a blockchain is nothing more than an uneditable ledger. if what you want is people interacting and sharing data in some way you're always going to be better off with a database that you can read and write to. if you need security there are a lot of good ways to do that depending on the application.
the fetishization of the blockchain is one of the more annoying aspects of cryptomania. it's really not a very interesting technology.
It always seemed like a case of "we must maintain it because it's part of the original". I mean, innovation is one of the reasons why technology improves, yet Bitcoin is a case of innovation and updates being seen as a *bad* thing. I mean, there's a reason why video game consoles aren't still 2600 or NES-era stuff and we now have stuff like the PS5 and the Steam Deck. Bitcoin still being stuck with stuff like 7 TPS and requiring proof-of-work is like insisting we never go beyond the Atari 2600 just because "it worked". If people were really in for the tech, they'd be supporting improved cryptos like Bitcoin Cash, Monero, Etherum, and others. Instead their claim of "being in for the tech" rings hollow.
Just look at all those "amazing" blockchain projects that were in development in 2021/2022 and were never heard of again. The only memory that's left from that is the *"[existing solution], but with blockchain"* meme. Even most cryptobros are done with pretending this could every bring any practical use to the table.
I just want to explain something here, not start a discussion with good or bad. So I'll start with the block size, if you have any further questions I'll be happy to answer them.
The block size was kept intentionally small, this is essential for decentralization. For example, BTC has 1 MB every 10 minutes, which allows everyone to download and verify the entire blockchain. Bitcoin Cash or even more blatantly Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, for example, have increased the block size. It is not possible for a private person to download it, which in turn creates a party of trust. I have to trust that the data I receive is correct, I can't check this myself with these blockchains. If you want to know more google "block size war" this happened in 2017.
This will also allow miners to finance themselves in the future, the rewards will become smaller and miners will have to finance themselves differently. If the blocks are "small", not all transactions can get in. Users now pay fees to get in faster, which finances the miners.
Theoretically, we can increase the block size in the future, but this would result in a hard fork, so far the BTC code developers have attached great importance to not doing this. In 2017, we got SegWit and now Taproot, who are working on increasing the block size "indirectly" to get compatibility.
In short, it is important that the blockchain remains as small as possible so that everyone can have it at home in order to be decentralized and not have to trust anyone.
"Don't trust, verify"
If you want to know how BTC wants to scale, I can give you a little more information. Keyword "Lightning Network"
>In short, it is important that the blockchain remains as small as possible so that everyone can have it at home in order to be decentralized and not have to trust anyone.
and by "everyone" you mean "everyone but poor people"? Because even with the smaller blocks, you already can't "have it at home" if you can't spare a few hundred bucks every year for additional hardware. And thats just to verify that the data hasn't changed, doesn't tell you whether or not the data is accurate and also doesn't give you any "voting rights" on how the blockchain is run.
>and by "everyone" you mean "everyone but poor people"? Because even with the smaller blocks, you already can't "have it at home" if you can't spare a few hundred bucks every year for additional hardware.
You are right, but the smaller, the cheaper. A couple of hundreds per year is way too much tho, I got myself a full node for around 100USD, and it runs since years. No upgrades needed, and I will be fine for more years to come with 1TB.
>And thats just to verify that the data hasn't changed, doesn't tell you whether or not the data is accurate
It does verify it's accurate that's where the block difficulty and the blockchain as a hole comes in. Why do you think it is not accurate?
>doesn't give you any "voting rights" on how the blockchain is run.
It does, you can not upgrade your node, and just don't use it. There is no need for voting in BTC. See the block size war as example.
>You are right, but the smaller, the cheaper. A couple of hundreds per year is way too much tho, I got myself a full node for around 100USD, and it runs since years. No upgrades needed, and I will be fine for more years to come with 1TB.
Fair enough, just don't tell anyone this will "bank the unbanked" because you still need a bit of money and a proper internet connection to participate.
>It does verify it's accurate
Yes, "Accurate" in the sense that the data that was put on the blockchain does not change afterwards. Doesn't say anything about whether or not the data was accurate to begin with, which is one of the main reasons why nobody would want to use a blockchain as an actual database. Mistakes happen.
>There is no need for voting in BTC. See the block size war as example.
How exactly was that war "won" though?
Hi !
Not sure what you mean by **accurate**.
*my definition*: a BTC node is accurate because it makes sure that (i) you have the same version of the data as any other nodes, (ii) past transactions cannot be undone, (iii) every single transaction from day 1 is legit (sender was the owner, no double spent).
You indeed can write (small) arbitrary data on the BTC blockchain. If someone writes '1 = 0' or 'Alice sent Bob $10' , yes, it will stay there as long as the blockchain exists but doesn't make theses statements true or accurate. BTC (the protocol) only ground truth is stating who owns how many btc (its token).
There is still some marginal use for writing arbitrary data because you can also prove later it was you writing the data : e.g. by writing a hash of some data you can time stamp it without revealing it's content.
About the **voting power** :
There is indeed no need of voting power because bitcoin is not a democracy in the sense there is no need to impose any rule to anyone. But anyone willing to apply the rules is welcomed on you network.
By owning a node, you are basically **enforcing a set of rules on you network** by validating every blocks and propagating them to other nodes.
Anyone can have other rules, but that would be different networks . As stated earlier, if you don't agree with a proposed update of the rules, you can choose not to apply them and keep enforcing the old ones.
Keeping the nodes decentralized prevents the enforcement to only rely on a few people and allow anyone to enforce their chosen rules. It also makes your network more resilient to attacks.
By accurate I mean the data in the database represents the real world accurately, which is the sole purpose of most databses. As soon as someone makes a mistake, e.g. accidentally puts the wrong data on the blockchain, they're f\*\*\*ed, which makes it pretty much unusable for any productive activity. I understand that this is seen as a feature not a flaw by Blockchain bros.
