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Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

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Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

#161

Post by ArcticCelt »

runeks wrote: post #138
joosters wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unclear whether or not the alternative 'proof of stake' technique will be more efficient than proof of work. It is susceptible to abuse, and is likely to require an arms race of CPU power to prevent attackers from abusing it.

It's definitely more efficient than proof-of-work, since no energy is burned off with the only purpose being to calculate a proof of this. The problem is that it makes consensus harder to reach, since there's no problem with having 10 different chains, because no energy needs to be burned off for each chain. This, effectively, makes your account balance a democratic decision by nodes in the Ethereum network (as oppos…

POW is as much a democratic decision by your description. If a group of miners decide to reach a consensus you have the sames results. The real difference is that the right to vote in the system in POW is determined by how many electricity you spend, in POS is determined by how many currency you own.

Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

#162

Post by dwild »

Laforet wrote: post #99
keyle wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be great if you could expand on that. Why doesn't it make sense, why is it too expensive, why unreasonable?

Not the poster above, but I think the main issue is with the cost to provide proof of work in a trustless network. For example, bitcoin is already at or close to the point where the most efficient mining operations have a hard time turning profit without a major bubble drawing in outside capital. 3 years from now it may well be unsustainable.

Isn't it by design? The Bitcoin difficulty move depending on the mining power, thus lowering or increasing the cost of operating a miner. If it's unsustainable, then miners will go out, the mining power will decrease and it will cheaper again.

I guess an outside force (private corporation or government) can try to leverage that as a weakness by injecting capital into their own mining operation, thus making it unsustainable for miner to operate and then getting the majority but that would be a whole other story (and we would still have ways to mitigate it).

There could also be some kind of critical point where too many miners keep doing it unsustainably, in hope to survive longer than others and stay up (but that would be absurd, they could just start it up again later when it will be sustainable again, but humans are humans...). They all close at a similar point and the difficulty stay way too high and it's literally too expensive to reach the next difficulty change. Even then, we could try to inject cash at that point or developpers may force a difficulty change... but it may be too expensive and we abandon Bitcoin because of that.

Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

#163

Post by qwtel »

xorcist wrote: post #150
patrickk wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPU power doesn't come into it. More ETH = higher returns. I haven't seen any specific details for Ethereum bonded validators, but the hardware required is likely to be a cheap VPS with a reliable internet connection, at least judging by other active proof of stake projects. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#how...

Ethereum wants a PoS that works, so they will need to do something different. We don't know what that will look like. Other projects using PoS survive by doing things like frequent block chain checkpoints (a notary stamped block if you will), which arguably isn't very decentralized or at least not trustless. If you have a notary anyway there are more efficient ways to go about things.

> If you have a notary anyway there are more efficient ways to go about things.

like trusting in bob: http://intheoreum.org/

be warned: this link contains humor.

Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

#164

Post by sharemywin »

abrkn wrote: post #84

At this time, there are 78 comments to this post, none of them addressing technical concerns. Quite unusual for HN. I've devoted my life to cryptocurrency since 2011 and still question whether or not this system even makes sense. It seems too expensive with the technology we have today. Once privacy, such as zk-SNARK, is added, it becomes unreasonable. Perhaps this is what a bubble looks like. I wasn't there for the…

as long as it doesn't go to 0 than I would say there is something to cryptocurrency. Having a way for early adopters to partake in the value creation of metcalfe's law is also an innovation.

Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

#165

Post by ArcticCelt »

runeks wrote: post #159
xorcist wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit early to say for certain. Nobody has made PoS work in an adversarial environment yet. It is misleading to describe PoS as a democratic vote. There is no voting as that could be faked. If you want an allegory maybe jury duty for the richest. That also captures the basic problem with it, when the chosen few collude. Let's just say it is an active research area.

