[Cryptography] How fast can a blockchain go ? like Zilliqa?

John Levine johnl at iecc.com
Wed Mar 7 13:24:22 EST 2018


In article <CAMm+LwgxJCXRoauPqbV4M3RDqfsb_EqRGas+uLQbKx2PbDUF8g at mail.gmail.com> you write:
>On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 2:03 PM, John Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
>> Sort of apropos of recent discussions, what sort of performance are
>> people getting out of blockchains, both transaction rates and latency?

>​The real question ​is how fast can you finalize a transaction so that it
>is fixed. Blockchain is a silly way to do that because there is a ten
>minute gap between blocks being added and the chain does not become
>dependable until several blocks are added.

That's Bitcoin.  You can certainly wave your hands and imagine a
scheme where blocks are added faster if they are full of transactions or
something like that.

I see a fair amount of press for something called Zilliqa which
purports to create a high speed blockchain by sharding the chain
somehow.  On the one hand, they've published a fair amount about it,
very little of which I have read.  On the other hand, it's bristling
with snake oil red flags like an ICO where they say everyone has
gotten rich, and a warning banner across their web site saying to
beware of scams and imitations.

Anyone know them?  I don't recognize any of the team on their web site
but they appear to be mostly in Singapore.

R's,
John

>The under appreciated part of BitCoin is the smart contracts. They don't do
>much in Bitcoin world because it isn't really connected to anything real.
>But if you were doing a system in which party A exchanges money/stock with
>B and each then want to trade with C and D, you could use conditional
>contracts, this one is good if node X has fixed point Y.

Considering that any program large enough to be interesting is large enough
to have bugs, I can hardly wait.


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