The Limits to Blockchain Scalability • Hacker News Board

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#441

Post by shawnz » Tue, May 25, 2021, 2:42 AM UTC

atweiden wrote: post #440

shawnz wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PoS blockchains pos1, pos2, pos3 cannot be compared without overtly trusting central authorities to give you the “correct” answer. I have seen you make this point before on here but I don't see how that is true. Can you elaborate? Don't PoS chains typically choose forks based on how much is staked? Last time we discussed this you never explained what is wrong with that approach.

When the PoW chain ‘pow’ forks into pow1 and pow2 with both sides claiming to be the original ‘pow’, the general public can compare the cumulative hashrate of pow1 and pow2 to ascertain legitimacy (see: Bitcoin v Bcash, 2016). In PoW, external input to the system — electricity — powers hashrate. Electricity is altogether foreign to the context of cryptocurrency, and by necessitating the wasting of electricity on one…

I don't understand how the situations you are describing are different between PoW and PoS.

In either case, after a fork, sympathizers of chain A or chain B will start mining/staking on the chain they like.

In either case, members of the public who just want the chain with the most security can pick the one with the most energy burned or most coin-days staked (that's the "hash rate" equivalent/external input with which to base your decision on).

What is the difference? How is human intervention inherently required in the PoS case any more or less than it's required in the PoW case?

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#442

Post by atweiden » Tue, May 25, 2021, 4:04 AM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #441

atweiden wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the PoW chain ‘pow’ forks into pow1 and pow2 with both sides claiming to be the original ‘pow’, the general public can compare the cumulative hashrate of pow1 and pow2 to ascertain legitimacy (see: Bitcoin v Bcash, 2016). In PoW, external input to the system — electricity — powers hashrate. Electricity is altogether foreign to the context of cryptocurrency, and by necessitating the wasting of electricity on one…

I don't understand how the situations you are describing are different between PoW and PoS. In either case, after a fork, sympathizers of chain A or chain B will start mining/staking on the chain they like. In either case, members of the public who just want the chain with the most security can pick the one with the most energy burned or most coin-days staked (that's the "hash rate" equivalent/external input with whi…

If “coin-days staked” is massively higher on one side of a PoS chain fork, that doesn’t impact the other side’s security in the way PoW hashrate imbalances would.

To use a real world example, Bitcoin PoW mining consumes in excess of 100 Terawatt hours of electricity per year. If Bitcoin were to undergo a repeat of 2016 today, and the Bcash blockchain were to be serviced by miners consuming less than 10% of the energy spend of the incumbent (Bitcoin), Bcash could be easily 51% attacked.

But in the PoS corollary to Bitcoin v Bcash, coin-days staked would have no bearing on Bcash’s ability to continue making forward progress. Just so long as it remained difficult to either disrupt 1/3 of Bcash validators or acquire 51% of it, Bcash would continue functioning perfectly well (see: Jude C. Nelson [1]). At that point the rightful heir to the Bitcoin title would have to be determined socially. It could not be determined without top-down human intervention.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26810619

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#443

Post by shawnz » Tue, May 25, 2021, 4:13 AM UTC

atweiden wrote: post #442

shawnz wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how the situations you are describing are different between PoW and PoS. In either case, after a fork, sympathizers of chain A or chain B will start mining/staking on the chain they like. In either case, members of the public who just want the chain with the most security can pick the one with the most energy burned or most coin-days staked (that's the "hash rate" equivalent/external input with whi…

If “coin-days staked” is massively higher on one side of a PoS chain fork, that doesn’t impact the other side’s security in the way PoW hashrate imbalances would. To use a real world example, Bitcoin PoW mining consumes in excess of 100 Terawatt hours of electricity per year. If Bitcoin were to undergo a repeat of 2016 today, and the Bcash blockchain were to be serviced by miners consuming less than 10% of the energy…

> But in the PoS corollary to Bitcoin v Bcash, coin-days staked would have no bearing on Bcash’s ability to continue making forward progress.

How wouldn't it? The ongoing coin-days staked in that fork specifically is what allows it to continue making forward progress. Just like how in a PoW fork, the ongoing consumption of energy in that specific fork is what determines the security of that fork.

