> they have intense hatred for anyone with a different opinion, even the very people who developed bitcoin.
Hal Finney, the very first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction claimed, quote:
"Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient." [1]
And Satoshi Nakamoto stated:
"Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale." [...] "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices." [2]
Did you have anyone else in mind? Perhaps Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen? It's a matter of historical record that these two believe gigablocks will assuredly cause Bitcoin P2P nodes to become confined to datacenters. Their gigablocker quotes follow:
Gavin Andresen: "there will be big companies spending lots of engineering dollars on their own highly optimized versions of bitcoin. I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa/MasterCard/etc networks" [3]
Mike Hearn: "probably 2 or 3 racks of machines" [4]
Gavin Andresen: "No, it's completely distributed at the moment. That will begin to change as we scale up. I don't want to oversell BitCoin. As we scale up there will be bumps along the way. I'm confident of it. Why? For example, as the volume of transactions come up--right now, I can run BitCoin on my personal computer and communicate over my DSL line; and I get every single transaction that's happening everywhere in the world. As we scale up, that won't be possible any more. If there are millions of bitcoin transactions happening every second, that will be a great problem for BitCoin to have--means it is very popular, very trusted--but obviously I won't be able to run it on my own personal computer. It will take dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces, and that kind of big iron to actually do all that transaction processing. I'm confident that will happen and that will evolve. But right now all the people trying to generate bitcoins on their own computers and who like the fact that they can be a self-contained unit, I think they may not be so happy if BitCoin gets really big and they can no longer do that."
Amir Taaki, author of libbitcoin and one of the most ardent early adopters of Bitcoin is further in strong disagreement with Gavin and Mike, and always has been! So this notion that the "original people" are being hated on, is just false. Read the libbitcoin manifesto [5], or the "Political Neutrality is a Myth" interview [6].
After Gavin and Mike's push for radically reshaping Bitcoin from a P2P currency into a DatacenterCoin failed (multiple times), this whole issue culminated in Gavin exclaiming that Craig Wright must be Satoshi Nakamoto, "beyond a reasonable doubt"! Which may have had at least something to do with the fact that Craig claimed to be running Bitcoin with 340GB blocks on his (also confirmed fake) "supercomputer". But of course the Craig and Gavin show had been meticulously timed to coincide with a major industry conference. Had it not been for astute cybersleuths cracking the case within minutes of it making the media rounds, we could've seen Gavin reclaim the throne with the help of an utter conman.
Yes, some people are ticked at these guys, as they should be. It's a remarkably (!!!) hostile environment that we've been dealing with for over 18 months, as the current lead developer Wlad so aptly puts it:
"Day in, day out, there is trolling, targeted attacks, shilling on social media targeted toward us. I don’t know of any other project like this. I’ve seen developer teams in MMOs under similar pressure from users; but possibly this is even worse. There, there are avid disagreements about how the game rules should be changed, here people get worked up about changes affecting a whole economic system. And the people attacking are, in many cases, not even users of the software." [7]
Most of that is a strawman: wanting to grow the main chain is not the same as wanting every transaction in world on it. Pushing the spam limit back so far that it acts only as a spam limit again gives breathing room for various layer 2 technologies to develop, and relinquishes a tool used for central control of the economic activity.
> cause Bitcoin P2P nodes to become confined to datacenters.
Someone paid a Russian hacker to DDOS the Bitcoin Classic nodes, and what we learned from that was that the nodes in datacenters are the only ones which can't be trivially knocked off the internet. If you want resiliance, get nodes in as many datacenters of different sovereign jurisdictions as possible. The nodes running on home connections are an illusion.
(at least until home internet connections come with DDOS mitigation tools)
What part of "they have intense hatred for anyone with a different opinion, even the very people who developed bitcoin" didn't you understand? What kind of person lambasts another for giving primary sourced, direct quotes to counter a misconception?
BTW, this too is a misconception: "and what we learned from that was that the nodes in datacenters are the only ones which can't be trivially knocked off the internet"
Right, because you didn't learn to run Tor hidden service nodes. You also didn't learn to proxy your connection over SSH. No, that would make too much sense. What you learned was that you had to physically relocate your node to a datacenter. Golf clap.
> If you want resiliance, get nodes in as many datacenters of different sovereign jurisdictions as possible. The nodes running on home connections are an illusion.
Welcome to 2013?
> Your suggestions don't stop the address published to the p2p network from being flooded.
bitcoind -?
-externalip=<ip>
Specify your own public address
-onion=<ip:port>
Use separate SOCKS5 proxy to reach peers via Tor hidden services
(default: -proxy)
-onlynet=<net>
Only connect to nodes in network <net> (ipv4, ipv6 or onion)
> In a perfect game system you'd probably make labor income taxes less than capital gains on investment
Indeed you would [1]. According to some legal scholars, wages earned from labor were/are not supposed to be taxed at all in America. The tax code was designed to tax investment gains only. Just imagine if that were upheld
> The fact is lower/middle class labor income workers put more directly back into the economy than the wealthy "job creators"
By doing what? Consuming consumables marketed to them by Corporations? The same Corporations that would just as soon replace most of their menial labor with robots.
Also, I'd curb your exuberance towards believing the lower/middle class "puts more back into the economy", because to the extent the lower/middle class is increasingly replaced by robots or cheap foreign labor, if this is your true belief then we should institute a universal income. Because that's going to "put more back into the economy".
> Demand comes from people that spend
But for example, planned obsolescence encourages spending. But is planned obsolescence really a tangible benefit for the "people that spend"?
Also, imagine if "cash" was of fixed supply (Bitcoin) rather than inflationary. In which case, you could make paper gains over time by not spending it or investing it. Wouldn't this provide more people with financial security given the risks and complexity of investing money in general?
