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Comment by jron | Hacker News Reader

I see comments like this echoed whenever bitcoin is mentioned outside of the usual circles. I always assume that the individual is personally invested in ethereum's success and/or they don't understand the technology.

Currently, ethereum has inherited all of the problems that bitcoin has and and magnified them by a substantial amount. We'll either witness the development team pull off a miracle - or more likely, in my opinion, watch the house of cards come crashing down.

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Having ~60 times as many blocks / hour means you can potentially secure transactions vastly faster using Ethereum’s even if the total number of transactions does not change. So, even if nothing else changes this really is a significant advantage.

Now, they are hitting scaling issues. But it will be interesting to see if they are more responsive.

The GHOST protocol only made the security properties of a group of short block times similar to longer block times. Before GHOST, short block times had worse security properties. POW over time still determines how secure a transaction really is.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Design-Rationale

https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/09/14/on-slow-and-fast-block-...

The attack model changes based on transaction size. For sub 10,000$ transactions the threat model is not someone with more hashing power than the network. It's someone with 1/k th the networks processing power getting lucky. Which is bound by both total network hashing power and the number of blocks you wait giving a significant usability advantage to faster blocks.

That assumes the person actually needs fast block confirmation times. The security properties of block times gets pretty complex and bitcoin's model is no slouch: https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1019.pdf

Ethereum has the same issue practically all current blockchains have. In order to scale, payment channels need to be used. This is why Ethereum has run into backlogs lately and has its own version of Lightning on its roadmap. Bitcoin already has usable payment channel implementations ready and waiting for the Segregated Witness bug fix to activate.

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