11–20 of 104 posts
Can somebody explain me how we deal with the increasing size of a blockchain? I get moore's law etc., but other than that? I mean, it's trillions of transactions we are talking about. Federated servers? We break the chain in some way?
I would have thought it was the coca.
>Similarly, the term “blockchain” has been so misappropriated that no one knows what it means anymore.
Thankfully, those who no longer know can just grab the paper at bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf and get a refresher.
Being a general ledger, the Blockchain also can be used as a more professional way of proving you made a prediction at a certain time. Sure, as an individual, I can tweet where I think the P/E of Amazon will be in a year and refer back to it to prove my point, but is that the best way for a financial institution? Having an entry in the blockchain has a more business oriented feel to it.
Neither one of these is compelling to me as you have to prove that this was the only prediction you made and you aren't cherry picking the correct ones.
I'm all for deflating blockchain hype, but I found the overall tone of the article pretty disagreeable, and more importantly, wholly missing the point. "In other words, the only thing previously stopping the standardization of reconciliation processes was the unwillingness of financial institutions to collaborate." No, actually, the one thing the blockchain provides, which was literally unsolved before pre-Nakamoto,…
Resistance to new technology is definitely a thing at banks, I remember when I worked at one I mentioned blockchain one day and everyone looked at me like deer in the headlights.
This is the naive view that has allowed the financial industry to ditch Bitcoin and run with blockchain. The problem that Bitcoin solves and private blockchains do not is called the Byzantine generals problem which did not have a known solution until Bitcoin came along.
Private blockchains cannot solve the Byzantine generals problem because they cannot ensure that one of it's limited number of parties is not employing massively more computing power in order to cheat. Bitcoin only works because an unlimited number of players are mining as hard as they can making it improbable that a single entity can exceeded 50% of the total hash power. With private blockchains it will always be reasonable to assume that cheating would be with in reach.
I'm all for deflating blockchain hype, but I found the overall tone of the article pretty disagreeable, and more importantly, wholly missing the point. "In other words, the only thing previously stopping the standardization of reconciliation processes was the unwillingness of financial institutions to collaborate." No, actually, the one thing the blockchain provides, which was literally unsolved before pre-Nakamoto,…
> The technological innovation of a blockchain is that it combines cryptographic signatures with a fault-tolerant distributed database. This is the naive view that has allowed the financial industry to ditch Bitcoin and run with blockchain. The problem that Bitcoin solves and private blockchains do not is called the Byzantine generals problem which did not have a known solution until Bitcoin came along. Private block…
Not that improbable: http://www.coindesk.com/ghash-io-never-launch-51-attack/
Can somebody explain me how we deal with the increasing size of a blockchain? I get moore's law etc., but other than that? I mean, it's trillions of transactions we are talking about. Federated servers? We break the chain in some way?
In this model, individuals would not need to store the entire chain as they could lazily fetch parts of the chain as they are needed. This would allow individuals to store very little of the historical blockchain data if their use case doesn't require them to access that historical data.
There are nuances to this solution. IPFS can be thought of as one giant torrent, and with torrents, someone must have the part you need for you to be able to fetch it. There is a theoretical failure mode in this model where everyone happens to delete the same part of the blockchain thinking that they won't need it and if they do they'll get it from someone else. In this case, this portion of the chain history would be lost. This failure mode should be simple to mitigate, especially since many people participating in the network need access to significant portions of the historical data, and everyone won't use the IPFS based storage layer so, when a chunk is not available over IPFS, the client can just fetch it over normal means.
> The technological innovation of a blockchain is that it combines cryptographic signatures with a fault-tolerant distributed database. This is the naive view that has allowed the financial industry to ditch Bitcoin and run with blockchain. The problem that Bitcoin solves and private blockchains do not is called the Byzantine generals problem which did not have a known solution until Bitcoin came along. Private block…
In a regulated industry there are other ways to prevent cheating. Making cheating obvious and undeniable is probably enough to prevent it from happening (due to legal risk).
Can somebody explain me how we deal with the increasing size of a blockchain? I get moore's law etc., but other than that? I mean, it's trillions of transactions we are talking about. Federated servers? We break the chain in some way?