> Also, imagine if "cash" was of fixed supply (Bitcoin) rather than inflationary. In which case, you could make paper gains over time by not spending it or investing it. Wouldn't this provide more people with financial security given the risks and complexity of investing money in general?
New currencies are needed but bitcoin and old school gold for that matter encourage hoarding, gold is worse because the control of gold is owned by physical mining. At least bitcoin doesn't leave monetary value up to physical mining, but still it does encourage hoarding. If a currency gains value over time doing nothing then investment will be lower.
Fiat currencies encourage investment because the value of your money goes down if it sits and is hoarded. Even though control of the currency is by the Fed and shadowy banking cabals, at least it spawns investment by wealth as they like to increase their money not see it slowly fade away to inflation.
Investment is key to growth/innovation but there has to be some demand there. Demand creation is always overlooked, when wages aren't raised, when companies move out of the US etc. These things directly impact demand and purchasing power of consumers at all levels eventually.
What will the robots build, sell or manage if noone has any money to buy anything? I don't necessarily buy that robots will remove all work. Computers were supposed to do the same, it has just enabled productivity gains to do more with less. There will always be more work to do, we haven't even explored very far off this rock. We need robots at every level but it won't mean less work, we'll have robot armies and it will enable entrepreneurs to do more with less.
Consumers don't buy 2% more chicken at the grocery store just because "inflation is 2%". That's total nonsense with no basis in reality. And investors will still make traditional investments in a deflationary environment, BTC denominated loan markets and "IPOs" are the case in point to that end.
Granted, in a deflationary environment, investments will be less profitable if the projects being invested in are dependent on consumers spending money frivolously.
> Investment is key to growth/innovation but there has to be some demand there. Demand creation is always overlooked, when wages aren't raised, when companies move out of the US etc. These things directly impact demand and purchasing power of consumers at all levels eventually.
Society gains purchasing power at large in a deflationary environment.
And note that, if the American economy grows 10% in a year, the Fed will still strive for inflation. If economic growth is 10% and inflation is 1%, the upper echelons of society will have skimmed 10% off the top, robbing society of that growth. Conversely, in a Bitcoin world, the 10% economic growth is returned to the savers in the form of more purchasing power.
>What will the robots build, sell or manage if noone has any money to buy anything? I don't necessarily buy that robots will remove all work.
I believe we will witness the rise of the leisure economy. Most people who still hold jobs will perform them in fields related to tourism and leisure activities, such as yoga teachers, tour guides, climbing, diving, boxing, golf instructors, etc. Basically robots/computers will eventually perform all tasks which do not necessarily require a human. Or in other words: The leisure industry will always require humans because it's catering for human experiences and not human needs.
For the aspect that you're referring to, see the question for "The income tax cannot apply to wages, because that would be a “direct tax” that must be apportioned in accordance with the Constitution":
> The income tax that was challenged in the Pollock decision was similar, and the majority opinion first struck down the tax on incomes from property (i.e., rents, interests, and dividends), but then went on to state that, if only the tax on interest, rents, dividends, and other income from property were ruled unconstitutional, “this would leave the burden of the tax to be borne by professions, trades, employments, or vocations; and in that way a tax on capital would remain in substance a tax on occupations and labor.” Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co., 158 U.S. 601, 637 (1895). The majority opinion therefore held that the entire tax act was unconstitutional, believing that Congress would invalidate the entire tax act rather than tax only “occupations and labor.” (The minority opinion in Pollock believed that the entire tax was constitutional, and so did not need to distinguish between income from property and income from employment.)
> That a tax on wages and other compensation for labor would have been constitutional even before the adoption of the 16th Amendment was confirmed by the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court in Brushaber, in which the court stated:
>> “Nothing could serve to make this clearer than to recall that in the Pollock Case, in so far as the law taxed incomes from other classes of property than real estate and invested personal property, that is, income from ‘professions, trades, employments, or vocations,’ (158 U.S. 637), its validity was recognized; indeed it was expressly declared that no dispute was made upon that subject, and attention was called to the fact that taxes on such income had been sustained as excise taxes in the past. Id. p. 635.”
Rules in blockchain-based software cannot change ex post facto. The only decision involved is the user's choice to use the application in the first place. These are user-controlled applications.
(I've tried explaining these as applications that no one controls, but that has a wild west connotation that isn't applicable.)
"I've tried explaining these as applications that no one controls, but that has a wild west connotation that isn't applicable."
it's also a statement that's simply not true. the parties that usually control financial and legal systems might not control it. it might be the case that no single person or single organization controls it. but to say that "no one controls" it is false. there are people whose input controls it. if that were not the case, it would not be useful.
My point is running all the nodes in the cloud means that the users of those nodes don't own them.
> the user's choice to use the application in the first place.
Right, but if none of the users can even run the so called "peer-to-peer" component, what's the difference between that and run-of-the-mill centralized DB software? Either way nobody but the chosen few can directly access the DB.
You are clearly talking to an Ethereum investor and not a programmer. A large part of the Ethereum hype is using blockchains where they are woefully the wrong tool for the job.
Haha, you didn't even take the effort to look at my profile. I write code. Like many Ethereum developers, I own ether. My comments apply to any EVM-based blockchain, and there will be many.
> Ethereum is a world computer. As in, it acts like a single public computer that can perform computations for anyone who is willing to pay for them, but instead of this computer being run by a third party, it's run by the network as a whole.
Compared to actual Python code, or Ruby code, or any code that you can imagine, Ethereum VM code is a hobbled down child's toy. Think: Gameboy from 1995. The memory is scant. The performance, abysmal.
> This is useful for any situation where you would usually need a trusted third party to perform some computations or enforce one side of a bargain - for example ecommerce/escrow, trading, voting, bets, issuing stock/currency, plus other things that probably have not even been thought of yet.