The argument you link in that other thread is interesting but it doesn't appear to be exactly what you are talking about. They seem to be describing an attack where nodes are taken offline by the attacker.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#444

Post by atweiden » Tue, May 25, 2021, 4:31 AM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #443

atweiden wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If “coin-days staked” is massively higher on one side of a PoS chain fork, that doesn’t impact the other side’s security in the way PoW hashrate imbalances would. To use a real world example, Bitcoin PoW mining consumes in excess of 100 Terawatt hours of electricity per year. If Bitcoin were to undergo a repeat of 2016 today, and the Bcash blockchain were to be serviced by miners consuming less than 10% of the energy…

> But in the PoS corollary to Bitcoin v Bcash, coin-days staked would have no bearing on Bcash’s ability to continue making forward progress. How wouldn't it? The ongoing coin-days staked in that fork specifically is what allows it to continue making forward progress. Just like how in a PoW fork, the ongoing consumption of energy in that specific fork is what determines the security of that fork. The argument you lin…

> The ongoing coin-days staked in that fork specifically is what allows it to continue making forward progress.

Coin-days staked has no bearing on a pure PoS chain’s risk of being 51% attacked, nor does it have any bearing on the risk 1/3 or more of its validators get disrupted. Not so with PoW hashrate: enormous hashrate imbalances between forked PoW chains directly translate into decreased data immutability per the risk of deep chain reorgs.

Those risks are simply not present in the PoS corollary.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#445

Post by nootropicat » Tue, May 25, 2021, 6:05 AM UTC

atweiden wrote: post #389

nootropicat wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 A…

> Defi is only about 2-3 years old The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins). And what the cool kids are calling “defi” today was called “appcoins” and “utility coins” several years ago. It’s all just marketing spin. > It's indeed fair to say that bitcoin has completely failed in getting any adoption beyond speculation. Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store…

>The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins).

I disagree. Defi started with lending and borrowing dapps. If just tokens themselves are 'defi' then bitcoin itself is defi, which would make the definition pointless. Finance requires lending and borrowing.

>Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store of value. Gold itself is a speculative SoV. For Bitcoin, that’s a sign of success — which is reflected in its market price.

The title of the bitcoin whitepaper is 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' which means it objectively failed in its stated goal. Of course, it had to, as bitcoin is not backed by anything and money must be backed by something.

Now it's just a ponzi scheme that continues to make people poorer while fooling them that they're getting rich. The only way to make a profit on bitcoin is to take someone else's wealth - it's zero sum by itself. On top of that there's mining, which ensures bitcoin continuously destroys wealth and makes bitcoin buyers poorer as a group compared to everyone else.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#446

Post by atweiden » Tue, May 25, 2021, 6:28 AM UTC

nootropicat wrote: post #445

atweiden wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Defi is only about 2-3 years old The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins). And what the cool kids are calling “defi” today was called “appcoins” and “utility coins” several years ago. It’s all just marketing spin. > It's indeed fair to say that bitcoin has completely failed in getting any adoption beyond speculation. Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store…

>The history of defi can be traced back to mid-2013 (mastercoin) or earlier (colored coins). I disagree. Defi started with lending and borrowing dapps. If just tokens themselves are 'defi' then bitcoin itself is defi, which would make the definition pointless. Finance requires lending and borrowing. >Digital gold is a euphemism for speculative store of value. Gold itself is a speculative SoV. For Bitcoin, that’s a si…

> Finance requires lending and borrowing.

And representing corporate shares on a blockchain isn’t in the purview of “finance”?

Everything old is new again.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#447

Post by dmitriid » Tue, May 25, 2021, 7:40 AM UTC

BeefWellington wrote: post #439

dmitriid wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

> 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. This is shifting the goalposts massively. The original comment was that there was no use-case for Blockchain. You are also talking about a component of cryptocurrencies as if they were the whole. The issue with the viability of cryptocurrencies i…

> This is shifting the goalposts massively.

We're literally in a comment thread to a comment that compared blockchains to cars. And that was made as an argument against "blockchains are not disruptive".

> The issue with the viability of cryptocurrencies is not tied to the blockchain but rather human investor behaviour.

It doesn't matter. If the only thing that people are doing with this "amazing tech" is speculation, that's all it's good for.

> I'm not sure what you've imagined the applications in question are but you appear to have invented them and decided they don't work; I didn't provide any specific examples.

Indeed, you didn't. Because blockchain apologists very rarely do, since for 100% of cases the proposed blockchain solution doesn't solve the posited problem.

What you did say though was "Then there's the applications for areas like logistics, supply chain, that are all under development". And all the ones that I know of have exactly zero need for blockchain, and blockchain solves none of the problems in those areas.