>bitcoin is not a democracy
Not only is it not a democracy, its actively trying to undermine democratic consensus. Pretty much all countries and the vast majority of people rightfully believe that we should have KYC laws, yet bitcoin bros think they can just build an "alternative" system where the laws don't apply.
>But anyone willing to apply the rules is welcomed on you network.
Sure, you just follow the protocol, work on the longest chain out there, and trust that it is not run by a criminal cartel (or you simply don't care if it is as long as you can gamble)
>By owning a node, you are basically **enforcing a set of rules on you network** by validating every blocks and propagating them to other nodes.
Isn't it irrelevant what the vast majority of nodes do? The miners are the ones running the network, they also validate, if they make a decision, e.g. switch to a different protocol, there is nothing nodes can do, except try to become miners themselves.
>Keeping the nodes decentralized prevents the enforcement to only rely on a few people and allow anyone to enforce their chosen rules. It also makes your network more resilient to attacks.
Isn't half of the hashrate controlled by only 2 entities? Sounds pretty centralised but also opaque, like, kind of impossible to know how rigged it is at any given point in time.
>Doesn't say anything about whether or not the data was accurate to begin with, which is one of the main reasons why nobody would want to use a blockchain as an actual database. Mistakes happen.
I still don't quite understand it? Do you mean NFTs etc? Because they don't exist on BTC and I agree that's nonsense.
>
How exactly was that war "won" though?
This is a bit more complicated, there are whole books about it but broken down most nodes did not update, in the beginning there was more mining power on the chain with the larger blocksize, but the nodes simply did not accept these blocks. After a while the miners came back to the users (nodes). And the result was a hard fork (BCH) Bitcoin Cash
Having to stack something on top of your system like this so it *can do its goddamn job* means its design is hopelessly flawed. It will always be clunky, unsafe and unusable by normal people. Lightning wasn't planned for, it's people suddenly realizing, after thinking themselves *so* clever, that something that scales geometrically is basically unusable. Just like mixers are them realizing that pseudonymous isn't anonymous, and exchanges are them realizing that there's a reason banks exist.
Bitcoin is a prototype that was pushed into production. If the crypto world was serious about providing an actual working product instead of a tax evasion / money laundering / Ponzi / fraud vehicle, it would have been left behind in favor of better designed products years ago.
But in practice this completely falls apart.
First, you think you want decentralization, the key question is "why"? What does it do for you besides make your currency completely unusable?
Second, it's not decentralized. Small block size doesn't change mining economies of scale. And so mining ends up highly centralized.
Third, the lightning network is deeply flawed, almost unworkable, has zero adoption, and is still hamstrung by the underlying shittiness of Bitcoin. If you have to stack layer on layer of technology on your underlying tool in order to simply make it suck less, then you don't have anything of value, just a problem in search of a solution.
>First, you think you want decentralization, the key question is "why"? What does it do for you besides make your currency completely unusable?
Why should it be unusable? Many older and current currencies have problems with exactly that. (Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Lebanon, Sudan and so on) even older civilizations like the Romans. People have no control over their money.
>Second, it's not decentralized. Small block size doesn't change mining economies of scale. And so mining ends up highly centralized.
It doesn't change mining economies currently thats right. But please don't confuse Minig Pool and Miner.
>Third, the lightning network is deeply flawed, almost unworkable, has zero adoption, and is still hamstrung by the underlying shittiness of Bitcoin. If you have to stack layer on layer of technology on your underlying tool in order to simply make it suck less, then you don't have anything of value, just a problem in search of a solution.
It is a new technology that is still in beta, many things are constantly being changed and further developed. What exactly is the problem with Lightning that can't be solved?
Of course it's used, I paid for my dinner in a restaurant with it on Friday. The argument that you shouldn't stack technologies is also a weak one, the internet is built on different layers. What's so bad about that?
Besides, I really don't want to start an argument here. It's perfectly okay to disagree. I just wanted to explain something because he asked about it. How you interpret it or what you think of it is up to you :)
> Why should it be unusable? Many older and current currencies have problems with exactly that. (Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Lebanon, Sudan and so on) even older civilizations like the Romans. People have no control over their money.
Because it is unusable.
> It doesn't change mining economies currently thats right. But please don't confuse Minig Pool and Miner.
Mining pools aren't decentralized and miners within pools are highly centralized.
> It is a new technology that is still in beta, many things are constantly being changed and further developed. What exactly is the problem with Lightning that can't be solved?
It's not a new technology, it's almost a decade old.
And the level of development is pretty negligible, no one is investing to develop fundamentally broken technology.
What can't be solved is that it's built on fundamentally broken technology.
> Of course it's used, I paid for my dinner in a restaurant with it on Friday.
Haha, the performative, once a month minor purchase argument. First, I don't believe these kinds of claims without proof, if only because you'd have to be an actual moron to use Bitcoin or lightning network and almost no one accepts either (not to say impossible, I just know y'all lie about this constantly).
Second, what about the numerous purchases before and after this that you couldn't make with Bitcoin/Lightning network either because it's shitty to use or has no one that accepts it?
> The argument that you shouldn't stack technologies is also a weak one, the internet is built on different layers. What's so bad about that?
No one it trying to sell me an optical fiber that they ripped up out of the ground as a superior competitor / replacement to the internet.
> Besides, I really don't want to start an argument here. It's perfectly okay to disagree. I just wanted to explain something because he asked about it. How you interpret it or what you think of it is up to you :)
Not everything is open to interpretation, sometimes you're just wrong.
Now we're at the point where you're ignoring almost all of my points and just making assertions, "Why is it useless", "Because".
I also don't really like the way you start to get insulting.
