[Cryptography] Digital currencies

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 2:25 AM, Howard Chu <hyc at symas.com> wrote:

> Jeff Burdges wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 2016-06-18 at 00:42 +0200, mok-kong shen wrote:
>>
>>> How far advanced are the developments in digital currencies?
>>> Would they ever be able to replace the classical currencies?
>>>
>>
>> If you mean blockchains, then one big issue is the need to many crypto
>> currencies to waste more resources than traverse the system to protect
>> the system.  These proof-of-wasteful-work schemes like bitcoin wont
>> scale.
>>
>
> Blockchains as currently envisioned would never scale anyway. It's not
> like any of this is a newly discovered problem of distributed computing.


Which is really sad because it is actually rather easy to establish an
append only notary infrastructure. We have a few emerging including
certificate transparency and my Mathematical Mesh.

Link a few independent notaries together and it becomes impossible to
backtrack very quickly.



> The only way to make any system scale is to leverage locality. When we
> have colonies on the Moon and Mars a single blockchain isn't going to work
> - you need to break things apart by locality. The majority of transactions
> can be settled 100% in a local set of nodes. Broadcasting all txs and
> blocks globally across the entire network/blockchain is inherently a
> non-starter. A system designed to work with global broadcasting is doomed
> from the start. You need a system designed with segmentation and
> partitioning built in.


Yep, and Harber Stornetta works great as a hierarchical scheme.
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