Why Proof-of-Work Does Not Scale

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8 points·twokei··5 comments

In spite of the video, when the time between blocks is big enough most of the time there is a clear winner and there are not long lived forks. (Except the cases when the blockchain was forked on purpose.)

The part about exponential complexity does not make sense.

It is also weird that they draw a blockchain where the nodes forks can collapse later. Bitcoin can't do it, but Ethereum has something like that with uncle chain rewards. I'm almost sure that part of the graph it is a lucky coincidence, not a deep understanding of the different chains.

A fork could be created just by taking the existing longest chain, and attempting to append a block to the frontiers blocks parent, or even to the frontier block itself. It's pretty simple. The time between blocks still is non-deterministic, and not often is there realistically a clear winner.

There existing n forks, even at a bare minimum of 3 forks of the same height is very common, especially if you consider how many miners there are in the entirety of the Bitcoin network.

I tried to find the details about the current mini-forks but I couldn't. Do you have a link? I guess the number is small because the mining pools are well connected and none of them want to waste resources (because they loose money).

Probably 3 forks is a good number, but I'd like to see some data. Anyway, it's a linear problem that is adjusted automatically by the difficulty to find the next block. It's not an exponential problem that makes the protocol unpractical at scale.

The difficulty adjustment algorithm for Bitcoin is unfortunately very naive - there is a reason blockchain timestamps have a 2 hour deviation.

For some data, look into orphan blocks: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/orphaned-blocks

is this asmr?

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