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Comment by tudorconstantin | Hacker News Reader

All the popular exchanges are facing scaling issues: I know about Poloniex, Coinbase, Bittrex, bitfinex.

It's all because of the higher and higher interest in bitcoin and crypto currency in general. Even CBOE had issues earlier today when they launched their futures, even though they were not doing active tradings and have many more years of experience (and time to scale).

There are interesting times ahead. Something we've never seen before in the history of humanity. Not even the internet was so disrupting as the blockchain technologies will become.

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> Not even the internet was so disrupting as the blockchain technologies will become.

The internet was a paradigm shift for how we communicate. It seems like blockchains are just sort of an opportunity to do things a different way.

From my perspective the main advantage of the blockchain is zero-trust transactions. Everything that can be done on the blockchain can be done easier/better off the blockchain as long as you choose to trust someone.

And currently from my perspective, no one is seriously using a blockchain for anything but speculation.

In your opinion, what makes the blockchain comparable or more influential to the internet?

You have to trust miners and developers with blockchains still.

You only have to trust that at least 50% of all miners are legitimate. And the public can choose to adopt what the developers create.

Not quite. You have to trust that they aren't colluding. It's fine if they're malicious as long as they aren't aligned

It's not fine if 51% of miners are maliciously mining empty blocks. no collusion necessary.

If 51% are simply mining empty blocks then tx rate drops by ~1/2 and tx fees double. tx would still go through unless they are colluding.

If 20% of bitcoin miners 'wasted' block space with a very high minimum transaction fee to drive up average transaction fees you get a huge problem. (This could actually be a net gain depending on the demand curve.)

If you look at the actual block chain there are many empty blocks so this is less theoretical than you might assume.

Another attack is if you get say 40% of miners to block transactions for a specific company you could create a lot of issues for them at minimal costs.

Gemini has also had significant downtime.

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