Verkle Trees
vitalik.ca
vitalik.ca
As an aside, the Verkle either stands for V(ector Commitment Mer)kle Tree or the more tongue-in-cheek V(ery Short Mer)kle Tree.
A huge thanks to Alin Tomescu, who provided me with this project when I was an MIT PRIMES student in high school. He came up with the ingenious idea of combining a vector commitment scheme with a Merkle Tree. He also has a brilliant blog post on his website explaining Merkle Trees if you'd like more background info [3].
[1] Paper: https://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/materials/20...
[2] Slides: https://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/materials/20...
[3] Alin's Website: https://alinush.github.io/
[4] My website: https://sites.google.com/view/johnkuszmaul
I remember many years ago back when Bitcoin was fun. I traded it back and forth with friends for pizza and such. I even used it once at a hip restaurant in town. Some Bitcoin forum (the name of which escapes me atm) had a bitcoin drip, which would give you a free Bitcoin every once in a while. But then Bitcoin's value exploded, it's not very useful anymore since transaction fees are so high and its value is so volatile, no one can mine it on their home machines, and its ecological disaster. But it used to be just a cool, kind of hacker niche, and was fun to think about the underlying technology and possibilities.
Vitalik's explorations with Ethereum have kind of a similar vibe to me. It's neat to think about the tech and how it works, and to try to come up with attacks and such. And if it ever moves to Proof of Stake, I won't have that guilty conscience playing with it. Of course, all of this on top of a $100 billion valuation is kind of frightening and weird. I hate to say it, but I'm not sure I'd mind a crazy crypto crash, just to explore this technology some more without the crazy monetary incentives.
BTC never was unfun. It’s more fun today than ever. OP is sad they sold.
Bitcoin has become toxic, the block size wars were interesting, but they yielded two communities that were less than what they were before the split.
Bitcoin has stagnated technologically and Bitcoin cash believes that it will win based off of the principals that governed the split.
Bitcoin will be on top for a good while longer, but I'm not interested in it anymore.
Bcash is not to be taken seriously. There is and always will be Bitcoin.
I don't find that interesting and I think the dominate force in the 21st century will be change and innovation.
It's great that bitcoin locked in taproot & that LN is functioning, those are small technical accomplishments compared to what Etherum, mina, zksync and many others have accomplished in that time (in terms of technical achievements).
Obviously bitcoin continues to dominate in terms of value, it's just not something that I find interesting anymore.
I've found the community get increasingly toxic. I don't believe it's skepticism because I've held bitcoin through much greater skepticism than what is happening now. I've held it through mtgox, before the IRS made any statement about it, through the split, through china banning it countless times, through 4 major crashes, through the 2013 unintended fork.
I followed bitcoin during the blocksize wars (I immediately sold all of my bch).
It's just not a community interested in growth, it seems like it's only interested in increased adoption & the idea of bitcoin as a global reserve currency.
If they're aspiring to build a global reserve currency, then why shouldn't their first priority be increased adoption? Distribution matters more than tech if the tech is already good enough.
Also, you seem to have contradicted yourself -- increased adoption begets growth.
A reserve is something held by a political state. Bitcoin is exciting becauee it exists beyond politics and nation-states.
If this is news for you, go read the original bitcoin paper. Its title is "Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash."
I also don't think that the current tech can accomplish much of what I was hoping Bitcoin could accomplish.
If the goal is just to increase adoption given the current tech then I'm out, there's more interesting things to pay/give attention to.
Everything you listed is years old, not cutting edge
Also, the dirty little secret of zkrollups is that they don't scale the system or make the system more trustworthy in this context. First, the prover, while asymptomatically fast (as one would expect from the PCP theorem), incurs constant factors that are still so high that you need a really beefy server to generate proofs in a reasonable amount of time. Second, even if that wasn't a problem, provers are still bandwidth-constrained and require BFT agreement -- each prover has to process all zkrollup transactions, and a malicious prover can still ignore transactions while generating correct proofs. At best, this leaves provers in a similar position as high-bandwidth chains like EOS, where only a few beefy nodes can feasibly process the requisite transaction load, but a BFT majority of nodes need to agree on state in order to prevent malicious censorship.
I honestly think zkSNARKs and zkSTARKs are wasted on blockchains. Imagine if AWS, grid computers, and supercomputers offered a zk prover interface, where they run your computations on beefy hardware and give you a proof that it was faithfully executed, thereby removing themselves from the TCB. I'd pay to use that service before I'd pay to use Ethereum.
I don’t mean to shit on the work to integrate this stuff, but a lot of it is either something that other chains already had (better versions of), or that other chains don’t need (eg: lightning)
It’s like TCP/IP. It is, just as tcp/ip innovates in a careful way.
If you think any chain doesn’t need a layer 2 overlay, which ultimately is the only way to scale tx’s. Anything else is kicking the can down the road.
All it takes is a single mistake and the Mina chain become useless, taking out all the embedded txs.
I believe this is misinformation, because it assumes that the energy usage is not being well spent - that Bitcoin is a waste - but that assumption could not be further from the truth.
Bitcoin's value lies in its absolute scarcity and immutable monetary policy - it preserves your time spent working in a money that cannot be debased by anyone, ever. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin.
