Underestimate blockchain at your peril [LWN.net]

Underestimate blockchain at your peril

Posted Jan 12, 2018 9:47 UTC (Fri) by Garak (guest, #99377)
In reply to: Underestimate blockchain at your peril by nix
Parent article: Welcome to 2018

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".

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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.