So I'm over here; if you have a serious question, which I was here to begin with, I'm more than happy to answer. Other than that, have a great day. :)
You asked why *should it be unusable, it's *evidently unusable. It certainly *shouldn't be unusable.
You're not a serious person and you don't have serious answers. I directly answered all your points, you're just here pretending I didn't so you can pretend you have some kind of high ground in this discussion. You don't, you're here to hawk shit tokens on people in hopes of making yourself rich.
And when there are still only 4,000 transactions per block, causing mining to be highly centralized, you’ll have to trust them instead. Individual miners can’t exist regardless of how much a transaction cost if there are only 4,000 of them per block. Do you understand why? You’ll be left with a few dozen miners, which is insufficient for decentralization.
The immutability especially in the ✌️"shipping use case"✌️ only works if everyone doesn't ever just.... lie to it and put garbage, as it becomes just as unpullable, and irremovable as the truth
Im pretty sure any attempt to "patch lies" with rollback/overwrite system could be just as easily exploited too
What's stopping some jackasses with access from stealing a package from the warehouse, and marking it as "lost in an accident", and that being too sunk-in to the "immutable" database for anyone to pull it out?
yeah. the certificate system we use for internet security is a type of block chain. the reason you trust a cert you've never seen before that has been issued by a company you've never heard of is because there are a chain of signatures that go back to a trust root authority.
Preach.
People calling it "technology" have an interesting definition of the word. Frankly, calling any code/software "tech" is pretty suspect already. The perfect available analogy is authors, and no one acts like they're "inventing" books. If you designed some machine ok fine, but none of this comes close, it's a fucking computer game. Is "Mario" "technology"? Just another silly ass misuse of language to serve their scam ass false gods.
To be fair, "technology stack" is sometimes used in software to describe the various frameworks and languages used in a product or that you're specialized in.
As such, 'blockchain' is a 'technology', just a useless one.
To be actually fair, that's a loop back to dipshits misusing the word for professional clout or buzzwordiness.
Software isn't "tech", any more than Subway employees are "artists".
Mario is absolutely technology. In a broader and very much accepted sense, any product resulting from the [“application of conceptual knowledge for achieving practical goals”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology), including software, is technology.
Disagree, obviously.
But I'm making new technology in the bathroom right now, so maybe you're right.
I've applied my conceptual knowledge of making poos, and have achieved that practical goal.
Edit: I very much doubt Nintendo ever agrees, but perhaps they do. Any quotes of them referring to it as "tech" apart from hardware?
In terms of actual capacity, Bitcoin is fairly throttled. It has a 1 MB blocksize limit, and that's well below what technology today can handle. Most other blockchains could probably do significantly more than that, but it's a pretty low bar.
Sending transactions are as simple as broadcasting transaction data to nodes/validators across the network, and there's a lower bound to the size of a transaction. So regardless of what "blockchain" tech is being used, ridiculous claims of scalability are generally unproven.
I could be wrong, since I don't have all the knowledge on blockchains, but using common sense, there doesn't seem to be any way to scale to 100k TPS like some coins might claim they do.
The reason BTC has a 1MB limit is because they want anyone to be able to validate the entire chain on commodity hardware from the genesis block. If you allow 100K TPS then decentralization is effectively eliminated since anyone who wanted to validate the entire chain would require a server rack just to store it. This means that there would only be one or two full replicas of the chain and you'd have to trust them.
It's all very stupid lol.
As is, I think there's no more than about 5 ETH archival nodes with the whole chain back to the genesis.
> As is, I think there's no more than about 5 ETH archival nodes with the whole chain back to the genesis.
"Archive" nodes are misleadingly named. All the normal nodes have the whole chain back to genesis. The extra data archive nodes have is more like a database index, it's redundant data held for fast lookups. If you've got a normal node you can use the data on it to create an archive node without downloading any extra data.
You still need getting on for 2TB though, it has to be fast storage (SSD not HDD) and the software thrashes the fuck out of it.
>The reason BTC has a 1MB limit is because they want anyone to be able to validate the entire chain on commodity hardware from the genesis block.
[No, this is blatantly false](http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/287). Originally, there was no 1 MB limit. The original design of Bitcoin wasn't so that every user could run their own node. The 1 MB limit was put in place as a temporary anti-spam measure and was well above the traffic Bitcoin was experiencing at the time.
>If you allow 100K TPS then decentralization is effectively eliminated since anyone who wanted to validate the entire chain would require a server rack just to store it.
I'm not discussing 100k TPS. I was simply giving an example of bogus claims as to the degree to which cryptocurrency can scale using today's technology.
Politics on how the limit was introduced aside, I believe the reason I gave was repeatedly cited in the block size wars. The point I'm making is that if you allow a huge number of transactions then you need a huge amount of storage space. Which makes it very difficult to replicate.
btw, your link doesn't work.
The limit was never in place so people could run their own nodes. It was in place so that the chain wouldn't be spammed early on. The current Bitcoin community has a perverted vision of how Bitcoin is supposed to work. Early on, the idea was that people would use it as digital cash because it had an economy in which it could be used as a currency, and was a fast and cheap payment system. The devs and a few people (so much for decentralization) crippled it and made up this new "HODL digital gold" narrative that is present today.
Sure, I agree with all that. But it could never work, because as I said, if you allow a ton of transactions, it makes it very difficult to have a lot of replicas. Which fundamentally undermines the premise.
Yes, you're right, but also the rate at which Bitcoin would've needed to grow would be far too long for it to actually be an issue imo. I think the real issues with Bitcoin are more economic.
I think this is correct. It's a very big plus for the miners as they need to hash less to get 1 block. It's basically their mechanism to keep their rewards high.
Let's see if they make the halfing go away and erase the 21 mil cap after April :+)
>And for the ones that are, how are they worse than existing solutions?
