shards don't.
i already looked months ago into sharding and played around ran scenarios. and like i said a few posts ago. once you wash away all the buzzwords it all just comes full circle
many sharding concepts exist.
some are:
master chain(single) where every 10blocks.. each block designated to a certain region/group
- this way no group can mine 10 blocks in one go. but only get 1 block in. then have to wait 9 blocks before another chance
master node(multichain) where by there are multiple chains that swap value
- i say master node. because although some sharding concepts pretend to not need them.
inevitably. without a master node the regions/group nodes end up having to "trust" the other chain when sending utxo's
and many more concepts
issues are the "trust" of data if its not in one place becomes its own weakness
even LN devs have noticed this and realised that LN full nodes would need to be master nodes downloading and monitoring bitcoin, litecoin, vertcoin
seems some of the sharding devs of sharding projects have not yet seen the dilemma play out.
(5 weak points more prone to attack than 1 strong point.
EG
easier to 51% attack one of the 5 points of 5exahash than it is to 51% attack one point of 50exahash. thus if one of the 5 weak points gets hit.. damage is done.)
I do agree that using atomic swaps (with recent advancements in HTLC) and forks has something to do with scaling, the problem being price as a free variable. It would be interesting tho, having a solution for this problem.
no, atomic swaps and HTLC are BADDDDDDD. think of the UTXO set. (as atomic swaps is about 2 tokens and pegging)
as i originally said, better to double mine (bc1q->sc1) that way bitcoin sees the bc1q as spent and thus no more UTXO
thus no holding large UTXO set of locked unspents (the sc1just vanishes and not counted on btc's UTXO as btc cant spend a SC1....
but again the whole needing a master node to monitor both chains comes up and circles around.
so yea LN, sharding, sidechains, multichains.. they all end up back full circle of needing a "masternode"(essentially a full node)
that monitors everything.. which end up as the debate of if a master node exists. just call it a full node and get back to the route problem.
i could waffle on about all the weakenesses of the 'trust' of relying on separate nodes holding separate data, but ill try to keep my posts short
block time reduction .. a moderate improvement in bitcoin parameters it is ways better than a comparable block size increase. They may look very similar but there is a huge difference: A reduction in block time helps with mining variance and supports small pools/farms. The technical difficulties involved are not big deals as everything could be adjusted easily, block reward, halving threshold, ...
nope
transactions are already in peoples mempool before a block is made.
nodes dont need to send a block with transactions again. they just send the blockheader.
this is why stats show transactions take 14 seconds but a block only takes 2 seconds. because a block header is small and the whole verification is just joining the header to the already obtained transactions.
again
all the nodes are looking for is the blockheader that links them together. the blockheader doesnt take much time at all.
because transactions are relayed (14 seconds) which is plenty of time within the 10minute window.
if that 10 minute window is reduced to 5minute. then thats less time for transactions to relay.
i say this not about the average txsigops of upto 500.. but in cases where a tx has 16000sigops which i warned about a few pages ago.
a 5 minute interval will be worse than a 10min interval
math: a 16k sigop tx will take 7 and ahalf mins to relay the network. meaning if a pools seen a tx first. relayed it out. and then started mining a 5 minute block.. solves it. and relays out the blockheader ..
the block header would have reached everyone in 5minutes 2 seconds. but a bloated transaction (degrees of separation) only reached 1000 nodes. as the last 'hop' from 1000 to their 10 nodes each to multiply it to the last lot has not had time to deal with the bloated tx
also its kinda why the 16k sigops limit exists to keep things under 10 minutes. but foolisly allow such a large amount that it doesnt keep tx's down to seconds.
yes a solution would be bring it down to a lower txsigoplimit when reducing thee blocktime.
which alone brings the
difficulty retarget to weekly. so discussions of moving it to 4032 blocks to bring it back to fornightly.
reward halving happening every 2 years. which means 21mill in less time unless to move it to 420,000 blocks for a 4 year half
and as i said 5minute interval which without reducing txsigop limit. will hurt propagation
so reducing block time is NOT simpler than just increasing block size.. thers alot of ripple effects of reducing blocktime than there is increasing blocksize.
also what do end users gain with a ~5min confirm.. its not like standing at a cashier desk waiting for a confirm is any less frustrating.. it would require a 2second confirm to make waiting in line at a cashier not be a frustration.
even 30 seconds seems the same eternity as 10 minutes when you see an old lady counting change
Right, but it adds up once you go to next and next hops. It is why we call it proximity premium. Bitcoin p2p network is not a complete graph, it gets like 10 times more for a block to be relayed to all miners. When you double or triple the number of txs, the proximity flaw gets worse just a bit less than two or three times respectively.
i kinda explained it a few paragraphs ago in this post
No disputes. I just have to mention it is infeasible to engineer the p2p network artificially and AFAIK current bitcoin networking layer allows nodes to drop slow/unresponsive peers and if you could figure out an algorithm to help with a more optimized topology, it would be highly appreciated.
you have kinda self found your solution..
have 15 potential nodes and pick the best 10 with the best ping/speed. naturally the network finds its own placement where the slower nodes are on outter rings and faster ones are at the center