You can do all of those things with Bitcoin. We don't promote it much because no one has cared to use any of it for years. It's always hooked in investors, though. Lots and lots of investors.
> and now think that without a leader it's doomed to design by committee and stalemate on key decisions
As a regular in the cryptocurrency world, it's evident that no matter what you do, someone is going to find a reason to criticize you. One day these people are criticising Bitcoin for being run by a cabal of closely knit developers, the next you see this guy saying Bitcoin doesn't have a leader and is instead being designed by an apparently leaderless committee. They seem to alter their concerns and their approach to criticising Bitcoin depending on which way the wind is blowing.
BTW, I'm going to assume something and you should too: adrianmacneil here is almost assuredly long ETH. He probably albeit less assuredly so doesn't own any BTC. In any case you can assume I have the opposite portfolio.
First and foremost, Bitcoin and Ethereum couldn't possibly be more different. Bitcoin is a "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Bitcoin places a higher value on securing the cash. It places tamper resistance above all else, and generally takes no chances on that. That's a feature, not a bug.
Because if that core unit fails, then the entire cash system collapses. You can't exactly have a global currency that fails mid voyage. Modern financial systems don't do that very often and neither should Bitcoin.
Conversely, Ethereum is a smart contracts platform through and through. It has 15 second block times. It has its own VM. This VM has had critical vulnerabilities in the recent past, and is less than 1 year into production.
Notice how Bitcoin could never be about smart contracts like Ethereum does, at its core, since Bitcoin could only do that by taking on existential risk?
However, that doesn't mean Bitcoin can't better manage its risk by making what is essentially a "unikernel" for Ethereum functionality on top of the Bitcoin network. Sure it won't be totally perfect, but it will do everything Ethereum does, without exception, and will do so without compromising the core of Bitcoin's network, when doing so would jeopardize the cash system.
And this is what the poster I'm responding to completely misses when he says:
> [Ethereum] offers a "bytecode" type language which can be created by compiling contracts in >=2 languages already. Bitcoin currently lets you define contracts in the equivalent of assembly code, with no higher level languages available. So this statment seems to apply more to Bitcoin than Ethereum.
The point is, once you have the unikernel model down, who cares if it's Ethereum? Ethereum's VM is very first generational, highly unproven, highly unstable, has God knows how many vulnerabilities not to mention competitors who develop competing languages and competing VMs. We don't want to be in that business. We want to be in the business of running the best of it as a unikernel without even remotely jeopardizing the entire system all at once, though I understand Ethereum kind of had to do that in order to raise money. Turns out if you don't raise a bunch of money from a bunch of investors, you don't get people to voluntarily promote you on HN and Reddit.
> That's basically what Rootstock[0] is supposed to be. Although at present, it seems to be vaporware.
Speaking of Ethereum promoters, they do have a knack for reminding you how the unikernels of cryptocurrency will surely never exist. Nothing to see here.
You raise good points. I think one of the reasons why the conversations surrounding cryptocurrencies are disproportionally emotional is that everybody is long something and inevitably biased because of it.
Also, I agree that comparing BTC and ETH is bogus, they share nothing more than a blockchain but have completely different goals and governance structures, ETH being more like a traditional startup.
In a world were most people haven't heard of blockchains or distrust them, 'competing' with other blockchains is just silly (nobody is really competing anyway, except for mindshare on forums).
Now, disclaimer, I am long ETH, though not by much. Cool sci-fi stories and evangelism aside, I think it's like other startups so it should face the same risk of ruin, which is roughly 90%. So in that sense we might even agree, except I feel like this "very first generational, highly unproven, highly unstable" might turn into something.
> once you have the unikernel model down, who cares if it's Ethereum?
That's a very technical argument, but I'm not at all convinced that the world will adopt a technically superior solution, especially if it is late to the game. Without momentum behind it, it might not even be superior for long. So if there is any application for blockchain VMs, it will probably run on the EVM, all else being equal.
>You raise good points. I think one of the reasons why the conversations surrounding cryptocurrencies are disproportionally emotional is that everybody is long something and inevitably biased because of it.
These tokens ruin a lot of the incentives that makes open source software work. They attract non-technical people and ideologues. The whole thing is a mess.
Bitcoin and Ethereum investors who put a few thousands of their own money on the line years ago have seen it rocket up in value into a considerable fortune.
Naturally, to the extent an investment makes you "rich", the investment occupies a proportionately larger share of your net worth. And to the extent it's a major component of your net worth, especially if your net worth allows for you to retire early, this makes for a situation where you will justify doing and saying anything and everything possible to promote your own interests, which are now dominated by, in our case Bitcoin or Ethereum.
This is why distinguished readers can practically see the greed pouring out of people's eye balls as they discuss these "technologies". Pro tip: call it a "technology" when you're invested in it, but call it an "investment" when you're not.
As you've noted, this gets incredibly frustrating to deal with in the cryptocurrency world. Not just because it applies to so many people, but because cryptocurrency itself is all just a confidence game of trying to get people to buy into a particular unit of account.
For example, I doubt if any of the Ethereum people actually use smart contracts, like ever. They're only using that as an angle to poach investment capital off Bitcoin. We all can see this is true because no one is making any money on "smart contracts". Ironically, the only people who have ever made money on smart contracts - cough Ethereum - did it by selling other people on the idea of smart contracts. Buy smart contracts now!
You seem to have pretty reasonable and moderate opinions, which I respect. And yes, for the record I do currently own a decent number of Ether (because I believe in the project), and I still own a decent (but lesser amount) of Bitcoin (I certainly haven't given up on it completely).
The main point of my post was responding to Bitcoin evangelism with counter arguments, so I guess it did come across a little fanboyish. I don't disagree that it would be nice if Bitcoin could become a sort of "layer 1" in the blockchain space, with smart contracts built on top of it using additional protocols (and I believed for the past couple years that this was the most likely outcome for Bitcoin).