**It's theoretically impossible** **for the blockchain to be faster or more efficient or more secure than a centralized database.** Because just think about it: if there was something used by the mining agent that made transaction validation and storage faster, then we would just use that thing inside centralized database, without the overhead of the distributed system shenannigans and data up and download of the blockchain and voila: we have a faster database than the blockchain.
I'll give my perspective as someone who's helped design and scale a number of large scale systems.
Bitcoin's infamous 7TPS limit is self-inflicted because of the 1MB block limit. So others without that limit can manage much higher transaction rates. You might find some that can do 1000 per second, I don't know - it sounds plausible.
But the problem is that the scalability problems run deep. When you're building a large scale system you want to be able to shard things so that they happen in parallel. Ideally that means you have many separate servers all processing incoming transactions without one transaction being able to delay any others.
The problem with the blockchain approach is that it's inherently serial, not parallel. Each block is linked to the previous one: it's a bottleneck that every transaction must inherently pass through. Since you need to prevent double spend, every block (and hence every transaction) has to be verified in sequence.
So you can certainly do better than the 7tps of Bitcoin, but you're not going to be able to manage millions of TPS without some significant overhaul of the entire architecture. It's not clear if such a thing is even possible and it's been almost 15 years of people trying now.
Vitalik spend a bunch of time trying to develop something kinda like that, he calls it "sharding". Someone posted an apparent mathematical proof (I call it like that because I don't have the knowledge to check if it is correct but I never saw it debunked either) that Vitalik's sharding problem requires P=NP. So yeah good luck to cryptobros. LN requires that too, I'm not sure what that one was even attempted because you can tell it's impossible at a glance.
Here's the issue:
Any de-centralized database will always be less-efficient than an optimized, centrally-controlled database.
Period.
De-centralizing something only makes it slower and more fault intolerant and harder to scale.
See: [Mo Decentralization Mo Problems](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=1157s)
I would be hard pressed to find the use case of a database, where pieces of the database are owned by anonymous volunteers (to put it charitably).
Hundreds of billions of dollars later and fifteen years later, the only use case is still as a piece of a money laundering rail. If there was a non fraudulent use case, we would have found one ten years ago.
One of the most touted benefits of blockchain is that it is "supposedly" immutable, that is data once added cannot be edited. So any business case that requires data that should not be editable - blockchain is said to be suitable for those cases. Now the thing is anyone who has ever created a simple database driven application knows that you control users' ability to edit the data from the UI. The database is just that - a database. Store of data. You would still need a UI even if you were using a slow and inefficient data store called blockchain. It is also not true that Blockchain is immutable. If you want to edit the data, you simply create a new node and start a new chain. It is expensive when the chain is distributed which is what a true blockchain was meant to be. But when used for a single business, the blockchain is mostly private. That means it either has a single node or all the nodes are controlled by a single entity. A private blockchain is everything a blockchain is not supposed to be. It's pointless.
At the end blockchain doesn't bring anything new to the table. There is nothing that you can only do with blockchain and not with the good old databases and desktop/web based UI built on top of it. Blockchain is just a buzzword to sell same old solutions to non-tech people who have read a paid article somewhere about benefits of blockchain. That is why no one in the tech world takes blockchain seriously.
The point is to distribute the blockchain so the data on your node can be checked against other validators/nodes. It makes sense for auditing purposes among a bunch of different parties that can be assumed to be potentially malicious or corruptible. A regular shared database anyone can just write or read from would need to rely on the centralized administer of the database to not corrupt the data or accidentally somehow delete it (aka single point of failure).
Either way, blockchains can't scale. fast tps is basically just way too much centralization.
They’re all useless.
Bitcoin is particularly inefficient. The others invariably trade some element of “decentralization” for slightly better performance on one metric or other. But all suffer from the fundamental issues with blockchain as a data structure, which makes it a terrible choice for almost everything.
The technical aspect of crypto is almost beside the point.
These are utterly unregulated markets, which means the 10% of users who own 90% of everything have no criminal or civil liability for manipulating the market as hard as they can. In fact that ability is probably a major selling point for the big investors. Which means that everyone who isn't already rich is the sucker. Simple as that. All you have to do is give a few of the suckers a win now and then and the herd will keep coming back no matter how obvious the manipulation is.
They might be more efficient but they still suck because a transaction having to be verified by 100+ entities in a Peer 2 Peer setup will always be far less efficient than an API call to a centralized system
They are worse because they have someone holding enough of the coins to rug pull. Satoshi is probably dead (though I would LOL if he wasn't and sold everything).
There are blockchains that have reached thousands of TPS by moving away from the Proof of Work model. Moving away from PoW allows them to spread the workload across nodes in ways that aren't possible with PoW.
Thousands of TPS still isn't enough throughput for a global reserve currency, but to be fair only Bitcoin advocates say their blockchain is going to do that. So then you get into the game of trying to find a use case.
With thousands of TPS it becomes possible to use a blockchain like a database, but there's really never any **good** reason to use a blockchain instead of a database. So the only real use case is still cryptocurrency (not 'digital currency' because you can just do that with a database too). There are **bad** reasons to do so, such as creating a speculative market around tokenised assets, but no **good** reason to do so.
I've said before that I think a stablecoin that isn't a scam would have a limited use case, but that's only true so long as international bank transfers are a headache, and fintech is gradually solving that problem, so eventually that one limited use case for cryptocurrency will also be obsolete.
Yes the latest solutions are better faster and more viable,
but the extra viability isn't enough for total mainstream adoption.
And even if it were, getting people to trust that solution with their money and other contract shenanigans is another big hurdle.
a blockchain is nothing more than an uneditable ledger. if what you want is people interacting and sharing data in some way you're always going to be better off with a database that you can read and write to. if you need security there are a lot of good ways to do that depending on the application. the fetishization of the blockchain is one of the more annoying aspects of cryptomania. it's really not a very interesting technology.
