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Verkle Trees

vitalik.ca

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Re: Verkle Trees

#21

Post by jude- »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #17
randomhodler84 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 achievem…

> 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.

If they're aspiring to build a global reserve currency, then why shouldn't their first priority be increased adoption? Distribution matters more than tech if the tech is already good enough.

Also, you seem to have contradicted yourself -- increased adoption begets growth.

Re: Verkle Trees

#22

Post by jude- »

Kuszmaul wrote: post #13

Author 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…

Vitalik should really give you proper attribution.

Re: Verkle Trees

#23

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

jude- wrote: post #21
X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 achievem…

> 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. If they're aspiring to build a global reserve currency, then why shouldn't their first priority be increased adoption? Distribution matters more than tech if the tech is already good enough. Also, you seem to have contradicted yourself -- increased adoption beg…

I don't believe strongly in the global reserve currency framework.

I also don't think that the current tech can accomplish much of what I was hoping Bitcoin could accomplish.

If the goal is just to increase adoption given the current tech then I'm out, there's more interesting things to pay/give attention to.

Re: Verkle Trees

#24

Post by dmitriid »

rogueSkib wrote: post #10
losvedir wrote: post #3

I 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.…

> Higher per capita energy usage leads to higher quality of life.

If that energy is spent on, you know, improving quality of life.

With bitcoin all energy is wasted on producing virtual tokens and a rate of transactions that a Raspberry Pi could run 10 times over.

Re: Verkle Trees

#25

Post by sydthrowaway »

Kuszmaul wrote: post #13

Author 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…

How did you get so proficient at math/CS while only in high school?

Re: Verkle Trees

#26

Post by toomim »

jude- wrote: post #21
X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 achievem…

> 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. If they're aspiring to build a global reserve currency, then why shouldn't their first priority be increased adoption? Distribution matters more than tech if the tech is already good enough. Also, you seem to have contradicted yourself -- increased adoption beg…

Aspiring to build a reserve currency? A reserve currency is something for banks to use. Bitcoin's excitement was as a p2p cash that needs no banks and no reserve.

A reserve is something held by a political state. Bitcoin is exciting becauee it exists beyond politics and nation-states.

If this is news for you, go read the original bitcoin paper. Its title is "Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash."

Re: Verkle Trees

#27

Post by saurik »

jude- wrote: post #22
Kuszmaul wrote: post #13

Author 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…

Vitalik should really give you proper attribution.

Yeah :/. I was sent the Vitalik article by someone, and (despite other people liking it) found it somewhat poorly written (as did another friend of mine in the same group chat, who was left with similar questions) and then searched around trying to find more information and came across the original paper--the abstract for which was way way better than Vitalik's article :D--that hadn't been linked anywhere in the various internal cluster of references and documentation by any of the Ethereum people, near far as I could tell :(.

Re: Verkle Trees

#28

Post by divs1210 »

rogueSkib wrote: post #10
losvedir wrote: post #3

I 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.…

Not sure why this is being downvoted.

BTC is not an ecological disaster - just like video games aren't ecological disasters.

Both use lots of energy and GPUs. One is decentralized hard money, the other is a source of entertainment.

Re: Verkle Trees

#29

Post by [deleted] »

jude- wrote: post #22
Kuszmaul wrote: post #13

Author 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…

Vitalik should really give you proper attribution.

[deleted]

Re: Verkle Trees

#30

Post by dmitriid »

divs1210 wrote: post #28
rogueSkib wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Not sure why this is being downvoted. BTC is not an ecological disaster - just like video games aren't ecological disasters. Both use lots of energy and GPUs. One is decentralized hard money, the other is a source of entertainment.

> BTC is not an ecological disaster - just like video games aren't ecological disasters.

False equivalence.

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