The main problem I now have with this model is that there are still missing features in this layer 1 which Bitcoin needs to support before decent solutions can be built on top of it (e.g. 2-way pegged sidechains, which require at least a couple of new opcodes). Every time Bitcoin wants to support a new use case, it requires someone to submit a BIP, months of development work, debating, and a soft fork to implement. For an example, see the recent OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY soft fork. This is not the sort of thing which can be built in layer 2 - it needs to be supported by the underlying blockchain, specifically so that people can build other layer 2 solutions on top of it. This is just one of many features - every few weeks someone suggests a new opcode on the bitcoin mailing list (and they often get shot down). This is why I originally got excited about Ethereum - while the "turing complete" badge is a bit of a buzzword, they really have solved the problem of creating a generic blockchain which can have anything else built on top of it.
Now, this is not to say that Ethereum is entirely without risk. For sure, Bitcoin is a more secure network, and definitely a better place to park your money if you are looking for long term stability. Bitcoin is also optimizing for stability and decentralization over adding shiny new features, which is simply different priorities and not at all a bad thing. Ethereum still have a long road ahead of them, both with attempting to shift a live blockchain to proof of stake, and with scaling (which will probably be even harder than the challenges Bitcoin is currently facing). But overall I find the project to be a very interesting and exciting development in the blockchain space.
I find it noteworthy that crypto-currencies are treated as investments and 'bets' which would seems to imply instability or a design feature of fluctuating value.
Almost as if a primary motive behind designing crypto "currency" protocols is not a stable value exchange medium, but rather instead an investment system for early adopters to exploit late adopter buyers?
"Maker is a DAO based on the Ethereum blockchain, where it maintains the infrastructure for the Dai - a cryptocurrency that uses smart contract-enforced monetary policy to create price stability.
The Dai enables Ethereum users to transact with smart contracts and applications on the Ethereum blockchain without having to deal with the volatility that is associated with traditional cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. It also functions as a decentralized savings account as it is long term deflationary, resulting in slow and steady capital gains.
Maker is able to maintain the price stability of the Dai through the Dai Credit System, which backs the Dai with collateral stored in Ethereum smart contracts, while simultaneously functioning as an internet-based, p2p credit market that commoditizes credit by allowing anyone with valid collateral to take out loans that have low transaction costs and no middle man fees."
"they really have solved the problem of creating a generic blockchain which can have anything else built on top of it."
No, actually they haven't. Try and explain how a distributed system should be Turing complete in a scientific paper and you'd notice its not possible. Eventually this will be discovered and this blockchain will implode. The centralised team doesn't even claim that the chain will last - they want to migrate to PoS.
I don't understand what you are saying is impossible about this.
Are you just saying "try it and be really careful about it and you will see that it is impossible"? Because I don't see why that claim should be convincing without, saying why?
huh? Computers on the Internet don't coordinate like nodes in a P2P blockchain. Bitcoin's script is limited to a simple stack language for a very good reason.
But you can port any and all features to sidechains or Enigma [1], and in doing so make them accessible to a much bigger market, denominated in BTC which is a more stable and proven unit of account.
Or at least that's how the story is supposed to go. In theory, porting nice-to-have features to a larger audience results in more revenue and more overall societal benefit than starting a new scarcity race, which Ethereum has done, pitting investors against each other.
I meant lowercase core, not uppercase Core. His most recent contribution is to the "Bitcoin Classic" fork rather than the "Core" fork. He's still a key developer in the Bitcoin community. I wasn't trying to wade into the Bitcoin political issues. It's all "Bitcoin"
Whats relevant to first post is that Bitcoin Foundation is a non profit aimed at bettering the Bitcoin ecosystem, similar to EthDEV, not some corporate owner of Ethereum IP, and they help move forward development of "Bitcoin"
> I generally agree with this sentiment--the biggest value blockchains provide to decentralized applications is an inimitable 100%-replicated log
You're coming at this backwards. Once you have the most valuable cryptocurrency unit of account, you have the most security and the highest availability log in the world. On that basis, you can do just about anything, e.g. sidechains or payment channels.
A "highly replicated log" is a prerequisite of that, and Bitcoin is currently winning that battle due to first mover advantage. Hence, anything can be built on top of that basis.
If you have small competitor to Bitcoin that aims to do more, it's more valuable for the majority to snipe the features from the small competitor and make those features available denominated in the majority owned asset.
Ethereum and Bitcoin can, and should, coexist. Both have something to offer to one another.
For example, check out btcrelay.org. While you're waiting for Bitcoin to "snipe the features from the small competitor", that small competitor can lend a helping hand to Bitcoin.
Global electronic cash is a zero sum game. Money is pure network effect and only one unit of account can have 90% global market share at a time. I want that to be BTC. You want that to be ETH. Let's just agree to disagree?
I want BTC to fulfill our need for global electronic cash and Ethereum to fulfill our need for a developer-friendly Dapp environment.
The bigger Bitcoin becomes, the more we all benefit from a stable universal currency. The bigger Ethereum becomes, the more we all benefit from a rich set of shared resources for developing apps that use BTC in ways that we've been dreaming of for years.
Bitcoin's killer apps might be Ethereum Dapps. That wouldn't mean that Ether "failed" as a currency or that Bitcoin "failed" because Ethereum was used to build the killer apps. It'd mean both are succeeding!
Life is more colorful when it's not just black and white.
But Ethereum's raison d'etre is "X for the blockchain".
VISA does 56,000 tps.
So it's really simple. How are you going to hit 56,000 tps on the blockchain. The Bitcoin community, which is far bigger and generally more experienced than Ethereum's just spent 18 months vigorously debating this question. Do you suggest Ethereum has come up with a better answer?
