[Cryptography] Standards Trolls: Re: Bitcoin is a disaster.

[jrzx]

On Tuesday, January 12, 2021 1:06 PM, Ray Dillinger <bear at sonic.net> wrote:

> I'm pretty strongly of the opinion that you're not going to get
> scalability in any system in which one transaction no matter how
> trivial results in communication to every node.

All successful cryptocurrencies as they get bigger, develop a
client peer/host architecture, with ever more clients and ever
fewer hosts.

You have to design it so that the clients, rather than the peers,
have the power, because they hold the secrets.

So, suppose, at scale, you have three hundred peers and five
billion clients.

So we have three hundred peers chatting with each other at about 50 Mbps.
That is not a very large cost.

What is the cost per transaction? A vps with a data cap is generally
around ten dollars a terabyte.  So three hundred times that, make it
\a thousand times that, and data cost per transaction is one two
hundred thousandth of a cent.

Data storage is going to cost more.  Quite a lot more.  Six hundredths
of a cent per transaction.

> For a single transaction you need consensus that the coins you're
> getting actually exist and actually belong to the person you're getting
> them from. You don't need a history of the universe for that; you need
> a history of those particular coins and evidence that the act of
> minting them was valid according to protocol.

But you want your coins to be spendable too and from anywhere on planet earth.

> If the tokens themselves are temporary - that is, if they are minted,
> they go through some number of transactions, and then they are melted -
> then the history of a given token can be short and require
> communicating about only a few transactions. A $20 bill, for example,
> only changes hands about 600 times before it is removed from
> circulation and destroyed. Agreeing about a few hundred transactions
> seems a lot more reasonable than agreeing about TheWholeDamnUniverseTM.

To prevent doubles spending, some trusted authority has to know the current
ownership of each token.

As the token wanders around, it is going to develop a chain of keys,
each authorizing the next - your blockchain of spend transactions in
the small.

So this is a bunch of small blockchains, which from time to time
disappear, and new ones appear.  But, conservation of money.  When
one disappears, the money has to go into a bigger blockchain,
and when one appears, the money has to come out of a bigger
blockchain.  So this is the sidechain solution.


Well, if you have a lot of tokens, you will have a lot of sidechains.
Why should you trust the sidechain?

Presumably because you personally participate in it, you are not just a
client.  Which means you will be downloading quite a lot of sidechains,
but still a lot less than the whole blockchain.

And then, when the time comes to shutdown a side chain, how does anyone
know that the property rights following the shutdown correctly followed
from the data that was in the sidechain?

A lot of people have thought a lot about sidechains - and it turns out
there is a lot of complex problems, complex cryptography, and complex
data structures that you don't seem to be proposing.

And it also turns out, it just does not seem to make the problem of
having a great big pile of data that has to be repetitiously stored
and checked by a great big pile of people go away.