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Verkle Trees
11–20 of 51 posts
Re: Verkle Trees
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had btc since 2012 not super early, but early enough that I briefly used mygox. Bitcoin has become toxic, the block size wars were interesting, but they yielded two communities that were less than what they were before the split. Bitcoin has stagnated technologically and Bitcoin cash believes that it will win based off of the principals that governed the split. Bitcoin will be on top for a good while longer, but…
The Bitcoin community got more focused on the fundamentals, long term thinking and actual value preservation. That is not true that it has stagnated technologically — MAST, taproot, Schnorr sigs. Lightning. Getting adopted as an official currency… Bitcoin is as cutting edge as ever. People got used to the slapdash lose a few hundred million in an eth smart contract world, and expect lambos in weeks. Which we see in t…
> Bitcoin is as cutting edge as ever.
Everything you listed is years old, not cutting edge
Re: Verkle Trees
#13Author of the 2019 paper introducing Verkle Trees here [1]. Super exciting to see this on the front page of Hacker News! As the post explains very nicely, Verkle Trees basically let you save space (typically bandwidth, which can be expensive) by replacing a secure hash with a vector commitment scheme, making the tree shorter and fatter with some branching factor $k > 2$. This saved bandwidth comes at the cost of some extra computation required to generate the Verkle tree and verify proofs of leaf nodes.
As an aside, the Verkle either stands for V(ector Commitment Mer)kle Tree or the more tongue-in-cheek V(ery Short Mer)kle Tree.
A huge thanks to Alin Tomescu, who provided me with this project when I was an MIT PRIMES student in high school. He came up with the ingenious idea of combining a vector commitment scheme with a Merkle Tree. He also has a brilliant blog post on his website explaining Merkle Trees if you'd like more background info [3].
[1] Paper: https://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/materials/20...
[2] Slides: https://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/materials/20...
[3] Alin's Website: https://alinush.github.io/
[4] My website: https://sites.google.com/view/johnkuszmaul
Re: Verkle Trees
#14Author of the 2019 paper introducing Verkle Trees here [1]. Super exciting to see this on the front page of Hacker News! As the post explains very nicely, Verkle Trees basically let you save space (typically bandwidth, which can be expensive) by replacing a secure hash with a vector commitment scheme, making the tree shorter and fatter with some branching factor $k > 2$. This saved bandwidth comes at the cost of some…
> We present Verkle Trees, which are constructed similarly to Merkle Trees, but using Vector Commitments rather than cryptographic hash functions. In a Merkle Tree, a parent node is the hash of its children. In a Verkle Tree, a parent node is the Vector Commitment of its children. A Verkle Tree with branching factor k achieves O(kn) construction time and O(logk n) membership proof-size. This means that the branching factor, k, offers a tradeoff between computational power and bandwidth. The bandwidth reduction is independent of the depth of the tree; it depends only on the branching factor. We find experimentally that with a branching factor of k = 1024, which provides a factor of 10 reduction in bandwidth, it takes 110.1 milliseconds on average per leaf to construct a Verkle Tree with 214 leaves. A branching factor of k = 32, which provides a bandwidth reduction factor of 5, yields a construction time of 8.4 milliseconds on average per leaf for a tree with 214 leaves.
Re: Verkle Trees
#15Author of the 2019 paper introducing Verkle Trees here [1]. Super exciting to see this on the front page of Hacker News! As the post explains very nicely, Verkle Trees basically let you save space (typically bandwidth, which can be expensive) by replacing a secure hash with a vector commitment scheme, making the tree shorter and fatter with some branching factor $k > 2$. This saved bandwidth comes at the cost of some…
> We present Verkle Trees, which are constructed similarly to Merkle Trees, but using Vector Commitments rather than cryptographic hash functions. In a Merkle Tree, a parent node is the hash of its children. In a Verkle Tree, a parent node is the Vector Commitment of its children. A Verkle Tree with branching factor k achieves O(kn) construction time and O(logk n) membership proof-size. This means that the branching…
Thanks for posting the abstract. It's $2^{14}$ leaves in the original LaTeX rather than 214, just in case anyone is confused. (It's also $O(\log_k n)$ = O(log n / log k).)
Re: Verkle Trees
#16I always enjoy reading Vitalik's posts. I remember many years ago back when Bitcoin was fun. I traded it back and forth with friends for pizza and such. I even used it once at a hip restaurant in town. Some Bitcoin forum (the name of which escapes me atm) had a bitcoin drip, which would give you a free Bitcoin every once in a while. But then Bitcoin's value exploded, it's not very useful anymore since transaction fee…
Re: "ecological disaster" I believe this is misinformation, because it assumes that the energy usage is not being well spent - that Bitcoin is a waste - but that assumption could not be further from the truth. Bitcoin's value lies in its absolute scarcity and immutable monetary policy - it preserves your time spent working in a money that cannot be debased by anyone, ever. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin.…
This is why I don't like it when people call it a waste or meaningless. In my opinion, it's not a waste, but it is "excessively energy-consumptive". Sure, a lot of value is generated, but is that value commensurate with the cost? In the limit, what's the cap on this? Will Bitcoin mining consume 5% of the entire world's electricity in a decade? Is that really the best way to create a secure cryptocurrency? In addition to the potential environmental impact, what's the opportunity cost of that usage?