If your savings is constantly at risk of being debased, not only do you lose purchasing power over time, but you're also incentivized to spend it and invest it as quickly as possible, rather than waiting thoughtfully for the best purchase or investment. You're being forced to have an extra job, as an investor, to even remotely come close to making a good investment. This is assuming that's even an option and that you have access to financial institutions in your country.
Technology is advancing exponentially - it should bring abundance and higher quality of life to everyone in the world. People will get more for less money, i.e. it is exponentially deflationary. With an inflationary monetary policy, where markets and assets prices are supported by the printing of money and will immediately crash if the printing stops, many nations will be forced to print exponentially to fight the deflation caused by technology. In other words, technology should be saving everyone time and energy as it raises productivity, but inflation forces everyone to work harder to keep up.
How can a finite planet support an economic system that demands infinite growth? A money with absolute scarcity solves this by allowing for deflation in prices as technology drives abundance. Fiat and inflationary monetary policy is the root problem driving climate change, and likely many other complex negative externalities.
In addition, I would point out that energy usage is not intrinsically bad. Higher per capita energy usage leads to higher quality of life. The climate issue energy poses is within how the energy is produced, and the majority of that problem lies in the emissions from coal power.
The good news on the energy production side is that a monetary network using Proof-of-Work incentivizes competition between miners globally. As cheaper (or even free, stranded) energy is made available to miners anywhere in the world, miners anywhere else who pay more for energy are pushed out of profitability and have to shut down shop. The difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin mining means that as more miners compete, those paying the most for energy are forced out of the market. This creates a clear incentive for miners to find the cheapest possible energy, which is predominately green and renewable and drives innovation in the space. Cheaper energy is great for humanity. Check out the recent work by ARK / Square exploring this.
Overall, these developments have made me hopeful and optimistic about the future again :)
And this is why it would be better to figure out how not to reward people for buying cryptocurrency. It's not a productive investment, it's just holding.
If that energy is spent on, you know, improving quality of life.
With bitcoin all energy is wasted on producing virtual tokens and a rate of transactions that a Raspberry Pi could run 10 times over.
BTC is not an ecological disaster - just like video games aren't ecological disasters.
Both use lots of energy and GPUs. One is decentralized hard money, the other is a source of entertainment.
False equivalence.
1. What you said, when we normalize logic, is: videogames are just as useless as bitcoin. If videogames disappeared, humanity would be allright. Same goes for bitcoin.
I wonder if that is exactly waht you were going for.
2. Videogames are not useless. You could start with the fundamental need of humanity for games in general. Yes, if videogames disappeared, we would find other things to replace them with. I wonder if someone would then pop up and say something inane like "BTC is not an ecological disaster - just like Gaelic football [1] is not an ecological disaster."
Secondly, videogames are increasingly found to reduce stress. They are used to treat various patients [2]. They broach the subjects such as "games as new medium" and "games as art". They create vast online communities.
Bitcoin (and blockchains in general) laboriously appends entries to an append-only log using the power-equivalent of several countries at a speed of a paraplegic snail [3]. And in ten years it hasn't found a single niche where the same operations can't be done faster and more efficiently (and are usually already done faster and more efficiently).
[1] I jest, but this is a thing of beauty. Watch the entire video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEAbWrdB9XU
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688462/
[3] All-time high for bitcoin was 450k transactions per day: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-transactions To do this, it requires more power than most countries in the world: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-power-consu...
Since we're speaking about videogames, in 2006 Eve Online had 150 million DB transactions per day. To do that, Eve Online needs something like 6 database servers: https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/tranquility-tech-3
Bitcoin would need the heat death of the universe to handle a comparable load.
Yes, it was. If you agree that Bitcoin is just as useless as videogames, and agree that videogames are not useless, you must also agree that Bitcoin is not useless.
I personally have no use for videogames, but I don't deny that many people do. I do, however, have use for an extremely resilient distributed timestampping service that takes several countries' energy to disrupt (which is what Bitcoin's blockchain is -- a public timestampping service). Turns out many people do, since running it is profitable.
Seems you missed that he disagreed on the first part. At least I read his "and videogames are useful because of this, and this, and ..." as saying that "as opposed to Bitcoin, videogames are useful because ..."
And, TBH, I've seen no proof of that first part.
Why must I?
> Turns out many people do, since running it is profitable.
Being profitable doesn't make it useful.
If Ethereum 2.0 rolls out and runs a PoS network without any issues for a year, 2 years, 3 years, what then? (Rather than debating the probability of that happening, for the sake of argument let's just hypothetically assume the transition does succeed and things run soothly for years.)
I suspect the community and devs won't even consider itas a topic for debate, though, which makes me think the cryptocurrency wars are going to get much more heated over the next 5 years. The cryptocurrencies you choose to use will be much more of a philosophical and ideological identity statement than it already is. Bitcoin-only vs. Ethereum-only vs. never-coiners. I'm genuinely pretty concerned it might reach the level of pro-life vs. pro-choice (vs. anti-natalist, I guess).
[0]: https://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/materials/20...
The main advantage of pairings is that you can have constant-size commitments.
There’s no space or computation savings when using FRI for the PC scheme here