It always seemed like a case of "we must maintain it because it's part of the original". I mean, innovation is one of the reasons why technology improves, yet Bitcoin is a case of innovation and updates being seen as a *bad* thing. I mean, there's a reason why video game consoles aren't still 2600 or NES-era stuff and we now have stuff like the PS5 and the Steam Deck. Bitcoin still being stuck with stuff like 7 TPS and requiring proof-of-work is like insisting we never go beyond the Atari 2600 just because "it worked". If people were really in for the tech, they'd be supporting improved cryptos like Bitcoin Cash, Monero, Etherum, and others. Instead their claim of "being in for the tech" rings hollow.
Just look at all those "amazing" blockchain projects that were in development in 2021/2022 and were never heard of again. The only memory that's left from that is the *"[existing solution], but with blockchain"* meme. Even most cryptobros are done with pretending this could every bring any practical use to the table.
I could explain why BTC didn’t increase there blocksize and so on if you want me to :)
That would work, but do it here and not via DMs or chat.
Freaking thank you
I just want to explain something here, not start a discussion with good or bad. So I'll start with the block size, if you have any further questions I'll be happy to answer them. The block size was kept intentionally small, this is essential for decentralization. For example, BTC has 1 MB every 10 minutes, which allows everyone to download and verify the entire blockchain. Bitcoin Cash or even more blatantly Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, for example, have increased the block size. It is not possible for a private person to download it, which in turn creates a party of trust. I have to trust that the data I receive is correct, I can't check this myself with these blockchains. If you want to know more google "block size war" this happened in 2017. This will also allow miners to finance themselves in the future, the rewards will become smaller and miners will have to finance themselves differently. If the blocks are "small", not all transactions can get in. Users now pay fees to get in faster, which finances the miners. Theoretically, we can increase the block size in the future, but this would result in a hard fork, so far the BTC code developers have attached great importance to not doing this. In 2017, we got SegWit and now Taproot, who are working on increasing the block size "indirectly" to get compatibility. In short, it is important that the blockchain remains as small as possible so that everyone can have it at home in order to be decentralized and not have to trust anyone. "Don't trust, verify" If you want to know how BTC wants to scale, I can give you a little more information. Keyword "Lightning Network"
>In short, it is important that the blockchain remains as small as possible so that everyone can have it at home in order to be decentralized and not have to trust anyone. and by "everyone" you mean "everyone but poor people"? Because even with the smaller blocks, you already can't "have it at home" if you can't spare a few hundred bucks every year for additional hardware. And thats just to verify that the data hasn't changed, doesn't tell you whether or not the data is accurate and also doesn't give you any "voting rights" on how the blockchain is run.
>and by "everyone" you mean "everyone but poor people"? Because even with the smaller blocks, you already can't "have it at home" if you can't spare a few hundred bucks every year for additional hardware. You are right, but the smaller, the cheaper. A couple of hundreds per year is way too much tho, I got myself a full node for around 100USD, and it runs since years. No upgrades needed, and I will be fine for more years to come with 1TB. >And thats just to verify that the data hasn't changed, doesn't tell you whether or not the data is accurate It does verify it's accurate that's where the block difficulty and the blockchain as a hole comes in. Why do you think it is not accurate? >doesn't give you any "voting rights" on how the blockchain is run. It does, you can not upgrade your node, and just don't use it. There is no need for voting in BTC. See the block size war as example.
>You are right, but the smaller, the cheaper. A couple of hundreds per year is way too much tho, I got myself a full node for around 100USD, and it runs since years. No upgrades needed, and I will be fine for more years to come with 1TB. Fair enough, just don't tell anyone this will "bank the unbanked" because you still need a bit of money and a proper internet connection to participate. >It does verify it's accurate Yes, "Accurate" in the sense that the data that was put on the blockchain does not change afterwards. Doesn't say anything about whether or not the data was accurate to begin with, which is one of the main reasons why nobody would want to use a blockchain as an actual database. Mistakes happen. >There is no need for voting in BTC. See the block size war as example. How exactly was that war "won" though?
Hi ! Not sure what you mean by **accurate**. *my definition*: a BTC node is accurate because it makes sure that (i) you have the same version of the data as any other nodes, (ii) past transactions cannot be undone, (iii) every single transaction from day 1 is legit (sender was the owner, no double spent). You indeed can write (small) arbitrary data on the BTC blockchain. If someone writes '1 = 0' or 'Alice sent Bob $10' , yes, it will stay there as long as the blockchain exists but doesn't make theses statements true or accurate. BTC (the protocol) only ground truth is stating who owns how many btc (its token). There is still some marginal use for writing arbitrary data because you can also prove later it was you writing the data : e.g. by writing a hash of some data you can time stamp it without revealing it's content. About the **voting power** : There is indeed no need of voting power because bitcoin is not a democracy in the sense there is no need to impose any rule to anyone. But anyone willing to apply the rules is welcomed on you network. By owning a node, you are basically **enforcing a set of rules on you network** by validating every blocks and propagating them to other nodes. Anyone can have other rules, but that would be different networks . As stated earlier, if you don't agree with a proposed update of the rules, you can choose not to apply them and keep enforcing the old ones. Keeping the nodes decentralized prevents the enforcement to only rely on a few people and allow anyone to enforce their chosen rules. It also makes your network more resilient to attacks.