And the criticism here is around the selling point of Ethereum: "everything goes on the blockchain". You're telling me after 18 months of debate, the best you've got to say about that is: "an account based architecture"?
What is it about widgets fully encapsulated in a blockchain-native smart contract on Ethereum that makes it so much more scaleable than a similar widget on Bitcoin's blockchain?
There are several things Ethereum does currently that's better for scaling.
1) It produces blocks every 17 seconds. It can do this without neglecting security, because orphan blocks count as uncles and are included in the security of the whole network.
2) It has a scalable/dynamic blocksize. The miners can scale the gas limit up or down by a certain amount. If the current gas limit (pi million) gets hit, miners can start increasing it.
3) Tx fees purpose is primarily for DDOS protection & solving the halting problem with turing-complete scripts. It's not a fundamental element for security, because the issuance rate is constant. This means that a "fee market" doesn't need to exist as much as in Bitcoin, in order to make sure the blockchain remains alive. It has an infinite, but predictable supply, rather than finite.
4) Future scalability improvements include Casper PoS, which will decrease block time to around 1 - 4 seconds & sharding, which will remove the need for every node to process every part of the transaction space.
These additions will mean that for the current period, transactions will increase, and perhaps lead to more centralization as not many will run nodes to keep the whole state. This is a trade-off in return for running more transactions.
What block size for Ethereum's blockchain would be required to hit 56,000 tps? I'm really getting some deja vu in having to write this out for the millionth time in a 18 month period.
None of your talking points magically address the extreme costs of prerequisite physical infrastructure needed to hit 56,000 tps.
Bottom line, it's impossible to match the throughput capacity of just a single credit card company on any blockchain, be it Bitcoin or Ethereum or BBQCoin, without incurring enormous costs in terms of CPU and bandwidth. This is to say nothing of doing decentralized exchanges, order matching, and option contracts - all of which Ethereum has been advertised as doing on a blockchain. For that you'd need hundreds of thousands of tps.
Make block time 1s. Allow blocks to hold 1M transactions. Problem solved?
Granted, this doesn't deliver the physical infrastructure to process that many transactions - but that will happen over time. Visa didn't process 56k tps on day one, either.
Is that 17 seconds per block globally, or per client? If it's global, how long would the average client take to generate a block?
If it's going to take hours to generate a block, I'm worried that it's going to take forever for an app to generate enough ether to get anything done; buying the stuff using real money is a nonstarter for most applications, so generating it on demand is the only real option.
Blockchains don't need to take over a substantial percentage of economic activity to be useful. I don't understand why people bring up transaction limits as if they permanently cripple the technology.
The throughput capacity of Bitcoin, being programmable money, isn't a user limit. We can just as soon put billions of users with BTC-denominated accounts at higher layers of abstraction, and in fact this is exactly what Bitcoin's core developers aim to achieve. It doesn't make any sense to globally broadcast every last Starbucks coffee and permanently etch it into an immutable database at enormous cost.
That's what I keep telling them. The whole of credit processing and banking... even the Fed... runs on centralized, transactional architectures with redundant datacenters and optionally redundant checks from mutually-distrusting parties. What people want to do can be built on a highly-efficient, log-based system with distributed checking run by a foundation (or international collaboration) in a neutral country. It would be simpler, more secure, use less energy, faster, and so on. Additionally, we can choose what level of detail we want in reporting or auditing to reduce data overload.
These blockchain models want everything to go on a blockchain whose operational hurdles even they can't agree on. It's like this subfield of IT is ignoring simple solutions to simple problems while pushing complex solutions with complex problems.
So, I add to your own question: what is it about a smart contract on Bitcoin or Ethereum that couldn't be done with a signed email or website document optionally run through a few cryptographic notaries? The latter is not only simpler and more efficient: it's in use commercially with many courts already approving of concepts and some implementations.
Ironically, the only people who have made money on smart contracts - cough Ethereum - did it by convincing other investors to part with their money subsequent to selling those investors on the idea of smart contracts. That whole sub-niche industry is just a big cess pool of people chasing investment gains that we're told can be had by pointlessly tilting at windmills.
Conversely, Bitcoin never promised smart contracts. To the extent Bitcoiners take part in Ethereum debates, we're only doing it because we know the real game Ethereum is playing is diverting investment capital away from Bitcoin.
The reason to use a blockchain is because you're locked out of service in the incumbent models. That means : gambling, drugs, sometimes porn, and capital flight. That's why you use a blockchain. (And IMO, that's what makes them so cool)
Otherwise - Blockchains totally suck at everything, and these private-blockchains/blockchains without energy are completely inane and stupid
I haven't seen anyone say that. Why can you do those things with a blockchain but not non-blockchain, settled ledgers? Seems like it boils down to rules and who is enforcing them rather than the tech.
Correct. Blockchains are for regulatory arbitrage. The entirety of the efficiency of any blockchain depends on the regulatory environment. If drugs and gambling were legalized tommorrow, across the Internet connected world, no one would mine, and blockchain would die.
I'm focusing on the other end of this. Couldn't those blockchains or at least those related to criminal activity be made illegal, controlled via regulation, or seized? I don't see how a blockchain is immune to this if people ever try to convert it to cash.
The answer, I suspect, is that it potentially wholly and fundamentally disempowers existing centralized authorities - as asset issuers, regulators, reputation police, debt collectors, and border-guards - and promises to outlive them, with relative guarantees of high availability and no SPOFs.
You mean it claims to. In reality, these will be centralized things under management or control of companies with an ecosystem interacting with them. Regulators and lawyers will step in to do their thing. The result is... another set of authorities giving us problems. That's what future it's looking like will happen.
Of course, the problems on authorities' side might be better or worse with the new models. Nonetheless, my argument is that these blockchains are essentially a combination of specific tech, ledgers, distributed verification, cooperation, and incentives on infrastructure side. You can do all that without blockchains using simple, dumb tech with different organizational structure & participation rules.
