Scaling: Ethereum’s make or break challenge [video] | Hacker News Reader

Scaling: Ethereum’s make or break challenge [video]

techcrunch.com

103 pointsdsr1250 comments

Great to see these young guys attempting to tackle these huge problems out of their believe that they can make "the world a better place". Not sure DLT will live up to its promise, but these guys truly believe the world is better off with trustless systems. And I cannot blame them, intermediaries, wether it be Google or Facebook, standing in between the user and the content creators, or banks, standing between creditors and debitors, haven't got the best reputation. A lot has gone wrong overthere, but I'm afraid DLT will bring entirely new problems to the table that we cannot forsee at this point. So I'm curious what the future will bring.

Offtopic. DLT is basically a marketing fraud. Both "permissioned" and "permissionless" DLT are packed into one term. Problem is - they are vastly different. Permissioned DLT is not interesting at all from technical and social point of view. We knew how to do them for a long long time. Openness, permissionless is the key innovation introduced with Bitcoin. "Permissioned blockchains" are just repackaged tech with lot of marketing sauce.

I use the term DLT as, for example, DAGs are not exactly blockchains if I'm not mistaken. They have no blocks, just transactions. It had nothing to do with permission.

Not all DAGs have blocks however many DAGs do have blocks. BlockDAGs are usually considered blockchains.

I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for that insight!!

>Openness, permissionless is the key innovation introduced with Bitcoin.

Can you think of non currency, voting, or timestamp applications for this?

People pay extra for currency verification, I cant imagine they'd pay extra for social media picture verification.

100%: Bitcoin was the first known solution for the double spend problem in a permissionless network while DLT doesn't have any dependency to this innovation.

What companies want to sell for DLTs is the vision of a "API 3.0" where different organizations make agreements with smart contracts instead of negotiating bilateral or multilateral protocols. The truth is that the hard problem here is the political and organizational agreements between parties and this cannot solved by technology.

Very well put.

Why is it a marketing fraud? As a mathematician, I can see the solution of a fully public permissionless DLT as long as (1) there is a PKI — not too hard to accomplish, (2) the generation time of ZKPs and SMPC can cross below the network latency threshold — to which I can say that I know researchers in the space and even a simple run rate calculations indicates this will be feasible soon...

I wonder whether your stance would update if you were to read Foundations of Cryptography by Oded Goldreich?

I think there is some typo in your comment - because otherwise - do you mean that permissionless DLT was obvious (as in anyone who read Foundations of Cryptography by Oded Goldreich could create it) and bitcoin was not a breakthrough?

Nope. I simply mean that it is not a fraud, and can provide a legitimate service in the form of a new abstraction implemented in software.

There is the worry that there might be a whole new set of problems that will arise with this system.

The other worry I have, and where I think, in the long run I will probably be right, is that, when the system collapses and cryptocurrencies' price crashes, nobody except for these few individuals will care for any philosophic reasons to support this product. People invested in crypto to make money, not to support free, distributed networks or smart contracts. It would be sad to see the entire idea vanish at that point.

This is why Bitcoin seems the most secure. 9 years of not breaking is pretty good.

Things like IOTA and Nano use verification methods that are untested.

ETH just seems wayy to expensive in POW, and seeing how they are already getting spammed in POW, POS seems insane.

The gold coin seems to be the most secure for me to be honest. If we're looking at monetary stability I'd rather have more than 9 years. Looking at our traditional ways of exchanging money, we have a history of about 6-7000 years, so that's a little more researched I'd suggest.

Honestly looking at the BTC prices right now and in the latest months, I'm seeing a few months of stability for the future followed by either a massive crash or some kind of small increase. Not really worth or secure enough to put my money into.

Ethereum is novel and ambitious technology. In my mind, and I think in the minds of most in the community, scaling had always been the big, important challenge on the horizon - but it builds confidence to see just how far the devs (and community) have brought it till now. It's like everything is in place for that final push over the mountain.

Another problem is the size of the blockchain

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-roadmap

I think people are overtly positive about ETH because they missed out on BTC and believed in ETH.

But dApps are unused. Customers are not paying 7x the price for decentralized verification. Centralized servers can be tampered with, but no one cares about your 4th of july pictures or saved games.

Unless currency, voting, or a timestamp is involved, you dont use expensive verification methods.

