Isn't he discussing cryptocurrencies in particular rather than blockchain in general? There are many uses for blockchain other than as a cryptocurrency.
Correct me if I'm wrong - I'm not an expert in blockchain by any means.
Correct me if I'm wrong - I'm not an expert in blockchain by any means.
If you want to talk about something useful you were probably calling it something like a signed/verifiable log.
Name one.
And I didn't realise the secrets I gave to my notary were out in the open. Hint: they're not, and that's legally enforceable. The blockchain is nothing because data is [legally] [1] nothing. You might as well just use public key cryptography and release your data over BitTorrent, like Wikileaks did. It'll get distributed based on supply & demand, and using BitTorrent is still cheaper & efficient than blockchain.
[1] At least, in the EU.
Turing completeness was sort of assumed with "Global computer". Neither myself nor the poster mentioned Ethereum at all. He just mentioned "global computer" as one application of blockchain that isn't a cryptocurrency. I could have just as easily been talking about NEO, which uses a number of languages, including C# and Java. Further, while Ethereum does frequently use a new language (Solidity), it doesn't rely on it. Ethereum is a virtual machine, and the first implementation of the virtual machine was Solidity. Others have been made as well, its turing complete after all.
Well, yes, but most of them (my pet peeve being voting) are as bullshit as cryptocurrency. Do you have an example that is not a bullshit?
Finally people are seeing that a blockchain without POW or censorship resistance is bullshit.
This is why bitcoin (cash) is more important than ever.
I couldn't pay someone in South Africa rural area for something worth $2 without bitcoin.
Many other people are censored.
Billions more have their wealth devalued via inflation.
Bitcoin is a way for people to be free without any state taking their money (see Greece)
Call me a skeptic.
Neither of those statements has ever been true and in recent years they've been ludicrously untrue — affluent people in developed countries were complaining about the transaction costs and they're supposed to be transformative for people in a developing country?
There will likely be a trade-off or balance of trust against transaction speed and cost. We're still working out how to build it and so we're not there yet, but my belief holds; the banana governments are not going to disappear anytime soon.
Those existing systems are also useful for evaluating the claims that this avoids bad governments, which is to say that it’s limited to bypassing antiquated banks. A networked system can’t avoid a sovereign state unless that state is completely inept, at which point everyone will be using a neighboring currency or USD anyway.
You can buy a cheap refurbished Android phone for $5.
And you have SMS cointext.io to transact for instance.
You do not need a hardware wallet, only to memorize the 12 word seed phrase.
Just look at the set of users who have phones without adequate banking. You will see this is measured in the billions of people.
The best hope to lift people out of poverty is for us to transact and deal with these people.
Maybe that's great for your pocketbook. To me it seems pointless and worthy of scorn.
But there was some music I paid for online because I liked the sound.
It's awesome that I'm able to support artists and creators across the globe and make a difference in someone's life (as they made a difference in mine).
Transaction cost? 1 cent with Bitcoin Cash. They kept $1.99
Yeah wow, we're all impressed.
If you end up scaling off-chain, then one asks why you have the PoW chain and it's phenomenal cost at all.
Different people answer differently, but many would give censorship-resistant currency as a use case. My personal answer is more complicated.
> If you end up scaling off-chain, then one asks why you have the PoW chain
Let me generalise slightly to include PoS, which I greatly prefer but which is also pretty expensive, and suffers from the same fundamental inefficiency problems. Obviously, you need on chain consensus and guarantees so that the payoff matrix for the offchain game is setup correctly so that honest behaviour in the offchain game is a Nash equilibrium. So that when I "pay" you some money in a payment channel you really have received it in a certain sense, and offchain payments are basically as secure as on chain ones.
Nothing about blockchains prevents censorship.
> Let me generalise slightly to include PoS, which I greatly prefer but which is also pretty expensive, and suffers from the same fundamental inefficiency problems.
Most literature I've read suggests potentially a hundredfold increase in throughput with Proof of Stake when executed correctly.