Decentralized systems are demonstrably less centralized than conventional capitalistic private sector/bank/gov/licensing hierarchies and the monopolies they foster. As you point out, it's the human factor that's generally the problem. I doubt we'll ever see a better illustration there than the current situation with Bitcoin. Historically, we've seen the well chronicled growth of government and commercial interests on the internet. Both are good examples of decentralized systems that fail or are weakened through human causes. I suppose these are the same areas in which offensive security research is focused.
We should be smart enough now not to put all of our trust in to one system, and instead to foster a biological-style heterogeneity of systems, all of which we can opt in/out of on a dynamic basis based upon their various objective properties and our risk model versus requirements (==motives).
"As you point out, it's the human factor that's generally the problem. I doubt we'll ever see a better illustration there than the current situation with Bitcoin. "
BOOM! Now you're seeing what I'm talking about. Regardless of the tech, it ends up coming down to the people controlling key companies, organizations, or code. Plus the legal system. So, I prefer just fixing that angle on a centralized system run by mutually-suspicious parties with open verification and incentives aligned right way.
"instead to foster a biological-style heterogeneity of systems, all of which we can opt in/out of on a dynamic basis based upon their various objective properties and our risk model versus requirements (==motives)."
That's a good idea. I'd push several good ones if they were available. Preferably they'd be really different from one another to maximize the diversity benefit. Another angle on that is to derive the currency value from a set of high-value or stable commodities. That was what high-assurance engineer Clive Robinson pushed for as an alternative to either gold or our currency. Turns out, there's an altcoin company doing exactly that. Can't recall the name.
When we founded Kraken, I did a lot of research and reach-out in the alternate financial systems space. The 'basket of commodities' suggestion is very well promoted by theorists in that area, though of course it doesn't remove the problem of manipulation: whether static or dynamic in composition, it has the same problem as setting central bank interest rates today - prior knowledge of manual change to the system becomes profitable, and corruption ensues. Some also suggest emphasizing particular qualities in the selected commodities.
Well, as I understand it, there's no technical reason Ethereum can't do the 56,000 tps. Ethereum has no fixed block size. Realistically, obviously, you'd need more and more compute power.
The end goal is to prevent only having large institutions running nodes and to keep the system more decentralized, hence the need for better scaling options. (Bitcoin has become more decentralized as it has aged, with fewer small nodes running)
And I'm not saying that Ethereum has it all solved, just that the system is different enough that some of the issues are not applicable. It's not useful, in my opinion, to just throw up your hands and say "It can never scale!!". First because there's no absolute limitation for scaling, only things that make it costly. Back in the day, if you asked someone how the early Internet was going to scale, it would have seemed like an equally impossible task. There's plenty of time to work on the issues before we need 56,000 tps.
> The end goal is to prevent only having large institutions running nodes and to keep the system more decentralized, hence the need for better scaling options. (Bitcoin has become more decentralized as it has aged, with fewer small nodes running)
Right, but that wasn't the question I raised. I asked what does Ethereum do different than Bitcoin that makes its blockchain more scaleable? The answer is, of course, nothing. If merge-mined sidechains and overlay protocols are your solution, Bitcoin is non-stop innovating in that direction.
> It's not useful, in my opinion, to just throw up your hands and say "It can never scale!!".
But if you're just going to throw up your hands and say "put it in the cloud", that's no different than what Bitcoin bigblockists want to do.
> I asked what does Ethereum do different than Bitcoin that makes its blockchain more scaleable
But I did answer what it does different. I cited a few of the many things it does different, one of which is an account based model. Another is faster and unlimited sized blocks. And if you care to read more of the development threads, you'd find lots of other solutions. Ignoring facts and continuing to say "The answer is, of course, nothing" is just FUD.
Here's a quote from Vitalik in October:
"Scalability: using a combination of sharding schemes, random sampling, heavy use of Merkle proofs and asynchronous calling in order to increase the potential transaction throughput from ~10-20 transactions per second to over 100000 (or, if super-quadratic versions are used, a theoretically unlimited number). The basic concepts behind scaling have been set in stone for over six months, and our research team is highly confident that the general approach is valid;"
> But if you're just going to throw up your hands and say "put it in the cloud"
Who said anything of the sort? I'm saying it's a hard problem, but it's tractable and takes resources and time. What's that got to do with the cloud??
Ultimately I don't understand the whole negative attitude on scaling. Obstacles are not a reason to not attempt something, and certainly not potential scaling issues. Making the Internet was hard. In 1993 people could have said "computers are expensive.. and think of all the cables you'd have to lay! It's going to be millions of miles of cables! It'll never happen! This whole WWW thing is just a toy fad!"
56k TPS is a supposed peak at burst volumes, in reality the number is closer to 3K TPS but that's beside the point.
Until there's a real need for bitcoin to support this sort of volume (if ever) I don't think comparing bitcoin to visa tps wise proves anything.
If there's enough customer adoption where there's a need to handle that kind of volume you can rest assured there will be infrastructure to support it and instead of a loose group of "core devs" there will be an official salaried department (at visa? :) ) working on this full time.
> If there's enough customer adoption where there's a need to handle that kind of volume you can rest assured there will be infrastructure to support it and instead of a loose group of "core devs" there will be an official salaried department (at visa? :) ) working on this full time.
But since we're talking about "decentralized systems", the question is who owns the blockchain infrastructure. Is the blockchain going to be serviceable on home desktop PCs, or are you going to need a datacenter?
To really drive this example home, could you please quote me a price on building out a Tier 1 datacenter with gigabit fiber? Because last I checked most people don't have that kind of money in their sofa cushion. And it isn't even remotely feasible to acquire that sort of infrastructure anonymously.
