What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#221

Post by CryptoPunk » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 8:50 AM UTC

tromp wrote: post #200

CryptoPunk wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initial sync up of a full node doesn't need all 300 GB of chain history to be downloaded/validated. A pruned state can be downloaded with no more trust assumptions than that required to trust the software distribution channel where you download the Bitcoin software from to actually serve Bitcoin. Anyway, every one in the world doesn't need to run a full node. Even a few thousand geographically distributed full nodes…

> A pruned state can be downloaded with no more trust assumptions than that required to trust the software distribution channel where you download the Bitcoin software from to actually serve Bitcoin. Nonsense. Bitcoin software releases come with widely publicized checksums and signatures from reputable sources.

I am only including those "widely publicized checksums and signatures from reputable sources" in my definition of "software distribution channel".

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#222

Post by thu2111 » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 11:02 AM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #142

opportune wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of bitcoin as a store of value and not a currency is a revisionist interpretation that became popular with the blockstream devs around 2017-18 when it became apparent that the bitcoin network was unsuitable for handling payments at scale and had fees too high to be useful for mundane payments.

> 2017-18 when it became apparent that the bitcoin network was unsuitable That's an extraordinary statement. The scaling aspects of Bitcoin was apparent to everyone involved in the project from the start, including Satoshi. The limits of an architecture where everyone processes everyone else's transactions should be obvious to anyone reading the whitepaper. It is also the focus of the very first email replies. Few re…

The answers Satoshi gave were convincing, which is why the project was able to grow in the first place, and why so many of the people involved from the start wanted it to become a global payments solution.

Computers are fast, Bitcoin payments are simple, and we can get data on roughly how common payments are. Even with the hardware of 2011 it wasn't implausible to keep up with PayPal with optimised software, and with multiple-machine nodes you could even keep up with the bigger credit card processors. That was in 2011. Since then we have things like AMD Rome and 128 core machines, NVRAM that's only 10x slower than DRAM and so on. Satoshi bet on hardware improvements and his bets were solid.

Meanwhile, there is no requirement in the architecture to never truncate the on-disk copy of the block chain. Some people should keep it for historical reasons and to preserve the low-trust nature of the system, but there's no requirement for every full node to keep it, and no requirement that everyone use a full node.

Bitcoin and scaling is unfortunately a topic that became horribly corrupted around 2015 by ideology, full blown information warfare and an overtly political manipulation of the community. As a consequence there are a lot of people who think, incorrectly, that they understand the design of Bitcoin better than Satoshi did, and who think it needed to be completely replaced with the "Lightning network". The reason this accompanied massive levels of censorship, DDoS attacks, intimidation and outright extortion is because the arguments were bad and the proposed alternatives, even worse. The original Bitcoin design was fine for what it needed and represented some pragmatic engineering that balanced complexity against scaling and decentralization. What Blockstream forced on the community was in contrast, significantly worse.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#223

Post by aeternum » Tue, Nov 03, 2020, 1:19 AM UTC

saalweachter wrote: post #203

aeternum wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lightning is still relatively new, one of the answers to the "why" is that none of the large wallets such as Coinbase / Cash App support it yet. Once it gets a few user-friendly wallet and merchant apps, I'd expect to see adoption. Especially since it's much safer for merchants as they do not need to wait for confirmations, and transactions fees are fractions of a penny so merchants actually benefit compared to credi…

Why do none of the large wallets support it yet? It's been well over five years since the Lightning white paper. By this point in Bitcoin's own timeline, the MtGox scandal was in rear view mirror; in another year, the Lightning network will be as old as Bitcoin was when Lightning was proposed. If Lightning is going to provide the mainstream digital currency Bitcoin promised but failed to deliver, why is it taking so…

Lightning is pretty complicated, it isn't quite as clean and simple a protocol as Bitcoin. Bitcoin uses a broadcast protocol whereas lightning needs more complex routing and nodes need to lock-up funds via an on-chain bitcoin txn to make a connection.

The internet itself at the backbone/isp level is a decent analog as ISP peering can be complex and often involve cost. It took awhile to get BGP right and determine the right cost metric for selecting a route.

There don't seem to be any blocking issues though and many of the large wallets have announced that they will be supporting it eventually.

Re: What Bitcoin’s White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don’t Know (2018)

#224

Post by MrXOR » Thu, Nov 05, 2020, 1:39 PM UTC

totemandtoken wrote: post #170

MrXOR wrote: post #2

Bitcoin's white paper turns 12! Dear Satoshi! Thanks for Bitcoin. If you read my comment, please reply me your advice.

>>Proceeds to read aloud the 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson

+1