If Ethereum 2.0 rolls out and runs a PoS network without any issues for a year, 2 years, 3 years, what then? (Rather than debating the probability of that happening, for the sake of argument let's just hypothetically assume the transition does succeed and things run soothly for years.)
I suspect the community and devs won't even consider itas a topic for debate, though, which makes me think the cryptocurrency wars are going to get much more heated over the next 5 years. The cryptocurrencies you choose to use will be much more of a philosophical and ideological identity statement than it already is. Bitcoin-only vs. Ethereum-only vs. never-coiners. I'm genuinely pretty concerned it might reach the level of pro-life vs. pro-choice (vs. anti-natalist, I guess).
Re: Verkle Trees
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had btc since 2012 not super early, but early enough that I briefly used mygox. Bitcoin has become toxic, the block size wars were interesting, but they yielded two communities that were less than what they were before the split. Bitcoin has stagnated technologically and Bitcoin cash believes that it will win based off of the principals that governed the split. Bitcoin will be on top for a good while longer, but…
The Bitcoin community got more focused on the fundamentals, long term thinking and actual value preservation. That is not true that it has stagnated technologically — MAST, taproot, Schnorr sigs. Lightning. Getting adopted as an official currency… Bitcoin is as cutting edge as ever. People got used to the slapdash lose a few hundred million in an eth smart contract world, and expect lambos in weeks. Which we see in t…
I totally agree Bitcoin is oriented towards fundamentals and value preservation.
I don't find that interesting and I think the dominate force in the 21st century will be change and innovation.
It's great that bitcoin locked in taproot & that LN is functioning, those are small technical accomplishments compared to what Etherum, mina, zksync and many others have accomplished in that time (in terms of technical achievements).
Obviously bitcoin continues to dominate in terms of value, it's just not something that I find interesting anymore.
I've found the community get increasingly toxic. I don't believe it's skepticism because I've held bitcoin through much greater skepticism than what is happening now. I've held it through mtgox, before the IRS made any statement about it, through the split, through china banning it countless times, through 4 major crashes, through the 2013 unintended fork.
I followed bitcoin during the blocksize wars (I immediately sold all of my bch).
It's just not a community interested in growth, it seems like it's only interested in increased adoption & the idea of bitcoin as a global reserve currency.
Re: Verkle Trees
#18It's good that he noted that this scheme is insecure against quantum computers. Anyway, homomorphic cryptography is a fascinating field with many cool applications. I'm sure the ideas will remain useful even in the quantum era.
Re: Verkle Trees
#19I always enjoy reading Vitalik's posts. I remember many years ago back when Bitcoin was fun. I traded it back and forth with friends for pizza and such. I even used it once at a hip restaurant in town. Some Bitcoin forum (the name of which escapes me atm) had a bitcoin drip, which would give you a free Bitcoin every once in a while. But then Bitcoin's value exploded, it's not very useful anymore since transaction fee…
Re: "ecological disaster" I believe this is misinformation, because it assumes that the energy usage is not being well spent - that Bitcoin is a waste - but that assumption could not be further from the truth. Bitcoin's value lies in its absolute scarcity and immutable monetary policy - it preserves your time spent working in a money that cannot be debased by anyone, ever. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin.…
Small, fairly predictable amounts of inflation don't matter too much in the long term because long-term savings is typically not saved as cash, but in a productive asset. That's a feature, not a bug. Why should we reward people if they don't invest their money in something useful?
And this is why it would be better to figure out how not to reward people for buying cryptocurrency. It's not a productive investment, it's just holding.
Re: Verkle Trees
#20I always enjoy reading Vitalik's posts. I remember many years ago back when Bitcoin was fun. I traded it back and forth with friends for pizza and such. I even used it once at a hip restaurant in town. Some Bitcoin forum (the name of which escapes me atm) had a bitcoin drip, which would give you a free Bitcoin every once in a while. But then Bitcoin's value exploded, it's not very useful anymore since transaction fee…
Re: "ecological disaster" I believe this is misinformation, because it assumes that the energy usage is not being well spent - that Bitcoin is a waste - but that assumption could not be further from the truth. Bitcoin's value lies in its absolute scarcity and immutable monetary policy - it preserves your time spent working in a money that cannot be debased by anyone, ever. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin.…
The mental gymnastics required here are staggering. The cost of roping more rubes into the pyramid
Currencies are not supposed to be hoarded. Hoarding crashes economies, not moderate inflation. Investments are supposed to have intrinsic value. Bitcoin’s scarcity belies the myriad alternatives. Smoking does not encourage lung cancer research. Miners already have full incentive to find the cheapest possible energy and this is the latest and most breathtaking excuse to keep this abominable scam alive.
My hope for the future is that people wisen up to get-rich-quick schemes before they lose all their money