Why a Bitcoin future will always end up in centralization

https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2018/01/21/bitcoin-future-will-always-end-centralization/

by avastmick • 9 years ago

34 11 9 years ago

Animats• 9 years ago

Not having centralization, as with some of the altcoins, has resulted in the price of NVidia and Radeon graphics cards more than doubling and the supply disappearing.[1]

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/cryptocurrency-b...

thisisit• 9 years ago

In case anyone wants to know about how sizing works in bitcoin, I have written this post [1]

250 bytes is the lowest end of a block size. Most of the blocks are nearly 360 bytes in size. Though Segwit should apparently help with the sizing.

The most interesting thing is block sizing and transaction ramping are not same. 1GB blocks were tested[2]

But, there are multiple bottlenecks which need to be resolved before it is usable. For one the mempool,

Mempool admission is no longer the bottleneck, as we’ve demonstrated mempool admission rates over 10,000 tx/sec already.

But the same thing has not been achieved in transaction confirmations:

“Our baseline results with BU essentially ‘as is’ — A few days ago we achieved 300 tx/sec sustained thanks to Andrew Stone’s work streamlining mempool admission,” explains Rizun. I think we’ll hit ~1,000 tx/sec sustained on the next ramp we attempt.”

[1] https://medium.com/@smith.garg/fees-calculation-in-bitcoin-a...

[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/gigablock-testnet-researchers-mine-...

knlinux• 9 years ago

Too bad the author did not mention Lightning Network. The issue covered in this article is one of the reasons LN was chosen as the scaling solution instead of the block size increase (i.e. bcash).

dmm• 9 years ago

I like that the article correctly points out that the problems with big blocks is bandwidth and validation time, not hard drive space as many others seem to focus on.

txsh• 9 years ago

I hope you’re not getting paid in BTC for your shill posts.

loceng2• 9 years ago

It's much simpler than that - they simply need to own the crypto-asset(s) they're wanting to succeed, for their value to go up.

CyberDildonics• 9 years ago

First, bcash is a term invented by bitcoin core to try to confuse people who look in to bitcoin cash and see that it offers transactions at 1/2000th the price of btc.

Second, the lighting network has been promised for multiple years. There are warnings right now that no one should use it for real money because there are multiple very real security and design problems with it.

If block size limits don't change, it will take thousands of transactions on each lightning channel to make transactions as cheap as they already are on bitcoin cash (and many other crypto currencies). Changing the block size is technically trivial, but the core team still thinks they can censor, lie and corrupt their way to making money off of suffocating bitcoin.

It should be obvious to anyone with a drop of critical thinking that 1MB blocks every 10 minutes is absurd. CPU, bandwidth and memory are all trivial even when taking the throughput up by 100x

BenoitP• 9 years ago

Ctrl+f "lightning". Zero mentions.

This is bad journalism and has nothing to do on HN.

acoye• 9 years ago

The author takes a large enough block for Visa or Master card volume like transaction and makes an educated guess.

His argument is _true_ in the same way saying that you could only fit a calculator in a hangar using vacuum tubes is true. If Cryptocurrencies are to succeed they need their silicon transistor.

To me the transistor of crypto is sharding. I'd bet Vitalik knows that and that is why he is putting R&D into it. I do hope Ethereum (or another one) succeed.

Why a Bitcoin future will always end up in centralization

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