> It is misleading to describe PoS as a democratic vote. There is no voting as that could be faked. I disagree. With PoS there is, ultimate, only the democratic vote. For example, in a network with 1,000 nodes, let's say 95% follow one chain and ignore another chain, and that the remaining 5% follow that other chain. The two chains are completely different, but are both valid. In a PoS-system there would be no way, b…

In a POW network with 1,000 miners (with equal hash power), let's say 95% follow one chain and ignore another chain, and that the remaining 5% follow that other chain. The two chains are completely different, but are both valid.

The second chain is just an alt coin resulting of a fork.

Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

#166

Post by loceng »

PeterisP wrote: post #100
loceng wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only tech you need to technically believe in is that blockchain could be used as a currency - which it already does act as, and then it is a matter of adoption.

Which blockchain? In the long run, most likely a blockchain would be used as a currency and it will have a quite large market cap, and the others will be near zero.

Indeed, which, and how does that winning blockchain algorithm allocate value. And will it be society as a whole that decides or the people who will gain the most value from their blockchain being adopted - with current algorithms making the earliest adopters have more value/other peoples' wealth transferred to them?

Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

#167

Post by subway »

csydas wrote: post #157
xorcist wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make sense. Read accesses couldn't possibly be logged. You probably wouldn't want sensitive information like health records in a block chain. The risk for leaks is obvious. Both credit cards records and health records are data where there is a single authoritative data source. You want to know who actually accessed the data, and not any sort of decentralized consensus about the matter. Agree about the wi…

This is especially true for Health Records with regards to US Health Care, as access control is heavily monitored and Hospital Employees are instructed clearly and frequently that you do not access records for anyone you are not treating, accidental access needing to be reported, and so on. Confidentiality of the patient records requires a clear system to see who accessed what, when, and from where they accessed it.…

Just because a node can participate in a blockchain and cryptographically verify the chain doesn't mean the node can access the plaintext of every record in check chain.

Check out permissioned implementations like JP Morgan's Quorum.

Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

#168

Post by ScottAS »

dpc_pw wrote: post #96

How pointless. The whole point of Bitcoin was to have uncensorable, decentralized asset that can be used to exchange value without any trust etc. That is the only reason we endure this utterly shitty and inefficient blockchain thing, and we exchange money for this otherwise pointless online points. I have no problem with ETH as cryptocurrency / smart contract platform. But this whole Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is j…

The EEA was formed in response to Hyperledger, the heavily IBM-backed private blockchain. I think it was the only possible move. The risk of Hyperledger taking over the world of blockchain was too great. EEA is sort of to Ethereum/Blockchain what RedHat is to Linux. A necessary evil.

Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

#169

Post by kgin »

dpc_pw wrote: post #96

How pointless. The whole point of Bitcoin was to have uncensorable, decentralized asset that can be used to exchange value without any trust etc. That is the only reason we endure this utterly shitty and inefficient blockchain thing, and we exchange money for this otherwise pointless online points. I have no problem with ETH as cryptocurrency / smart contract platform. But this whole Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is j…

It's an industry working group to shape the direction of the Ethereum project, similar to a million working groups (ex Bluetooth) where companies are motivated to agree on and advance a technology.

Nothing about being in EEA says that company will use the public chain. Most of them will probably use private chains.

You presenting it as if it's possible for an open source project to recruit a long list of multinational corporations to sign on to collude on a pointless project just to make everyone involved look "cool" and get rich. If only.

Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance

#170

Post by jcousins »

2_listerine_pls wrote: post #141
CalChris wrote: post #40

I suppose the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance should be contrasted with IBM and friends Hyperledger. These are a couple of well backed consortia which from 30,000 feet are similar. https://www.hyperledger.org/

What exactly is hyperledger solving?

From what I have seen and read, they aren't solving problems that haven't already been solved, merely attempting to improve the security and efficiency of a solution. One example they have touted is their work with Maersk on tracking shipping containers and their contents in a tamper-proof fashion as well as providing a way to interact with that data. Will any of this really result in greater efficiency, interoperability and savings? Time will tell.
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