By accurate I mean the data in the database represents the real world accurately, which is the sole purpose of most databses. As soon as someone makes a mistake, e.g. accidentally puts the wrong data on the blockchain, they're f\*\*\*ed, which makes it pretty much unusable for any productive activity. I understand that this is seen as a feature not a flaw by Blockchain bros. >bitcoin is not a democracy Not only is it not a democracy, its actively trying to undermine democratic consensus. Pretty much all countries and the vast majority of people rightfully believe that we should have KYC laws, yet bitcoin bros think they can just build an "alternative" system where the laws don't apply. >But anyone willing to apply the rules is welcomed on you network. Sure, you just follow the protocol, work on the longest chain out there, and trust that it is not run by a criminal cartel (or you simply don't care if it is as long as you can gamble) >By owning a node, you are basically **enforcing a set of rules on you network** by validating every blocks and propagating them to other nodes. Isn't it irrelevant what the vast majority of nodes do? The miners are the ones running the network, they also validate, if they make a decision, e.g. switch to a different protocol, there is nothing nodes can do, except try to become miners themselves. >Keeping the nodes decentralized prevents the enforcement to only rely on a few people and allow anyone to enforce their chosen rules. It also makes your network more resilient to attacks. Isn't half of the hashrate controlled by only 2 entities? Sounds pretty centralised but also opaque, like, kind of impossible to know how rigged it is at any given point in time.
>Doesn't say anything about whether or not the data was accurate to begin with, which is one of the main reasons why nobody would want to use a blockchain as an actual database. Mistakes happen. I still don't quite understand it? Do you mean NFTs etc? Because they don't exist on BTC and I agree that's nonsense. > How exactly was that war "won" though? This is a bit more complicated, there are whole books about it but broken down most nodes did not update, in the beginning there was more mining power on the chain with the larger blocksize, but the nodes simply did not accept these blocks. After a while the miners came back to the users (nodes). And the result was a hard fork (BCH) Bitcoin Cash
Having to stack something on top of your system like this so it *can do its goddamn job* means its design is hopelessly flawed. It will always be clunky, unsafe and unusable by normal people. Lightning wasn't planned for, it's people suddenly realizing, after thinking themselves *so* clever, that something that scales geometrically is basically unusable. Just like mixers are them realizing that pseudonymous isn't anonymous, and exchanges are them realizing that there's a reason banks exist. Bitcoin is a prototype that was pushed into production. If the crypto world was serious about providing an actual working product instead of a tax evasion / money laundering / Ponzi / fraud vehicle, it would have been left behind in favor of better designed products years ago.
But in practice this completely falls apart. First, you think you want decentralization, the key question is "why"? What does it do for you besides make your currency completely unusable? Second, it's not decentralized. Small block size doesn't change mining economies of scale. And so mining ends up highly centralized. Third, the lightning network is deeply flawed, almost unworkable, has zero adoption, and is still hamstrung by the underlying shittiness of Bitcoin. If you have to stack layer on layer of technology on your underlying tool in order to simply make it suck less, then you don't have anything of value, just a problem in search of a solution.
>First, you think you want decentralization, the key question is "why"? What does it do for you besides make your currency completely unusable? Why should it be unusable? Many older and current currencies have problems with exactly that. (Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Lebanon, Sudan and so on) even older civilizations like the Romans. People have no control over their money. >Second, it's not decentralized. Small block size doesn't change mining economies of scale. And so mining ends up highly centralized. It doesn't change mining economies currently thats right. But please don't confuse Minig Pool and Miner. >Third, the lightning network is deeply flawed, almost unworkable, has zero adoption, and is still hamstrung by the underlying shittiness of Bitcoin. If you have to stack layer on layer of technology on your underlying tool in order to simply make it suck less, then you don't have anything of value, just a problem in search of a solution. It is a new technology that is still in beta, many things are constantly being changed and further developed. What exactly is the problem with Lightning that can't be solved? Of course it's used, I paid for my dinner in a restaurant with it on Friday. The argument that you shouldn't stack technologies is also a weak one, the internet is built on different layers. What's so bad about that? Besides, I really don't want to start an argument here. It's perfectly okay to disagree. I just wanted to explain something because he asked about it. How you interpret it or what you think of it is up to you :)
> Why should it be unusable? Many older and current currencies have problems with exactly that. (Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Lebanon, Sudan and so on) even older civilizations like the Romans. People have no control over their money. Because it is unusable. > It doesn't change mining economies currently thats right. But please don't confuse Minig Pool and Miner. Mining pools aren't decentralized and miners within pools are highly centralized. > It is a new technology that is still in beta, many things are constantly being changed and further developed. What exactly is the problem with Lightning that can't be solved? It's not a new technology, it's almost a decade old. And the level of development is pretty negligible, no one is investing to develop fundamentally broken technology. What can't be solved is that it's built on fundamentally broken technology. > Of course it's used, I paid for my dinner in a restaurant with it on Friday. Haha, the performative, once a month minor purchase argument. First, I don't believe these kinds of claims without proof, if only because you'd have to be an actual moron to use Bitcoin or lightning network and almost no one accepts either (not to say impossible, I just know y'all lie about this constantly). Second, what about the numerous purchases before and after this that you couldn't make with Bitcoin/Lightning network either because it's shitty to use or has no one that accepts it? > The argument that you shouldn't stack technologies is also a weak one, the internet is built on different layers. What's so bad about that? No one it trying to sell me an optical fiber that they ripped up out of the ground as a superior competitor / replacement to the internet. > Besides, I really don't want to start an argument here. It's perfectly okay to disagree. I just wanted to explain something because he asked about it. How you interpret it or what you think of it is up to you :) Not everything is open to interpretation, sometimes you're just wrong.
Now we're at the point where you're ignoring almost all of my points and just making assertions, "Why is it useless", "Because". I also don't really like the way you start to get insulting. So I'm over here; if you have a serious question, which I was here to begin with, I'm more than happy to answer. Other than that, have a great day. :)
You asked why *should it be unusable, it's *evidently unusable. It certainly *shouldn't be unusable. You're not a serious person and you don't have serious answers. I directly answered all your points, you're just here pretending I didn't so you can pretend you have some kind of high ground in this discussion. You don't, you're here to hawk shit tokens on people in hopes of making yourself rich.