The sheer cost of blockchain makes it insane to imagine apps being built on it. Currency has typically required firepower to move money and different ways to verify money is real money. This is a real case for using blockchain.

plenty of what you say is just not right (or plain wrong). btc = monetary/value transactions. i read the paper as early and 2008 and didn't miss out on it, i just didn't care then same as i don't care now. eth = dapps. just because dapps didn't take off immediately doesn't mean they aren't beginning to get used, increasingly so, and that there isn't a lot of valuable, useful, interesting and innovative applications being built and experimented with. btc and eth are two different things. if how much something can possibly enrich you is all you care about, that doesn't mean that everybody else is necessarily on that page. that being said, it's true - ethereum is basically useless for a lot of otherwise really interesting possible use cases and applications (which is why we got things like IOTA, something that i'm sure everybody here has nothing but hate towards, for whatever reasons). then ethereum classic, too, is something just as different. and i couldn't help but notice how most innovation is being done by people of russian or eastern european origin, or israelis, while the vast majority of silicon valley only chase the dollar bill and base their entire business models on how they can possibly screw the user. much as i sometimes find valuable threads here on hackernews, i don't really take much of what you people say seriously.

What do you find so interesting in Ethereum Classic? The userbase?

The dude has no clue.

Listed 0 applications but said "Yeahh man its gonna happen"

Sounds like the idiots on /r/cryptocurrency, doesnt sound like a programmer.

I see a growing interest in ETC, but I do not find any rational reason - except some people considering it could replace ETH in case the chains grows too big.

But if shit hits the fan, ETH could decide to do something serious itself.

I just don't understand it.

well, it's under the umbrella of IOHK, they particularly emphasize security, take a slow, deliberate and conservative approach to how they do things, in addition to this: https://callisto.network/

i don't find it all that surprising.

i also don't see ETH and ETC as being in competition. and i hold both as well. :)

i can see a scenario where some applications are housed by ETC and others by ETH. sky rocketing gas prices and transaction fees kinda defeat the purpose i'd say (for anybody other than speculators and miners), and given the network load sometimes, that would make a lot of sense until some working scalability solutions are in place.

didn't say i find anything all that interesting about Ethereum Classic. didn't jump in with the intention of promoting or defending a position either, but both responses following my post seem eager to shove things down my throat, not sure why.

but if you want to know what i find interesting far as ethereum apps go, i can list those: Augur, MakerDAO, DAOStack. those are examples of efforts that regardless of what goes down would not have been in vain and have already made significant contributions to the better understanding of things in their respective domains.

ETC, can't say so much about, they seem a little hush hush, but they recently did launch a complementary chain dedicated to smart contract security audits for both ETH and ETC (but paid for from their treasury), and i also think the proposed ERC-223 (by an ETC member) makes a lot of sense and personally hope that it does get approved to substitute the current ERC-20. overall, i just wouldn't disregard the efforts made.

and i think i'm more or less keeping my tone civil, no? too much to ask for the same? (directed at the person below, that)

One thing to keep in mind is that most "scalable" apps (top 100 most popular websites like search, videos, social networking, forums, etc.) don't need double-spend resistant ledgers.

They just need decentralized and cryptographically verified guarantees, like with what decentralized Reddit (notabug.io) and other apps, built on our system ( https://github.com/amark/gun ), that is already pushing terabytes traffic weekly in production.

The future for scaling is more about working around double-spend/blockchain than trying to make double-spend/blockchain systems themselves to be scalable (trying to do that would require violating various CAP Theorem / physics rules).

Ethereum is talking about 2020 as its target for scaling upgrades. There are other projects that haven't launched yet that probably have an advantage over them, as so long as it can integrate with Ethereum rather than claim it can totally supplant it.

There are projects like Cardano and Zilliqa, but then there are some like Orbs that are using blockchain virtualization claiming it can work in tandem with Ethereum.

I assume Ethereum will implement some of its solutions before that 2020 date, but they will probably need to rely on more partnerships to do it.

https://cosmos.network/ will also have an Ethereum bridge, as well as proof-of-stake.

Cardano has stalled for so long that I stopped waiting. I hear great things about EOS from people I trust, though, I need to look into that.

EOS is like a really expensive AWS. There is nothing revolutionary or decentralized about that.

I don’t know what you mean about Cardano, they have a very detailed roadmap and haven’t missed any major milestones I am aware of.

https://cardanoroadmap.com

The launch of EOS has not been very well received at all. Lots of mistakes and the governance is a mess.

Indeed, EOS relies on a constitution with human interpretable rules [1]. Not sure how that fits into the crypto sphere, where governance should be done be algorithms and code.