> If you want a specific example of where it's addressing things and is being put to use: Provenance

1. Doesn't need blockchain

2. Blockchain doesn't solve the problem of "ensuring integrity of food labeling and efficient management of quality and contamination issues."

Let me quote from an article [1]

=== start quote ===

An illustration of the difference: In 2006, Walmart launched a system to track its bananas and mangoes from field to store. In 2009 they abandoned it because of logistical problems getting everyone to enter the data, and in 2017 they re-launched it (to much fanfare) on blockchain. If someone comes to you with “the mango-pickers don’t like doing data entry,” “I know: let’s create a very long sequence of small files, each one containing a hash of the previous file” is a nonsense answer, but “What if everyone keeps their records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone?” at least addresses the right question!

...

It’s true that tampering with data stored on a blockchain is hard, but it’s false that blockchain is a good way to create data that has integrity.

...

Blockchain systems do not magically make the data in them accurate or the people entering the data trustworthy, they merely enable you to audit whether it has been tampered with. A person who sprayed pesticides on a mango can still enter onto a blockchain system that the mangoes were organic.

=== end quote ===

Bute yeah, the article does have a high "bullshit hype per number of words" ratio: Blockchain! Internet of Things!

[1] Part I: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-c...

Part II: https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustle...

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#448

Post by jimmydorry » Tue, May 25, 2021, 7:58 AM UTC

Retric wrote: post #299

jimmydorry wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model you propose is weak to sybil attacks [1] and is based on trust, while the BTC model is based on zero-trust. There is nothing stopping someone malicious from spinning up thousands of nodes that all say the current hash is Y (with transactions that break the rules of the blockchain) while the remaining minority of nodes say the hash is actually X (the original longest chain). It is only by calculating the has…

The solution is to use the hash power between points of consensus. Aka everyone thinks node A is state last year and here are the next N transactions resulting in the current state X. Sybil attack says no it’s actually B and here are the next N transactions resulting in state Y. You can compare the effort it takes for history A vs History B. Now, unlike traditional 51% attacks you don’t just need hashing power that i…

Checkpoints are definitely a thing that could be implemented, but you then need to either trust that the software developers have put a valid (or honest) checkpoint into the software... otherwise you are back to trying to determine consensus among hostile actors. A simple >95% consensus on a checkpoint is not enough when it effectively costs fractions of a cent to create thousands or millions of nodes that could all claim to have the "most correct" checkpoint.

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#449

Post by wizzwizz4 » Tue, May 25, 2021, 12:56 PM UTC

znpy wrote: post #406

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralised communities used to exist without such bribery. I wonder why that's not really happening much any more. (Of course, the old ones still exist, and there are replacements to the ones that went defunct, but precious few new things work this way.)

except we're talking about a monetary system, not a community.

Potato potato. The set of people using the monetary system forms a community. “All Bitcoin miners” is a community, of sorts – one whose members trust SHA-256 but rarely each other, but a community nonetheless. (I do believe some of the more influential miners agreed that they wouldn't provide more than 30% or so of Bitcoin's computational power; that's the kind of move that naïve profit-seeking doesn't give you, so Bitcoin's miners already do act like a community.)

Re: The Limits to Blockchain Scalability

#450

Post by littlestymaar » Tue, May 25, 2021, 1:02 PM UTC

meowface wrote: post #411

littlestymaar wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but you can likely at least retrieve that record and be pretty sure the data is accurate and wasn't tampered with. You will have no way to tell if this data came from the legitimate Ethereum blockchain that was in use in 2021, a forked chain, or even a completely fake one which has zero blocks in common with the real one. The authenticity guarantee in blockchains doesn't come from cryptographic schemes, it comes fr…

If the network is totally gone, it's indeed more tricky. But if it still exists, and if there's no indication that the main network and chain was ever disrupted between then and now, you can be pretty confident the data is accurate if you join the network. If no one uses it anymore or if it's so little-used that it's schismed into tons of other chains over the years, I think you can still probably obtain the original…

> you can be pretty confident the data is accurate if you join the network.

And how do you know the network you're joining is actually the original ethereum network and a completely different blockchain?

Like every peer to peer network in existence, an Ethereum node needs to connect to a reliable first node (a “tracker” in the bittorrent protocol, idk what's the name in the ethereum world). If they are down, you're on your own to join the network, and you have little guarantee that the network you're joining is working on the original ethereum blockchain.

In fact, after the ethereum foundation is gone, what guarantee do you have that you are running an actual ethereum node and not something running a modified protocol?