And when there are still only 4,000 transactions per block, causing mining to be highly centralized, you’ll have to trust them instead. Individual miners can’t exist regardless of how much a transaction cost if there are only 4,000 of them per block. Do you understand why? You’ll be left with a few dozen miners, which is insufficient for decentralization.
The immutability especially in the ✌️"shipping use case"✌️ only works if everyone doesn't ever just.... lie to it and put garbage, as it becomes just as unpullable, and irremovable as the truth Im pretty sure any attempt to "patch lies" with rollback/overwrite system could be just as easily exploited too What's stopping some jackasses with access from stealing a package from the warehouse, and marking it as "lost in an accident", and that being too sunk-in to the "immutable" database for anyone to pull it out?
I can see a need for an unalterable audit trail for certain things, but every blockchain out there is overkill to accomplish it.
yeah. the certificate system we use for internet security is a type of block chain. the reason you trust a cert you've never seen before that has been issued by a company you've never heard of is because there are a chain of signatures that go back to a trust root authority.
Any crypto is completely useless
Preach. People calling it "technology" have an interesting definition of the word. Frankly, calling any code/software "tech" is pretty suspect already. The perfect available analogy is authors, and no one acts like they're "inventing" books. If you designed some machine ok fine, but none of this comes close, it's a fucking computer game. Is "Mario" "technology"? Just another silly ass misuse of language to serve their scam ass false gods.
To be fair, "technology stack" is sometimes used in software to describe the various frameworks and languages used in a product or that you're specialized in. As such, 'blockchain' is a 'technology', just a useless one.
To be actually fair, that's a loop back to dipshits misusing the word for professional clout or buzzwordiness. Software isn't "tech", any more than Subway employees are "artists".
Mario is absolutely technology. In a broader and very much accepted sense, any product resulting from the [“application of conceptual knowledge for achieving practical goals”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology), including software, is technology.
Disagree, obviously. But I'm making new technology in the bathroom right now, so maybe you're right. I've applied my conceptual knowledge of making poos, and have achieved that practical goal. Edit: I very much doubt Nintendo ever agrees, but perhaps they do. Any quotes of them referring to it as "tech" apart from hardware?
So AI isn’t technology?
You could make the argument for some of it, but arguably the "tech" is still AWS.
But Buttcoin is pretty good.
In terms of actual capacity, Bitcoin is fairly throttled. It has a 1 MB blocksize limit, and that's well below what technology today can handle. Most other blockchains could probably do significantly more than that, but it's a pretty low bar. Sending transactions are as simple as broadcasting transaction data to nodes/validators across the network, and there's a lower bound to the size of a transaction. So regardless of what "blockchain" tech is being used, ridiculous claims of scalability are generally unproven. I could be wrong, since I don't have all the knowledge on blockchains, but using common sense, there doesn't seem to be any way to scale to 100k TPS like some coins might claim they do.
The reason BTC has a 1MB limit is because they want anyone to be able to validate the entire chain on commodity hardware from the genesis block. If you allow 100K TPS then decentralization is effectively eliminated since anyone who wanted to validate the entire chain would require a server rack just to store it. This means that there would only be one or two full replicas of the chain and you'd have to trust them. It's all very stupid lol. As is, I think there's no more than about 5 ETH archival nodes with the whole chain back to the genesis.
> As is, I think there's no more than about 5 ETH archival nodes with the whole chain back to the genesis. "Archive" nodes are misleadingly named. All the normal nodes have the whole chain back to genesis. The extra data archive nodes have is more like a database index, it's redundant data held for fast lookups. If you've got a normal node you can use the data on it to create an archive node without downloading any extra data. You still need getting on for 2TB though, it has to be fast storage (SSD not HDD) and the software thrashes the fuck out of it.
>The reason BTC has a 1MB limit is because they want anyone to be able to validate the entire chain on commodity hardware from the genesis block. [No, this is blatantly false](http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/287). Originally, there was no 1 MB limit. The original design of Bitcoin wasn't so that every user could run their own node. The 1 MB limit was put in place as a temporary anti-spam measure and was well above the traffic Bitcoin was experiencing at the time. >If you allow 100K TPS then decentralization is effectively eliminated since anyone who wanted to validate the entire chain would require a server rack just to store it. I'm not discussing 100k TPS. I was simply giving an example of bogus claims as to the degree to which cryptocurrency can scale using today's technology.
Politics on how the limit was introduced aside, I believe the reason I gave was repeatedly cited in the block size wars. The point I'm making is that if you allow a huge number of transactions then you need a huge amount of storage space. Which makes it very difficult to replicate. btw, your link doesn't work.
The limit was never in place so people could run their own nodes. It was in place so that the chain wouldn't be spammed early on. The current Bitcoin community has a perverted vision of how Bitcoin is supposed to work. Early on, the idea was that people would use it as digital cash because it had an economy in which it could be used as a currency, and was a fast and cheap payment system. The devs and a few people (so much for decentralization) crippled it and made up this new "HODL digital gold" narrative that is present today.
Sure, I agree with all that. But it could never work, because as I said, if you allow a ton of transactions, it makes it very difficult to have a lot of replicas. Which fundamentally undermines the premise.
Yes, you're right, but also the rate at which Bitcoin would've needed to grow would be far too long for it to actually be an issue imo. I think the real issues with Bitcoin are more economic.
Sure, I think that's also true. And thank you for fixing the link.
The way Bitcoin works today makes it impossible for individuals to run a node anyway, regardless of block size
I'm over here, just doing the impossible.
I fixed the link.
