Decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum
hackingdistributed.com
hackingdistributed.com
https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...
This isn't necessarily damning, as "everything has to start somewhere," but it definitely doesn't warrant self-congratulatory pats on the back exclaiming a decentralized utopia. There's still a lot of work to do, but these projects might be the furthest along we've seen after open-source software.
The only thing most people want from cryptocurrencies is more USD than they put in.
Editted to better represent reality.
A lot of very smart people care passionately about decentralization and the technology is going to change a lot of things. It seems like from your post history you're going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
Bitcoin itself is 9 years old. Ethereum is barely 3 years old. Meanwhile, people are building decentralized trading platforms, prediction markets, provably fair online casinos, an entirely new venture funding model has been created, crypto collateralized loans, virtual assets trading, IOT-based supply chain management, and so much more. You'd realize that if you looked past the memes, there's something there, it's still very early, but it's growing rapidly.
That's attractive in theory but very difficult to achieve in practice, even with a spec. That said, it looks like at least one initiative to do this in the industry is succeeding - Lightning Network. The protocol was agreed on last fall and now all three main implementations are inter-operating on mainnet.
That is, I don’t see how these same issues that are affecting blocks that come every ~15s can be used to draw a conclusion about a system whose blocks come every ~ten minutes.
On an older PC I can't sync, it keeps falling further and further behind. It's got a slow old spinning rust disk.
As a note, I believe the Geth devs have an update coming where they use more memory caching which saves smashing the disk so hard during sync.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/669cn9/how_to_use...
There is an option for this in the GUI version as well.
Developer > Sync with light client (beta)
If you don't have the blockchain downloaded yet, I'd look for a zipped version online. You can import it locally using "geth copydb <location>".
Bitcoin core could probably be sunk by covert US government or mafia-esque intervention with the dev team.
Both bitcoin core and ethereum are monocultures, which makes them much more vulnerable to black swan bugs.
Anyone, anytime can fork the code, and thereby the block chain, and create a second version of the currency.
The question is: Which one do people attribute value to?
Use parity (though probably not any of their contracts).
What's the benefit of running an Etherum node with complete history?
In a situation as exists with Bitcoin currently it's anyone's guess whether a transaction will ever confirm because there are HUGE backlogs that haven't cleared for several months. A transaction has a high chance of being dropped regardless of the fee being paid because the backlog and fee level required to get confirmed at all is unpredictable. Bitcoin Core also has what they call RBF which increases the chance that a dishonest person can double spend an unconfirmed transaction exponentially. Makes 0-conf transactions unusable on Bitcoin Core.
Waiting 30 minutes for a transaction is annoying, but you can plan around it. Unexpectedly waiting an hour and a half is maddening. :)
That's exactly what the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) is: https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pd...
(Full disclosure: I work at Stellar)
I do not understand this.
One more thing: The guys that wrote this article should be be looking at how intersections of 2 arrays can be more efficiently calculated. This is the big one with the blockchain.