[1] https://github.com/EOSIO/eos/blob/5068823fbc8a8f7d29733309c0...

and it's also supposed to be hashed in each "legitimate" transaction. while network resources are so scarce as to stir rampant speculation. idk - the only thing about EOS that i have noticed is how overtly it screams of greed. the people that jumped in on that bandwagon did so for no other reason but hoping it would make them rich (cos Daniel Larimer said "you can run Ethereum on a single EOS smart contract", lol).

EOS has essentially taken the worst part about the blockchain technology (slowness and expensive operations compared to a centralized solution) and merged it with the worst part about a centralized technology (human mistakes, cartels, collusion, oligarchy).

Ethereum has the massive advantage of having nurtured a certain culture and community around it. that's why, regardless of all else, there is a list of really interesting experiments taking place on Ethereum and applications that could cement its future.

Man the TC website sure is terrible to use on mobile. Everything keeps flying around, there's a white banner in the way of the video with an X that appears to behave as a back button when you click it??

Is scaling the real reason there are no useful applications?

Fungible and Unfungible ERC token are used by a lot of people.

Off topic but I am so entirely sick of amp/mobile pages like this that just fail so hard at delivering the advertised content. Multiple reloads, pop-up conditionals, auto-scrolling...yuck. Clicking the link briefly flashes the title of the topic followed by a blank square with a “close” X then flashes a couple of times and I land on a listing of videos none of which are the op topic. I’m not using ie4 or something - this is the current version of Safari on the latest mobile device from one of the biggest phone manufacturers that exist! All on a “tech” website.

First world problems I know but goddamn is it frustrating.

Sorry for rant.

Same on Android

Edit: it works now but it is badly broken video player, stopped when I tried to seek forward

I hate AMP as well.

They’re less maintained, feature less pages (see reddit), and they have obnoxious script that prevents hold-tap from allowing “open in new window” from working.

here is a youtube link to the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=976Q2cu1_DE

I think for a cryptocoin to be useful in the real world, scaling and quick transaction times has to be a priority from the start of the design. Its not something you can fix, as an afterthought.

That's why I like xrp. Low transaction times, and it scales well. It is permissioned in the sense that every validator-node needs to keep a list of all the other validator nodes it trusts. Which means validators without a reputatable company behind them, might find it hard to become trusted by anyone else. Thats a price worth paying for scalability, in my opinion.

What a Crypto Currency needs too is price stability, and that isn't tackled by XRP, nor can it be added to it since it has no smart contract capability.

So you sacrifice decentralization for only one of the necessary characteristics of money. Not worth it, PayPal works fine for now.

It's easy to scale when your transactions are basically only tcp/ip messages between trusted nodes. There has to be a bettwer way...I'm personally in favor of dPoS (delegated proof of stake) networks, that can have high throughput without sacrificing decentralization, with consensus achieved by representatives that can be changed by everyone in the network. Still, xrp might have applications in the banking world, time will tell.

I am concerned that dPOS will lead to cartel like organizations in the long run as the rich get richer and can vote for themselves

AFAIK, all dPoS systems have so far proven to fairly quickly spiral into what you just described. Waves uses a leased PoS that might be worth exploring in more detail (or I've been meaning to anyway).

XRP is a currency, ETH is supposed to be a smart contract platform.

I believe in cryptoCURRENCY, as people do pay extra for validation in currency. XRP and Monero are both designed for payments.

ETH, is being used as a currency, but this is a mistake. ETH is designed to run apps, and is doing that poorly.

I would say that Ethereum is the smart contract platform, but that Ether (ETH) is a currency. That's based both on how it's used, and on how the protocol separates normal transactions from smart contract interactions (including token transfers).

I like the fungibility that Monero offers (making it similar to cash), but I just can't wrap my head around Ripple. I always associated cryptocurrencies with decentralized and trustless (at least at its core), neither of which seem to apply to Ripple. I would have preferred a "trusted party" system on top of a decentralized one to get higher transaction speeds, e.g. when the stakes/amounts are low.

Ripple is decentralized, in the technical sense.

If you are a programmer you will appreciate this. It explains the consensus protocol in detail. I found it fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4jq4frE5v4

but my currency runs on eth!

nolCoin is an experimental crypto-currency where anyone can make as many as they want for free (plus gas) but only in amounts of a maximum 255 at a time. then when total coins reach uint256 max no more can be made.

implemented as standard erc20 token, plus a make(address, amount) function you can use to create coins!

get yours now! -> 0xa698933897Cc176cbA5C0C31e7fF4bB5Cd3A9aE4

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