Yet that's what it's going to take to hit 56,000 tps on a blockchain any time this decade or perhaps even after [1]:
> Next month, the worldwide semiconductor industry will formally acknowledge what has become increasingly obvious to everyone involved: Moore's law, the principle that has powered the information-technology revolution since the 1960s, is nearing its end.
A common mistake is confusing "popularity" with decentralization. BitTorrent is both popular and decentralized. It doesn't take a datacenter and a 10-machine cluster to participate in a BT swarm as a full-on peer. As an aside, it's no surprise the creator of BitTorrent is staunchly against scaling Bitcoin in datacenters [2].
"To really drive this example home, could you please quote me a price on building out a Tier 1 datacenter with gigabit fiber? Because last I checked most people don't have that kind of money in their sofa cushion."
"Big boys" do though. And that is my point exactly - if there's enough tx volume (driven by consumer adoption first and foremost) to warrant this expense - someone will do it.
Also, in reality bitcoin isn't all that decentralized. Sure, individual nodes on the p2p network are all over the place however the vast majority of them are members of mining pools, with 3 biggest Chinese pools accounting for 30+ % of the total hashrate.
So if one of the major card networks steps in and takes over that chunk, as a consumer I'd be looking at a more reliable system to deal with.
You'll have to excuse me for this, but what you've just written has been said so many times in the past 18 months it's basically a cliche.
If you're willing to put the entire system into the cloud and hand over the backbone of Bitcoin to big banks and megacorps, you end up with a system no different from fiat currency over time. It ends up being a State controlled fiat money, because all of the infrastructure providers are Corporations - creatures of the State.
Inflation? No problem, we'll just have the usual suspects update the code. Freezing accounts? Narcoturrerism? No problem, we'll update the code. Etc. Having a P2P electronic cash system means accepting that the system is going to be different than government scrip.
The blockchain was never meant to be PayPal. It was meant to bootstrap a cryptoeconomic system outside the bounds of politics and the law. It's completely irresponsible to give that vision up for the ability globally broadcast low value, meaningless consumer payments - especially since you can achieve that by building higher layers of abstraction.
Well sure, there's a "libertarian" angle and there's a "pragmatic" angle here. I don't want to be beating a dead horse but with the way things are shaping up for bitcoin things are getting pretty centralized and as a result easy to control.
As for being "outside the bounds of politics and the law" when it really comes down to it you can only go so far especially if there's something as sensitive and highly visible as "money" is involved.
Even in the reasonably "soft" western countries there are subpoenas, cease and desist orders etc. All of that can be set in motion by the government who has the final say.
In China - they just disconnect the whole country from the internet :)
The bitcoin debate is mostly political, not technical, even if their are lots of techlogical aspects to it. Butshares allready has an architecure that can deal with 200000 transactions a second. I dont know if etherium could do the same.
What outsiders don't seem to understand is the people shouting "Bitcoin is or should be a democracy" the loudest are the ones who stand to benefit the most from seizing power from the current core developers.
As if those people have any intention whatsoever to listen to the opinions of billions of poor people when making technical protocol decisions. They don't want real democracy - they want their democracy where they're in control. And for anyone wondering what that control looks like, here are some direct quotes from the "democracy" crew:
Gavin Andresen: "there will be big companies spending lots of engineering dollars on their own highly optimized versions of bitcoin. I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa/MasterCard/etc networks" [1]
Gavin Andresen: "I think long-term the chain will not be secured purely by proof-of-work. I think when the Bitcoin network was tiny running solely on people's home computers proof-of-work was the right way to secure the chain" [2]
Gavin Andresen: "bitcoin is already more decentralised than it needs to be" [3]
Mike Hearn: "probably 2 or 3 racks of machines" [4]
Gavin Andresen: No, it's completely distributed at the moment. That will begin to change as we scale up. I don't want to oversell BitCoin. As we scale up there will be bumps along the way. I'm confident of it. Why? For example, as the volume of transactions come up--right now, I can run BitCoin on my personal computer and communicate over my DSL line; and I get every single transaction that's happening everywhere in the world. As we scale up, that won't be possible any more. If there are millions of bitcoin transactions happening every second, that will be a great problem for BitCoin to have--means it is very popular, very trusted--but obviously I won't be able to run it on my own personal computer. It will take dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces, and that kind of big iron to actually do all that transaction processing. I'm confident that will happen and that will evolve. But right now all the people trying to generate bitcoins on their own computers and who like the fact that they can be a self-contained unit, I think they may not be so happy if BitCoin gets really big and they can no longer do that.
IOW, the goal of their democracy is to usurp control of full nodes from individual hands and make that into a Corporate-dominated service. It would basically turn Bitcoin into an enterprise database that most people are stuck accessing as a proprietary SaaS.
Consider that much of the opposition to Core comes from the perception that Blockstream, which employs many of the core developers, is usurping it to be a high-fee, low-transaction network so that they can incentivize (and profit from) the use of their lighting network.
That's why the opposition is called "classic" not "bitcoin democracy". Their position is they are getting back to what bitcoin should have been.
And bitcoin originally had larger than 2mb blocks. The 1mb block limit was a short term solution to a problem that existed back then... that was never lifted.
The performance test data shows 32MB blocks are the absolute maximum block size that can be handled on desktop PCs today [1]:
> After simulating the creation of blocks up to 32 MB in size, we have arrived at some interesting conclusions:
- a 32 MB block, when filled with simple P2PKH transactions, can hold approximately 167,000 transactions, which, assuming a block is mined every 10 minutes, translates to approximately 270 tps
- a single machine acting as a full node takes approximately 10 minutes to verify and process a 32 MB block, meaning that a 32 MB block size is near the maximum one could expect to handle with 1 machine acting as a full node
- a CPU profile of the time spent processing a 32 MB block by a full node is dominated by ECDSA signature verification, meaning that with the current infrastructure and computer hardware, scaling above 300 tps would require a clustered full node where ECDSA signature checking is load balanced across multiple machines.
