Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please name a “cutting edge” feature that exists in a coin today.
Ethereum's zk rollups and upcoming sharding
Sounds like years old things too, things not yet in production…
Verkle Trees
41–50 of 51 posts
Re: Verkle Trees
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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."
I wasn't aware Bitcoin-the-protocol could prevent banks, companies, and countries from buying and hodling Bitcoin. Maybe, Bitcoin is whatever its users say it is. Maybe you should reread the paper.
Re: Verkle Trees
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please name a “cutting edge” feature that exists in a coin today.
Ethereum's zk rollups and upcoming sharding
I'll believe sharding when I see it. It's a much harder problem than it seems.
Also, the dirty little secret of zkrollups is that they don't scale the system or make the system more trustworthy in this context. First, the prover, while asymptomatically fast (as one would expect from the PCP theorem), incurs constant factors that are still so high that you need a really beefy server to generate proofs in a reasonable amount of time. Second, even if that wasn't a problem, provers are still bandwidth-constrained and require BFT agreement -- each prover has to process all zkrollup transactions, and a malicious prover can still ignore transactions while generating correct proofs. At best, this leaves provers in a similar position as high-bandwidth chains like EOS, where only a few beefy nodes can feasibly process the requisite transaction load, but a BFT majority of nodes need to agree on state in order to prevent malicious censorship.
I honestly think zkSNARKs and zkSTARKs are wasted on blockchains. Imagine if AWS, grid computers, and supercomputers offered a zk prover interface, where they run your computations on beefy hardware and give you a proof that it was faithfully executed, thereby removing themselves from the TCB. I'd pay to use that service before I'd pay to use Ethereum.
Re: Verkle Trees
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How so? Videogames are no less useful than Bitcoin. Like, if all videogames disappeared tomorrow, humanity would fundamentally be all right.
Re: Verkle Trees
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> BTC is not an ecological disaster - just like video games aren't ecological disasters. False equivalence.
How so? Videogames are no less useful than Bitcoin. Like, if all videogames disappeared tomorrow, humanity would fundamentally be all right.
> Videogames are no less useful than Bitcoin. Like, if all videogames disappeared tomorrow, humanity would fundamentally be all right.
1. What you said, when we normalize logic, is: videogames are just as useless as bitcoin. If videogames disappeared, humanity would be allright. Same goes for bitcoin.
I wonder if that is exactly waht you were going for.
2. Videogames are not useless. You could start with the fundamental need of humanity for games in general. Yes, if videogames disappeared, we would find other things to replace them with. I wonder if someone would then pop up and say something inane like "BTC is not an ecological disaster - just like Gaelic football [1] is not an ecological disaster."
Secondly, videogames are increasingly found to reduce stress. They are used to treat various patients [2]. They broach the subjects such as "games as new medium" and "games as art". They create vast online communities.
Bitcoin (and blockchains in general) laboriously appends entries to an append-only log using the power-equivalent of several countries at a speed of a paraplegic snail [3]. And in ten years it hasn't found a single niche where the same operations can't be done faster and more efficiently (and are usually already done faster and more efficiently).
[1] I jest, but this is a thing of beauty. Watch the entire video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEAbWrdB9XU
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688462/
[3] All-time high for bitcoin was 450k transactions per day: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions To do this, it requires more power than most countries in the world: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-power-consu...
Since we're speaking about videogames, in 2006 Eve Online had 150 million DB transactions per day. To do that, Eve Online needs something like 6 database servers: https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/tranquility-tech-3
Bitcoin would need the heat death of the universe to handle a comparable load.
Re: Verkle Trees
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so? Videogames are no less useful than Bitcoin. Like, if all videogames disappeared tomorrow, humanity would fundamentally be all right.
> Videogames are no less useful than Bitcoin. Like, if all videogames disappeared tomorrow, humanity would fundamentally be all right. 1. What you said, when we normalize logic, is: videogames are just as useless as bitcoin. If videogames disappeared, humanity would be allright. Same goes for bitcoin. I wonder if that is exactly waht you were going for. 2. Videogames are not useless. You could start with the fundamen…
> I wonder if that is exactly waht (sic) you were going for.
Yes, it was. If you agree that Bitcoin is just as useless as videogames, and agree that videogames are not useless, you must also agree that Bitcoin is not useless.
I personally have no use for videogames, but I don't deny that many people do. I do, however, have use for an extremely resilient distributed timestampping service that takes several countries' energy to disrupt (which is what Bitcoin's blockchain is -- a public timestampping service). Turns out many people do, since running it is profitable.
Re: Verkle Trees
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Videogames are no less useful than Bitcoin. Like, if all videogames disappeared tomorrow, humanity would fundamentally be all right. 1. What you said, when we normalize logic, is: videogames are just as useless as bitcoin. If videogames disappeared, humanity would be allright. Same goes for bitcoin. I wonder if that is exactly waht you were going for. 2. Videogames are not useless. You could start with the fundamen…
> I wonder if that is exactly waht (sic) you were going for. Yes, it was. If you agree that Bitcoin is just as useless as videogames, and agree that videogames are not useless, you must also agree that Bitcoin is not useless. I personally have no use for videogames, but I don't deny that many people do. I do, however, have use for an extremely resilient distributed timestampping service that takes several countries'…
> you must also agree that Bitcoin is not useless.
Why must I?
> Turns out many people do, since running it is profitable.
Being profitable doesn't make it useful.
Re: Verkle Trees
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wonder if that is exactly waht (sic) you were going for. Yes, it was. If you agree that Bitcoin is just as useless as videogames, and agree that videogames are not useless, you must also agree that Bitcoin is not useless. I personally have no use for videogames, but I don't deny that many people do. I do, however, have use for an extremely resilient distributed timestampping service that takes several countries'…
> you must also agree that Bitcoin is not useless. Why must I? > Turns out many people do, since running it is profitable. Being profitable doesn't make it useful.
Whatever you say, bro. Whatever you say.
Re: Verkle Trees
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> MAST, taproot, Schnorr sigs. Lightning I don’t mean to shit on the work to integrate this stuff, but a lot of it is either something that other chains already had (better versions of), or that other chains don’t need (eg: lightning)
“Better”? Features like? There is this narrative that bitcoin is old and not innovating. It’s like TCP/IP. It is, just as tcp/ip innovates in a careful way. If you think any chain doesn’t need a layer 2 overlay, which ultimately is the only way to scale tx’s. Anything else is kicking the can down the road.
Lightning barely works, and it’s completely outclassed by roll ups based on validity or fraud proofs.
Re: Verkle Trees
#50In case people are interested, here are some of my recent notes on Verkle trees: https://www.notion.so/norswap/Stage-0-Discovery-dcbb7318ba66...