[Cryptography] Krugman blockchain currency skepticism

[Alfie John]

On Tue, Aug 07, 2018 at 07:08:27AM +0800, jamesd at echeque.com wrote:
> > On Mon, 2018-08-06 at 14:11 +0800, jamesd at echeque.com wrote:
> > > The downside of Chaumian e-cash is very simple.  You need a single
> > > centralized trusted server holding a small number unshared secrets.
> 
> On 07/08/2018 04:11, Benjamin Kreuter wrote:
> > Not true, you can create a threshold scheme if you wanted to do so.
> 
> Threshold cryptography neither scales nor helps.

I beg to differ:

    https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/199

Honey Badger is a BFT protocol that relies on Threshold Cryptography:

    "For example, the Visa processes 2,000 tx/sec on average, with a peak of
    59,000 tx/sec"

    ...

    "From Figure 6 we can see for each setting, the throughput increases as
    the number of proposed transactions increases. We achieve throughput
    exceeding 20,000 transactions per second for medium size networks of up to
    40 nodes. For a large 104 node network, we attain more than 1,500
    transactions per second. Given an infinite batch size, all network sizes
    would eventually converge to a common upper bound, limited only by
    available bandwidth.  Although the total bandwidth consumed in the network
    increases (linearly) with each additional node, the additional nodes also
    contribute additional bandwidth capacity"

And that's with the threshold holding across the entire network. You can
squeeze even more transactions out if you partition the network (think
Stellar's FBA does Quorum Slices, or even random threshold participants based
on Kademlia).

The next evolution of blockchain are not your father's cryptocurrencies...

Alfie

-- 
Alfie John
https://www.alfie.wtf