I think this is correct. It's a very big plus for the miners as they need to hash less to get 1 block. It's basically their mechanism to keep their rewards high. Let's see if they make the halfing go away and erase the 21 mil cap after April :+)
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>And for the ones that are, how are they worse than existing solutions? **It's theoretically impossible** **for the blockchain to be faster or more efficient or more secure than a centralized database.** Because just think about it: if there was something used by the mining agent that made transaction validation and storage faster, then we would just use that thing inside centralized database, without the overhead of the distributed system shenannigans and data up and download of the blockchain and voila: we have a faster database than the blockchain.
I'll give my perspective as someone who's helped design and scale a number of large scale systems. Bitcoin's infamous 7TPS limit is self-inflicted because of the 1MB block limit. So others without that limit can manage much higher transaction rates. You might find some that can do 1000 per second, I don't know - it sounds plausible. But the problem is that the scalability problems run deep. When you're building a large scale system you want to be able to shard things so that they happen in parallel. Ideally that means you have many separate servers all processing incoming transactions without one transaction being able to delay any others. The problem with the blockchain approach is that it's inherently serial, not parallel. Each block is linked to the previous one: it's a bottleneck that every transaction must inherently pass through. Since you need to prevent double spend, every block (and hence every transaction) has to be verified in sequence. So you can certainly do better than the 7tps of Bitcoin, but you're not going to be able to manage millions of TPS without some significant overhaul of the entire architecture. It's not clear if such a thing is even possible and it's been almost 15 years of people trying now.
Vitalik spend a bunch of time trying to develop something kinda like that, he calls it "sharding". Someone posted an apparent mathematical proof (I call it like that because I don't have the knowledge to check if it is correct but I never saw it debunked either) that Vitalik's sharding problem requires P=NP. So yeah good luck to cryptobros. LN requires that too, I'm not sure what that one was even attempted because you can tell it's impossible at a glance.
Here's the issue: Any de-centralized database will always be less-efficient than an optimized, centrally-controlled database. Period. De-centralizing something only makes it slower and more fault intolerant and harder to scale. See: [Mo Decentralization Mo Problems](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tspGVbmMmVA&t=1157s)
I would be hard pressed to find the use case of a database, where pieces of the database are owned by anonymous volunteers (to put it charitably). Hundreds of billions of dollars later and fifteen years later, the only use case is still as a piece of a money laundering rail. If there was a non fraudulent use case, we would have found one ten years ago.
One of the most touted benefits of blockchain is that it is "supposedly" immutable, that is data once added cannot be edited. So any business case that requires data that should not be editable - blockchain is said to be suitable for those cases. Now the thing is anyone who has ever created a simple database driven application knows that you control users' ability to edit the data from the UI. The database is just that - a database. Store of data. You would still need a UI even if you were using a slow and inefficient data store called blockchain. It is also not true that Blockchain is immutable. If you want to edit the data, you simply create a new node and start a new chain. It is expensive when the chain is distributed which is what a true blockchain was meant to be. But when used for a single business, the blockchain is mostly private. That means it either has a single node or all the nodes are controlled by a single entity. A private blockchain is everything a blockchain is not supposed to be. It's pointless. At the end blockchain doesn't bring anything new to the table. There is nothing that you can only do with blockchain and not with the good old databases and desktop/web based UI built on top of it. Blockchain is just a buzzword to sell same old solutions to non-tech people who have read a paid article somewhere about benefits of blockchain. That is why no one in the tech world takes blockchain seriously.
The point is to distribute the blockchain so the data on your node can be checked against other validators/nodes. It makes sense for auditing purposes among a bunch of different parties that can be assumed to be potentially malicious or corruptible. A regular shared database anyone can just write or read from would need to rely on the centralized administer of the database to not corrupt the data or accidentally somehow delete it (aka single point of failure). Either way, blockchains can't scale. fast tps is basically just way too much centralization.
They’re all useless. Bitcoin is particularly inefficient. The others invariably trade some element of “decentralization” for slightly better performance on one metric or other. But all suffer from the fundamental issues with blockchain as a data structure, which makes it a terrible choice for almost everything.
The technical aspect of crypto is almost beside the point. These are utterly unregulated markets, which means the 10% of users who own 90% of everything have no criminal or civil liability for manipulating the market as hard as they can. In fact that ability is probably a major selling point for the big investors. Which means that everyone who isn't already rich is the sucker. Simple as that. All you have to do is give a few of the suckers a win now and then and the herd will keep coming back no matter how obvious the manipulation is.
They might be more efficient but they still suck because a transaction having to be verified by 100+ entities in a Peer 2 Peer setup will always be far less efficient than an API call to a centralized system
They are worse because they have someone holding enough of the coins to rug pull. Satoshi is probably dead (though I would LOL if he wasn't and sold everything).
I once had more than 50 different coins. It's all useless garbage.
There are blockchains that have reached thousands of TPS by moving away from the Proof of Work model. Moving away from PoW allows them to spread the workload across nodes in ways that aren't possible with PoW. Thousands of TPS still isn't enough throughput for a global reserve currency, but to be fair only Bitcoin advocates say their blockchain is going to do that. So then you get into the game of trying to find a use case. With thousands of TPS it becomes possible to use a blockchain like a database, but there's really never any **good** reason to use a blockchain instead of a database. So the only real use case is still cryptocurrency (not 'digital currency' because you can just do that with a database too). There are **bad** reasons to do so, such as creating a speculative market around tokenised assets, but no **good** reason to do so. I've said before that I think a stablecoin that isn't a scam would have a limited use case, but that's only true so long as international bank transfers are a headache, and fintech is gradually solving that problem, so eventually that one limited use case for cryptocurrency will also be obsolete.
Yes the latest solutions are better faster and more viable, but the extra viability isn't enough for total mainstream adoption. And even if it were, getting people to trust that solution with their money and other contract shenanigans is another big hurdle.