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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

Good to have you here. What is your view around private blockchains and smart contracts regarding Hyperledger Fabric vs Ethereum based ones? I mean, in my perspective there is no need to have smart contracts ala Ethereum because in a private blockchain you can simplify the problem to a workflow with states where the parties sign the different transitions and the logic can be outside a VM. Since private blockchains rely on a lot of oracles, those oracles are the weakest link in the security chain and the VM does not add significant security like in a public blockchain.

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I think it's still a big experiment and there's a lot to figure out around the right state machines and the right models for computation in these systems. We hope that Cosmos and Tendermint help that experiment along

Private networks could grow to become public. It would be nice to be able to use the same system for scaling from 4 to 10B.

Private blockchains are incentivized to adopt public blockchain architectures because public blockchains are most economically vetted.

No, private blockchains can scale better than public blockchains for obvious reasons: they are trustful.

Regarding private blockchains growing to public trustless blockchains, that is not a trivial problem. There are new blockchain models that are being promoted (e.g. IOTA, EOS, NEM) which have not being studied enough by consensus researchers.

Tendermint works great for 4 to 300 validators, and with the Cosmos delegation model, many more stakers can participate. So yes, it's not a trivial problem, but Tendermint is solving it.

Tendermint is not solving the problem I pointed before because it is not trustless, you are trusting the validators.

In PoW, you are trusting the miners.

I am not talking about PoW specifically but about the new research that Bitcoin opened, including new consensus systems in trustless networks. The community knew how to build distributed systems in trusted networks before Bitcoin.

Yes, there were many designs.

I don't know of anyone who really applied traditional BFT networks into public blockchain architecture, however, until Tendermint.

For example, who spoke or wrote of BFT fault accountability/attribution, and how it pertains to proof-of-stake models, before Tendermint?

There was also the 2011 paper that lamented the lack of good open-source middleware for BFT algos. Tendermint solves that engineering problem as well.

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