Topic: A decentralized (multilayered) blockchain. Is it ever possible? - page 2. (Read 1883 times)

It's not semantics, you've just made ridiculous statement and you can't defend it. You either have a hard time clearly articulating your thoughts to the point where no one in this thread can figure what you mean, or you're being confusing on purpose.

Try and use good old "blockchain size" or "bloating blockchain" terms instead and see how it goes.

I don't feel inclined to get absorbed in semantic gymnastics

As I already said, if you know the proper term for what I described as a "blockchain centralization" (one and only one data set existing across the Bitcoin network which is considered valid and authentic), I will happily use it. If you have nothing constructive to say, please refrain from posting in this thread. I think I explained it pretty well what I meant by blockchain being totally centralized

*sigh*

Let me try different angle:


If the blockchain is already centralised, could you point the central entity?

---

Is it at all possible, that the main point you're concerned with is the size of the blockchain and the whole "each node holding full ledger = centralisation" was just a brain fart?

I didn't work at a data center back then. These were typical IDE drives available for around $100 per unit (maybe, somewhat more than that). I've been there and seen that with my own eyes (and kept these disks in my own hands). In fact, I have two such drives from those times still collecting dust in the cupboard. The data center stuff was SCSI all throughout, and these drives cost a few times more and were reliable as an AK. In any case, your references to 16 year old technologies and capacities are irrelevant. The CPU frequency is no longer growing due to physical limits (mostly speed of light)...

And similar limits will be eventually hit with network bandwidth and storage capacity

im talking common RELIABLE household grade stuff.. retail consumer available.. not the datacentre/specialist grade stuff.

otherwise i would have mentioned ISDN and tethering and other things to speed up internet speeds at the millenia..

however i was talking household grade technology, which is the point of this topic. where households had the capacity to run bitcoin nodes, not datacentres.

so 16 years ago HOUSEHOLDS had RELIABLE
4gb hard drives
dialup

now its 4tb hard drives
ADSL/FIbre

future
bigger hard drives
faster fibre

.. as for miners(not nodes)..
forget about internet speeds, forget about hard drive capacity.. miners dont even see or care about the 7 years of blockchain history.

all they do is hash a small piece of data.
asics dont have a hard drive.

the only concern you had about miners relates to CPU.. which i already informed you we surpassed the CPU argument in 2011
by miners moving to GPUs, then FPGA's then ASICS.

I will readily use a better term for describing what I mean (Bitcoin transactions aggregation and centralization). Do you have any?


That actually doesn't seem to be a top priority right now


I'm afraid this won't work out the way you think it will. If you had unlimited bandwidth and storage space, then yes, it might work, though this would still be a tremendous waste of resources, so it remains debatable. But let's get real. And getting real right now means pretty ugly things, to be honest. I mean spamming the network with high fee transactions which is what seems to be going on this very moment. So instead of being concerned with the decentralization of network, bitcoiners should better think about resolving more urgent issues, and these issues are directly connected with the topic of this thread...

Otherwise, this so longed for decentralization might become totally irrelevant very soon

You're twisting the meaning of "decentralisation". What most bitcoiners are concerned with, is decentralisation of network, meaning there is no and should never be any central entity controlling the network.

Centralisation, as you call it, of data set is actually desirable. In the perfect scenario, there are millions of nodes, each of them having a copy of full ledger (so you don't have to rely on other nodes to keep the missing parts).

Purpose of data dispersion (or blockchain sharding) is to reduce the blockchain size each node has to store, but it doesn't improve decentralisation of network (it could in certain circumstances, but it could as well have the opposite effect).

Oh, really? So wtf are you talking about the hard drive capacities as back as 16 years ago?

And by the way, you are flat-out wrong about that too (but that's not surprising). 16 years ago most drives came in 40Gb capacities. I well remember those days when IBM started selling their Deskstar 75GXP hard drives with glass platters and up to 75Gb in storage space, made in Hungary and exceptionally prone to failures. We called them Magyar woodpeckers since their abbreviation, DTLA, was consonant to woodpecker in Russian, "dyatel", lol. I had a few such 40Gb disks in early 2000s that quickly failed. 4Gb disks were common in 1996-1997, if I'm not mistaken


There is only one data set of transactions which is authentic at any given moment. That seems to be the highest level of "centralization" possible

Its enough as it is, because if bitcoin would NEED more decentralization, people would setup more nodes in almost instant.
There is no one codebase, there are many implementation of bitcoin protocol in diffirent languages of programming.

