I’m still not quite following why people are looking at bitcoin for this. Surely one of the newer generation like eth is better suited? Or better yet a layer 2 on eth
What scaling technologies do they have? The ones I'm aware of are: "commit the global state every n blocks and trust that", and "have n parallel blockchains so it's not one big chain"
>Or better yet a layer 2 on eth
or layer 2 on BTC, aka lightning network?
Turns out nobody likes watchtowers which lightning style solutions require, the market is not choosing that
Bitcoin does not represent choice, it represents throwing all eggs in one basket and defending that with no competition (lightning). More like a state capital system.
Why not? Anyone can use bitcoin for anything they want. And any other cryptocurrency can compete with bitcoin if they want (and clearly many try). Seems we have plenty of choice in the market at the cryptocurrency moment.
The difference is that in Bitcoin land, people cooperate to build standards. In Ethereum, far fewer standards are created, and instead people just build whatever Ethereum based project they want and try to sell that. So yes, there are more choice, but the quality of those choices is a lot lower. For example, in Bitcoin there's one lightning network standard, and many wallets that implement that stanrdard. By contrast there's a ton of layer 2 networks on Ethereum and none of them interoperate and each one has a single implementation (generally).
> nobody likes watchtowers
The number of bitcoin lightning nodes has been constantly growing since its inception, and pretty much every metric is at an all time high: https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning . So .. I think you're not correct there.
Bitcoin has some obscure things besides lightning due to the permissionless nature as well, but the limitations come from the block space and the smaller set of operations allowed
The comparison about what the market chose comes from TVL and volume metrics. see www.defipulse.com which also includes lightning
Zkrollups on Ethereum have the same security properties as on-chain transactions, with no need for monitoring and no withdrawal delays. That can't be said for the LN.
It may even be harder, as there would be more nodes in total when the hardware/network resources a person needs to run a node decline from what's needed to validate the whole blockchain, to what's needed validate the fraction of the blockchain contained in one shard, or conversely, when 64X more economic activity, and thus more people, are utilizing the blockchain, as a result of the scalability boost provided by dividing the blockchain into 64 shards.
>>Also, if you have, say, 10 shards - that isn't giving you 10x throughput. Its gonna give you maybe 2x throughput because what shards are doing is allowing lower-power machines help run the network, and those lower-power machines are not as effective as the rest, so they aren't contributing as much.
They don't have to be lower power machines. If the blockchain is divided into 64 shards, then the total network throughput can increase by 64X with the power requirements of validating machines not changing.
Why use this complicated hack solution when anyone can just use a different cryptocurrency and not have these problems in the first place?
Good. They need to get it right.
> Why use this complicated hack solution
It’s complicated but not a hack at all. It makes perfect sense.
> when anyone can just use a different cryptocurrency and not have these problems in the first place?
There are 0 (zero) cryptocurrencies that scale better than Bitcoin that don’t also compromise on security or decentralization. Lightning is the best known option which keeps these properties which make Bitcoin desirable in the first place.
The only way what you are saying makes sense is if you decide to for some reason define security as "bitcoin's hashing and has rate".
No one is doing any sort of mining attacks on bitcoin cash, monero or ethereum.
Like the "lightning network" the only way to pretend it is necessary is to pretend it solves a made up problem.
You should read the paper this thread is about. It tells you tons of technical reasons that it would be a bad idea to increase the max block size very much if at all.
It makes laughable claims like miners have only 94KB of bandwidth.
It’s the same old fud that says SPV is unsafe for the average user, Moore’s law is nonexistent, and even then makes crazy lowball assumptions about what hardware and network connectivity people have.
It’s basic fallacy is the same old one that says every user needs to download and validate the entire chain and all transactions to use Bitcoin.
If that’s true it’s going nowhere anyway.
Spinning up an ethereum full node (“archive node”) is way harder than spinning up a Bitcoin full node, partially because the eth blockchain is over 7TB vs about 300GB for BTC.
That being said, I don’t know enough about the security aspect - so your claim may end up being correct!
Ripple owns a lot of XRP(in escrow). That is the only claim of centralization that is true. The network has equal or greater decentralization than BTC.
Not Eth, but you're missing one option - tree graph based. They've pushed 3000+ TPS through it already in testnets...and that's on layer 1. High level description:
https://confluxnetwork.medium.com/tree-graph-structure-of-co...
>or layer 2 on BTC, aka lightning network?
Indeed - that could work. I do think Eth has the edge though. Throughput only matters if you have an eco-system that needs it ultimately.
Whenever someone says something like "they've tested it with X throughput", it usually means that they're not considering security properties. Sure, you can push throughput through on test machines in a test setting and it will happen. But in an adversarial environment, systems pushed to those limits can often be attacked. Its not sufficient to test throughput in normal conditions. You have to go through every attack vector and test the throughput during attacks and ensure the throughput you're pushing through isn't making those attacks easier to pull off.
Centralized systems can push plenty of throughput. The question is not: "How fast can we make this system run?", the question is "how fast can we make this system run WHILE keeping its properties of decentralization and resilience against attacks?".
They claim they have managed security, scalability and decentralization. I'm in no position to evaluate this. However they've got Sequoia onboard, plus a Turing award winner, plus Shanghai gov and team is full of PhDs...so I figured good enough for me.
> Surely one of the newer generation like eth is better suited?
Why surely?
He'll, I don't even have a personal BTC wallet and no one I know does either. Everything is ERC20: if you want BTC exposure, you hold WBTC not BTC.
Which is „pretty much the same“ in crypto terms.
https://medium.com/electric-capital/electric-capital-develop...
There is also substantially more economic activity on Ethereum, with users paying 10X more fees to utilize it over the last 7 days:
https://twitter.com/iamDCinvestor/status/1392468184482164741
Granted there are projects on Bitcoin, like rootstock, that have the goal of adding the capability, but my personal take (and I think a lot of others) from being in the space many years, is that its unlikely these will ever get released and/or adpoted.