Underestimate blockchain at your peril [LWN.net]

Underestimate blockchain at your peril

Posted Jan 11, 2018 17:10 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Underestimate blockchain at your peril by nix
Parent article: Welcome to 2018

Normal human beings will not tolerate a currency with no way to reverse mistakes and no way to defend against theft of their entire bank account or heck their entire bank.

Not to mention that people won't be enthusiastic about a “currency” in which, when you buy a newspaper or a cup of coffee at the train station, the time it takes the transaction to clear is longer than the train ride.

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Underestimate blockchain at your peril

Posted Jan 11, 2018 20:36 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Quite! but that's a problem with Bitcoin in particular. I was trying to point out mostly problems common to all blockchain-based cryptocurrencies similar to Bitcoin, not just implementation problems in Bitcoin.

The related problem for all implementations is that they have a horrible choice:

- either make transaction costs ridiculously high due to the need to lug around a massive database of all transactions ever -- which for practical replacement of real currencies would need to have new blocks arrive at least once a second, I'd guess, so it would be exabytes in size soon enough

- or make everything horribly insecure due to the need to trust someone *else* with carrying out the actual, netted transactions of many other people. And at that point you're back to trusting someone else not to run off with all your money, so, uh, what's the advantage of this over ordinary currency again?

Underestimate blockchain at your peril

Posted Jan 12, 2018 9:47 UTC (Fri) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (1 responses)

Did you not get the memo? I have no idea if these will turn out to be the solution of the problem you highlighted. But it seems to me this sort of addressing of issues that come up is standard FOSS operating procedure. I suspect that within the next few years there will be many variants of and competitors to this solution, and enough of them will work well enough that the problems you highlighted will be considered entirely historical within 5 or 10 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SegWit

Of course I believe there will be half a dozen other major issues that come to light, and of the hundreds of attempted solutions to those most will fail. But enough will survive and thrive. This is all the power of darwinian evolution, capitalism, and FOSS rolled into one. It will be bloody, but to quote Jurassic Park- "Life Finds A Way". "The Desire To Have A Cryptocurrency That Survives Will Find A Way".

Underestimate blockchain at your peril

Posted Jan 12, 2018 16:56 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I haven't paid attention to SegWit but Lightning Network fundamentally doesn't work because it's a network with no mechanism proposed to ensure that routes actually eventually terminate at the intended destination, nor indeed that they won't contain (ruinous) loops, because every routing node has no understanding of anything about the network topology beyond the next link or two. (Also, everyone who wants to be part of a route has to go into debt for howeverlong it might take transactions to clear, which might be forever due to the previous problem). And that's just the *start* of its huge laundry-list of fundamental flaws.

In any case, netting everything up to get around terrible transaction costs and delays is how you get around a broken system, not a way to advertise a system as ready for prime-time.