In addition:
> Aside from the obvious network and storage constraints of running a full Bitcoin node at large block sizes, it appears the Bitcoin network is capable of handling a substantially higher transaction volume than it does currently. The CPU time being dominated by ECDSA signature checks at high transaction rates suggests a clustered full node architecture could process credit-card-like transaction rates by using a load balancing / offload approach to ECDSA signature checking, e.g. a full node with a 10 machine cluster would top out at >2,000 tps.
> The resources and know-how required to run a clustered node like this may impose a significant centralizing force on Bitcoin. Backpressure against the centralization of Bitcoin may well drive alternative solutions to having all transactions on-chain. Alternatively, it may end up that Bitcoin adoption grows slowly enough that the computing power of a single node grows quickly enough to avoid requiring a clustered full node architecture.
Under Gavin Andresen's original plan, the 32MB limit could've been crossed in Jan 2018 when the size doubled to 40MB. Importantly, Gavin has since dropped the idea for a block size of 2MB. Hence you really can't claim that your own preferred plan for block size won't result in "a high-fee, low-transaction network". It's 2MB - that's a very far cry from VISA and it's only 0.4MB more than the scaling roadmap - that's a difference of at worst 3 tps out of VISA's 56,000.
Unless your intent is to quite literally put 100% of Bitcoin full nodes in datacenters, it's as clear as day that raising and re-raising block size ad infinitum doesn't work, as it usurps control of full nodes from individuals. It effectively turns Bitcoin into an enterprise database only accessible to the rest of us through garbage proprietary SaaS platforms. Clearly this isn't a benefit and we should be pulling out every possible stop to avoid it from happening. Look, if your vision for Bitcoin is that it should be like Parse.com for credit cards, I'm sorry but we're just going to have to agree to disagree.
> Unless your intent is to quite literally put 100% of Bitcoin full nodes in datacenters
It is a fallacy to think that unless people can run nodes on dial-up in basements, the Bitcoin network has failed in its mission.
Thousands of nodes running in data centers all over the world can provide a scalable, fault-tolerant, censorship-resistant, decentralized relay network.
Hal Finney, the very first recipient of a Bitcoin transaction claimed, quote:
"Bitcoin itself cannot scale to have every single financial transaction in the world be broadcast to everyone and included in the block chain. There needs to be a secondary level of payment systems which is lighter weight and more efficient." [1]
And Satoshi Nakamoto stated:
"Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale." [...] "Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices." [2]
Did you have anyone else in mind? Perhaps Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen? It's a matter of historical record that these two believe gigablocks will assuredly cause Bitcoin P2P nodes to become confined to datacenters. Their gigablocker quotes follow:
Gavin Andresen: "there will be big companies spending lots of engineering dollars on their own highly optimized versions of bitcoin. I bet there will be alternative, secure-and-trusted, very-high-speed network connections between major bitcoin transaction processors. Maybe it will just be bitcoin transactions flying across the existing Visa/MasterCard/etc networks" [3]
Mike Hearn: "probably 2 or 3 racks of machines" [4]
Gavin Andresen: "No, it's completely distributed at the moment. That will begin to change as we scale up. I don't want to oversell BitCoin. As we scale up there will be bumps along the way. I'm confident of it. Why? For example, as the volume of transactions come up--right now, I can run BitCoin on my personal computer and communicate over my DSL line; and I get every single transaction that's happening everywhere in the world. As we scale up, that won't be possible any more. If there are millions of bitcoin transactions happening every second, that will be a great problem for BitCoin to have--means it is very popular, very trusted--but obviously I won't be able to run it on my own personal computer. It will take dedicated fleets of computers with high-speed network interfaces, and that kind of big iron to actually do all that transaction processing. I'm confident that will happen and that will evolve. But right now all the people trying to generate bitcoins on their own computers and who like the fact that they can be a self-contained unit, I think they may not be so happy if BitCoin gets really big and they can no longer do that."
Amir Taaki, author of libbitcoin and one of the most ardent early adopters of Bitcoin is further in strong disagreement with Gavin and Mike, and always has been! So this notion that the "original people" are being hated on, is just false. Read the libbitcoin manifesto [5], or the "Political Neutrality is a Myth" interview [6].
After Gavin and Mike's push for radically reshaping Bitcoin from a P2P currency into a DatacenterCoin failed (multiple times), this whole issue culminated in Gavin exclaiming that Craig Wright must be Satoshi Nakamoto, "beyond a reasonable doubt"! Which may have had at least something to do with the fact that Craig claimed to be running Bitcoin with 340GB blocks on his (also confirmed fake) "supercomputer". But of course the Craig and Gavin show had been meticulously timed to coincide with a major industry conference. Had it not been for astute cybersleuths cracking the case within minutes of it making the media rounds, we could've seen Gavin reclaim the throne with the help of an utter conman.
Yes, some people are ticked at these guys, as they should be. It's a remarkably (!!!) hostile environment that we've been dealing with for over 18 months, as the current lead developer Wlad so aptly puts it:
"Day in, day out, there is trolling, targeted attacks, shilling on social media targeted toward us. I don’t know of any other project like this. I’ve seen developer teams in MMOs under similar pressure from users; but possibly this is even worse. There, there are avid disagreements about how the game rules should be changed, here people get worked up about changes affecting a whole economic system. And the people attacking are, in many cases, not even users of the software." [7]
[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342...
[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1790.msg28917#msg289...
[3] https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=3118.0
[4] https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&oldid=35...
[5] http://nakamotoinstitute.org/libbitcoin-manifesto/
[6] http://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoins-political-neutrality-...
[7] https://laanwj.github.io/2016/05/06/hostility-scams-and-movi...