181–190 of 225 posts
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Pretty much all the newer ones, Nano, Iota and Eth probably soon to. There is also a debate to use delegated PoS or a hybrid of PoS and PoW to get both of their upsides with none of tbeir downsides.
> There is also a debate to use delegated PoS or a hybrid of PoS and PoW to get both of their upsides with none of tbeir downsides. Read: PoS has downsides.
So, what is that you propose instead? If nothing then disregard you.
That’s a bit of a fallacy - you can legitimately point out the shortcomings of something without needing to name an alternative (e.g. criticizing Ponzi schemes). In this case, though, you could actually have an alternative of simply not using blockchain. The world was just fine for a long time without it.
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> What's the point of having a chain at all? Different people answer differently, but many would give censorship-resistant currency as a use case. My personal answer is more complicated. > If you end up scaling off-chain, then one asks why you have the PoW chain Let me generalise slightly to include PoS, which I greatly prefer but which is also pretty expensive, and suffers from the same fundamental inefficiency prob…
> Different people answer differently, but many would give censorship-resistant currency as a use case. My personal answer is more complicated. Nothing about blockchains prevents censorship. > Let me generalise slightly to include PoS, which I greatly prefer but which is also pretty expensive, and suffers from the same fundamental inefficiency problems. Most literature I've read suggests potentially a hundredfold inc…
The decentralization of block producers helps. For instance we saw a few years ago that a few payment processors could decide to not support wikileaks donations, meaning that the only non-cryptocurrency way to donate to them was to mail them cash in an envelope. A government seeking to do the analogous thing would need to effectively make the network soft-fork a rule in disallowing payments to wikileaks addresses, something much harder to do.
> I'm certainly happy to be shown this is wrong. Got resources?
I have never seen any legitimate public blockchain claim 100x improvement from PoS over PoW. I'd be surprised if it were more than 3x for ethereum.
One very powerful upper bound in any non-sharded blockchain without validator delegation is that every full validator must process all transactions, and we want validators to be able to do so with relatively weak hardware (e.g. a Macbook Pro). Certainly, a 100x increase in ethereum TPS would violate this upper bound; for instance, the current state size (2GB) is not designed to fit into RAM, and hence every transaction must do a random disk read and write onto a hard disk. The actual computation can be pretty expensive too, e.g. I've seen a benchmark that ECDSA verification takes 500ms on an i5 processor.
The "broadcast mode limitation" you mention imposes another upper bound, but I do not think it is sharper than then validation upper bound.
> The practical outcome will be indistinguishable from a healthy banking system, won't actually stop fraud, will be subject to the exact same controls that other physically rooted banks are subject to
So this is more subjective but I have to disagree here, depending on what you mean by "healthy banking system". We've learned from history that to have banks run on fractional reserve yet not be subject to frequent bank runs, we have to make them hold reserves in some central bank. And even if you just set up an "anti-escrow service" you have anti-fraud and AML laws to comply with. The end result is that there are huge capital requirements to create new banks most places in the world and fraud still occurs; the capital requirements lead to an oligopolistic industry that doesn't actually provide the consumer services it exists to provide very well. This seems pretty backwards to me. I think in the near-term, payment channel hubs will be much cheaper to stand up than banks and the trust model will be the same as on-chain payments: if you accidentally pay someone off-chain you have no recourse. It seems that building fraud protections on top of this base is more sensible.
"Every tradeable ICO is really an unregulated security." I disagree with this claim. It depends on whether the token constitutes an investment contract. If the token has utility, was sold as a utility bearing token (rather than an investment opportunity), and if the project possesses an open codebase which token holders can theoretically modify, then I don't believe said token is an unregulated security. Yet, the vas…
If it's a utility then why ICO? Strictly as a fundraising method? To enable resale? None of that requires a centralized consensus chain even in a trustless world. No, you ICO a utility token because you hope it'll go superluminal by interacting with an ecosystem full of unregulated securities.
You are approaching the ICO as though there were some Boolean value as to whether they are "good" or "bad," and have returned "bad" for you. In reality, to throw them all in the "bad" bin is lazy and the opposite of due diligence.
Let me give you some examples of other motivations beyond fast cash that might power an ICO:
1. Ideology
2. Community spirit
I will not attempt to encapsulate what these motivations mean to various actors, but I can tell you that it's not "just about money" for everyone.
However, I will fully concede that most ICOs are scams. Advertising networks are not being overly cautious by restricting adbuys on ICOs. And most people are not equipped to tell the difference between a scam project and a real one.
There is some truth in the slides but it's well mixed with falsehoods and misunderstandings. * Distributed consensus schemes are not useful only for monetary applications. When they are used as such, there exist mechanisms to commit to a certain fiat price and minimize market exposure to the point where transactions are almost free, in fiat terms. * The disbursement of tokens and the distributed consensus rewards do…
If something is 95% of the times X, can't we just label the whole thing as X? Just making life simpler. (Actually, my threshold goes even as low as 50% for the case of BS.)
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The important question is if you think it's possible to create impervious functions of ~100 lines of code. I tend to think that with modern formal verification systems this is a feasible goal. Otherwise you have to stick with closed-source security-through-obscurity and rely on legal reversal. This seems pretty weak to me, though - ex, if a stock exchange was hacked, sure you could reverse it legally, but the market…
I am not sure what your position here is: that you can do whatever you want, or at least a lot of useful things, in ~100 lines of code? That if your software is broken down into functions no bigger that ~100 lines of code, and they have each been individually verified, then their composition has also been verified? Or something else? There is also the matter of verifying the platform itself.
The Ethereum virtual machine has been formally verified.
Isn't he discussing cryptocurrencies in particular rather than blockchain in general? There are many uses for blockchain other than as a cryptocurrency. Correct me if I'm wrong - I'm not an expert in blockchain by any means.
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> ability to trade instantly with anyone anywhere with no fees Neither of those statements has ever been true and in recent years they've been ludicrously untrue — affluent people in developed countries were complaining about the transaction costs and they're supposed to be transformative for people in a developing country?
Ethereum and Litecoin among others offer fast and cheap transactions today, and efforts are underway to solve this problem for Bitcoin (e.g. Lightning Network). There will likely be a trade-off or balance of trust against transaction speed and cost. We're still working out how to build it and so we're not there yet, but my belief holds; the banana governments are not going to disappear anytime soon.
Those existing systems are also useful for evaluating the claims that this avoids bad governments, which is to say that it’s limited to bypassing antiquated banks. A networked system can’t avoid a sovereign state unless that state is completely inept, at which point everyone will be using a neighboring currency or USD anyway.
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> That being said, 95% of the times the word "blockcahin" is uttered these days, what follows is most likely bullshit. This is true -- it's also true the 5% is pretty damn interesting. There are plenty of interesting tokens out there. Some of them are tackling real problems. That's pretty exciting. I don't begrudge someone who's trying to solve something. The historical analogs are lazy in my view. The financial and…
One of the coolest things about cryptocurrency right now is the insane amount of money being invested in decentralization. With all of the Facebook privacy issues in the news right now, decentralization offers an interesting alternative where users control their data.
All this money is invested in "get-rich-quick" hopes. Few would care, or invest anything, if it was just for the decentralization aspect (case in point, all the failed aspects of decentralized social networks and other such efforts).