The only fundamental inefficiency problem PoS shares, by my reading, is the broadcast mode limitation where every node needs the full chain to be broadcast before it can move forward. However, PoW systems are nowhere near that rate limit.
I'm certainly happy to be shown this is wrong. Got resources?
> Obviously, you need on chain consensus and guarantees so that the payoff matrix for the offchain game is setup correctly so that honest behaviour in the offchain game is a Nash equilibrium.
You're right, the offchain game needs to be set up so that honest behavior is the optimal behavior. But this is where the cart is firmly planted in front of the horse. What you need is not a blockchain, what you need is trust that controls are in place to resolve a dispute equitably. The blockchain is a methodology not for eschewing trust, but contracting it out in a novel way. A blockchain, folks with guns, an escrow service with a good API, international banking: they all serve the same purpose here.
We should use these tools when they serve us. But what I've seen is that for an actual daily-use currency all that's going to happen is a million little token vendors which can negotiate lightning channels to one another will show up and we'll just have new banks that are like the old banks, but with the threat of a chain resolution which may or may not occur. The practical outcome will be indistinguishable from a healthy banking system, won't actually stop fraud, will be subject to the exact same controls that other physically rooted banks are subject to, and also be a lot more confusing.
I think lightning is solid; in that it will work. I also think it reduces a play at fundamentally restructuring commerce into a flashy buzzword pitch to reshuffle the existing players on the board somewhat.
Having been deeply in the (somewhat broken) American banking system, I can tell you that the system desperately needs to be reworked from the ground up and that can only happen with a truly distributed, truly transparent (an often undersold or ignored aspect of Bitcoin but a truly phenomenal property), truly and fundamentally new way of performing commerce.
We don't have that.
The decentralization of block producers helps. For instance we saw a few years ago that a few payment processors could decide to not support wikileaks donations, meaning that the only non-cryptocurrency way to donate to them was to mail them cash in an envelope. A government seeking to do the analogous thing would need to effectively make the network soft-fork a rule in disallowing payments to wikileaks addresses, something much harder to do.
> I'm certainly happy to be shown this is wrong. Got resources?
I have never seen any legitimate public blockchain claim 100x improvement from PoS over PoW. I'd be surprised if it were more than 3x for ethereum.
One very powerful upper bound in any non-sharded blockchain without validator delegation is that every full validator must process all transactions, and we want validators to be able to do so with relatively weak hardware (e.g. a Macbook Pro). Certainly, a 100x increase in ethereum TPS would violate this upper bound; for instance, the current state size (2GB) is not designed to fit into RAM, and hence every transaction must do a random disk read and write onto a hard disk. The actual computation can be pretty expensive too, e.g. I've seen a benchmark that ECDSA verification takes 500ms on an i5 processor.
The "broadcast mode limitation" you mention imposes another upper bound, but I do not think it is sharper than then validation upper bound.
> The practical outcome will be indistinguishable from a healthy banking system, won't actually stop fraud, will be subject to the exact same controls that other physically rooted banks are subject to
So this is more subjective but I have to disagree here, depending on what you mean by "healthy banking system". We've learned from history that to have banks run on fractional reserve yet not be subject to frequent bank runs, we have to make them hold reserves in some central bank. And even if you just set up an "anti-escrow service" you have anti-fraud and AML laws to comply with. The end result is that there are huge capital requirements to create new banks most places in the world and fraud still occurs; the capital requirements lead to an oligopolistic industry that doesn't actually provide the consumer services it exists to provide very well. This seems pretty backwards to me. I think in the near-term, payment channel hubs will be much cheaper to stand up than banks and the trust model will be the same as on-chain payments: if you accidentally pay someone off-chain you have no recourse. It seems that building fraud protections on top of this base is more sensible.
> What is a good spec for blockchain?
> Bitcoin
The only difference between it and a git history is that git histories are dags instead of trees — The hash-of-parent-node structure is the exact same, except commits can have multiple parents. The tamper resistance of the data structure itself comes from the hashes: it serves as both a pointer and a checksum for the previous nodes.