you need to make a consumer-friendly distribution of the node software, and package it and keep it updated in a way that regu…

Ethereum proof of stake has 4 production implementations today that run the chain. They are from independent teams that are not part of the Ethereum Foundation

They are as independent as Mozilla is from Google. So they're not the same entity; but in practice they take orders from Eth foundation because they're funded by the Eth foundation.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#353

Post by dannyw »

billytetrud wrote: post #345
3np wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less than most actually. Most have no practical means to act against the interest of pools, whose operators have most of the real control that people ascribe to miners.

For Bitcoin, Stratum v2 will solve this problem and return block creation power to the miners instead of the handful of large pool operators, which will be a huge win. However, even then, miners are beholden to the actively spending economic majority.

Miners want ROI. Running your own block creation infrastructure offers no benefit and only drawbacks and more services to keep online.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#354

Post by dannyw »

znpy wrote: post #167

For a blockchain to be decentralized, it's crucially important for regular users to be able to run a node, and to have a culture where running nodes is a common activity. you don't convince users to do stuff. you bribe them. introduce a small form of reward for running a validating node and voila, nodes popping up everywhere.

Eth2 staking does this.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#355

Post by dannyw »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #214
znpy wrote: post #167

For a blockchain to be decentralized, it's crucially important for regular users to be able to run a node, and to have a culture where running nodes is a common activity. you don't convince users to do stuff. you bribe them. introduce a small form of reward for running a validating node and voila, nodes popping up everywhere.

That’s not very Sybil-resistant: how do you prove that the node is actually verifying things? The only remotely viable way would be to use recursive SNAKRs to prove that you verified block proofs in block chains like Mina

Eth2 has the concept of slashing. If you see a validatoe acting maliciously, you can publish a proof and slash them. You receive a portion of the penalty.

So running full nodes will have a monetary benefit. Running two will only give you more benefit if they have improved network reachability and latency.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#356

Post by dmitriid »

BeefWellington wrote: post #112
dmitriid wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do quote everything, while you're at it. > The first production of automobiles was by Karl Benz in 1888 in Germany and, under license from Benz, in France by Emile Roger. There were numerous others, including tricycle builders Rudolf Egg, Edward Butler, and Léon Bollée. Bollée, using a 650 cc (40 cu in) engine of his own design, enabled his driver, Jamin, to average 45 kilometres per hour (28 mph) in the 1897 Paris-T…

> 11 years from introduction, no one has come up with a use-case for blockchain This seems an odd claim to make. Currently there's hundreds of Cryptocurrencies using blockchains as a foundation, and more than half a trillion dollars tied up in them. Right now it seems like they're at least speculative investments. If this does not count as a use-case then we'd better break the news to essentially all of finance. Year…

> Because of all of the speculation cryptocurrencies have generally become too volatile for that.

So, the great amazing disruptive technology that is going to completely change the world... broke as soon as a tiny fraction of the world start paying any attention to it.

> Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development.

Literally none of those applications require blockchain, and blockchain solves literally none of the problems in those domains.

> That doesn't mean it isn't useful.

You'd think that the great amazing disruptive technology that is going to completely change the world would actually show some useful applications by now.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#357

Post by wcoenen »

noxer wrote: post #114
mtreis86 wrote: post #43

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

DTLs aren't "computers" its just that some build a computer into it to create a decentral computer. In its raw form a DTL does not compute an output but ofc all participants compute signatures and such stuff to validate input and reach consensus. This is not a competition to a single computer as load is no distributed its the exact opposite. Everyone checks the rules of the system. (not to be confused with mining tha…

What is DTL? Did you mean DLT (distributed ledger technology)?

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#358

Post by dmitriid »

crazypython wrote: post #60
dmitriid wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before it can be discarded to save disk space. Everyone should have this quote ready when there's an inevitable "but there's no tampering of the log, and all transactions are kept forever and can be verified!"

Yes, the blockchain data structure ensures that if you verify the older transactions, the newer transactions on top of it are verified. If the old version was valid, the newer block built on top of it is too.

> Yes, the blockchain data structure ensures that if you verify the older transactions, the newer transactions on top of it are verified.

That is not enough.

Blockchain is proposed for various things like, for example, land registries. They have to be kept around indefinitely long. In many countries financial institutions are required by law to keep financial transactions around for 4 years. Ans so on.

But yeah, sure, go ahead and remove all historical data "because new transaction is mathematically valid".

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#359

Post by billytetrud »

wespiser_2018 wrote: post #315
wmf wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Lol, nice link. Why do you think number of messages is n^3? Each message only needs to be sent once to each network participant, that's n messages. Additional messages will be needed to tell their connections which messages they've received, but this can be a single metadata message talking about many primary messages. So if you send 1000 messages through a network of 3000 people, that's not 3000^3*1000 messages, it's 1000*3000 + a*3000 where a is how many metadata messages are sent per message (which likely would be more related to the rate at which messages are sent, rather than any kind of constant).

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#360

Post by meowface »

dannyw wrote: post #349
stickfigure wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I disagree. If bitcoin or ethereum gets completely killed today, I'm confident you'll still be able to download the chain in four decades (assuming civilisation still exists) out of pure history and data hoarding.

Right. The "value" / perceived value won't be permanent (and may be very subjective and disputed from the start), but in terms of long-term data integrity and availability, blockchains can be useful. An NFT ownership transfer that occurred in 2020 on some blockchain may not be considered too valuable in a hypothetical 2040 world where almost no one is using that (or perhaps any) blockchain anymore, but you can likely at least retrieve that record and be pretty sure the data is accurate and wasn't tampered with.

So a (at-one-point reasonably popular) blockchain or protocol forking or falling out of use won't actually result in that data being lost to time. You'd probably need a major worldwide catastrophe for there to be a significant risk of that.

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