So stay calm

im not sure why your talking about CPU frequency.
bitcoin moved passed that 'CPU limit' in 2011. it moved to GPU.
bitcoin moved passed that 'GPU limit' in 2012. it moved to FPGA.
bitcoin moved passed that 'FPGA limit' in 2013. it moved to ASIC.

we are not stuck in 2011 crying about the limits of CPU frequencies


a single bonsai may only grow 2 foot.
you dont simply cry that a bonsai has limits.
you dont cry that a bonsai takes 30 years to grow 2 foot and has limited foliage
you dont cry that it needs a forest of bonsai to cope with leafcutter ants.

instead you would plant a redwood tree that can grow 300 foot tall and has healthier and extra foliage. where the ants have room to do their
job uninhibited and without needing lots of maintenance to allow the ants to move about.

and laugh at other people for planting fields of bonsai, trying to get one ant to jump from bonsai to bonsai

Why aren't you telling that the processor frequency has not been increasing for almost a decade already?

The trees don't grow to the sky. There is a limit to everything (save for stupidity, of course), but in this very case it doesn't actually matter, since bitcoin user base can expand exponentially (simply because it is tiny right now) while the performance of network and the capacity of storage devices can't. Moreover, increasing the number of transactions two times may cause the network load to get increased greater than that (non-linear dependence)


You obviously fail to differentiate between the subjunctive and indicative mood


That's the point I was trying to make

compare a
4GPU miner of 2012
to a
single ASIC of 2016

2016 asic is:
CHEAPER,
more powerful
more efficient
less heat intensive
less electric wasted

and that will continue. each new generation of asic will be more efficient than the previous.

the blockchain is decentralized. but i think its not diverse enough.
its all by majority handled by one codebase.

i can kind of see what the OP is getting at. but at the same time he is then using that lack of diversity and also fake doomsday rhetoric of bloat worries. to then try advertise the same thing that the banking sector are planning (sidechains on their hyperledger coded by the same guys that are pushing for bitcoin to move to sidechains too)

@franky1
You are saying improvements in technology would make it possible for miners to have more storage spaces, faster internet speeds to keep up with the ever increasing btc transactions.

Well, I am saying I hope technology creates highly efficient mining rigs that are much cheaper and requires less cooling than what we have now because we will always need home-miners to fill in the demand - and the number of home-miners keep dwindling

It is, author have incosistent knowledge about bitcoin blockchain.
Blockchain that media talking about is just database, bitcoin blockchain is decentralized and got huge computing power behind it (without it, its just another database).

OP.

"I guess it will be simply impossible to process millions (billions) of transactions daily "
but that mindset is overshadowing this:
"It is almost a given that if the Bitcoin adoption should increase multifold in the coming years"

lets emphasise..
"coming years".

just 16 years ago the largest hard drive someone could have was 4gb. and the largest portable storage was only a few megabytes.
the internet was dialup.

things have changed.
in 2009 1mb blocks were acceptable.
stats done on average internet speeds (even by companies like livestreaming, videocalling services) and by those concentrating on bitcoin have shown 8mb is ok now.
and storage is well over 2 terrabyte for average home cost PC's.

meaning we can grow upto 8x now. no issue..
even core now believe 4x bloat (bloat not capacity) is safe enough within the next month..

and as you say millions/billions over YEARS. (not hours/days) is plenty of time for the hardware and bandwidth to allow more growth.

in short.
put yourself 10-16 years in the past and while on dialup with a 4gb hard drive.... ask your younger self.
"could you see in 10-16 years that just one shoot-em-up game will require the storage space of 20x the largest hard drives available, and people wont even care/think about it and just treat it as ok/normal..
that playing others while talking to others and showing each other your game play would seem normal too. but require internet speeds of over 20x the max available"

your younger self could not imagine that..
much like you cannot imagine the future in 10-16 years time

It's impossible to scale on-chain anywhere relevant. It's simply physically impossible to compete against payment networks by scaling onchain, unless you want to turn bitcoin itself into a paypal 2.0 (duh). The only solution to scale is Lightning Network which delives a reasonable amount of decentralization while backed by the bitcoin blockchain. I repeat: There is no other way, scaling onchain will never get us anywhere near what we want (world domination, millions of transaction per second etc). We will need a 2nd layer, unless some alien from the future comes with a space machine and gives us a new technology that can scale onchain while having small nodes that everyone can run on their basements, which is not gonna happen.

From what I can tell, you are proposing either separate unrelated block chains (à la altcoins) or multiple (and possibly contradictory) versions of a single block chain.

I don't see much problem against centralized.

People can make an boycott, people can make pressure for changes and for sure they will heard us.

Well, miners nowadays rule the bitcoin and can do this, users don't have much to do.

I mean there is one and only data set ("blockchain") which is valid. In this sense, the blockchain is centralized. Hope this clarifies what I meant to say


My whole point comes down to concluding that the current paradigm of a centralized blockchain (in the sense of only one authentic data set existing on the network) massively defies scalability and leads to nowhere in the long term. I pretty much don't know how to mend matters and make Bitcoin more scalable, to be honest. I just want to let people know about this issue as well as the imminence and inevitability of it, should Bitcoin adoption increase in the future, of course...

In other words, prevention is better and easier than cure