I've seen a lot of noise that blockchain is going to be a huge disruption for everything recently (yeah I know people have been saying it for a while - I may have been asleep). What would people recommend as the best resource for a) evaluating whether the hype is valid and b) as a technical overview?
If the hype is merely about Bitcoin itself as an alternative currency, then simply forget it. That's just some aftershocks of people joining the party lately.
However, if you are talking about Blockchain technology and applications beyond currency and gambling, there may be something onto it. For example, check out Ethereum:
This allows you to enforce and reward contracts in a very flexible and completely decentral fashion. Also, "agreeing on one truth/history" has been replaced from "power of work" (arms race to burn energy resources) to a more subtle decentral reputation system. This is more about finding consensus among the network participants as intelligent individuals, rather than who's able to invest more energy/hardware resources more quickly.
Creative stuff like Ethereum has not just the potential to replace payments, but enables companies that are totally differently structured than what we find today. If that's for better or worse, I'm not sure.
But if there's any justified hype about Bitcoin, it's about emerging projects like that - not about Bitcoin itself.
Proof-of-Stake is nothing new, and it has serious problems: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_Stake. There are good reasons why Bitcoin uses "wasteful" proof-of-work.
Bitcoin is the only Blockchain implementation that has gained any kind of traction, and that is due to the incentive model working out. People just don't like it because it challenges their economic worldview.
I wasn't able find criticism about Proof-of-Stake there. Instead, the beginning describes the problems with Proof-of-Work (which Proof-of-Stake tries to address). The large middle part describes some systems which mix both PoW and PoS.
> People just don't like it because it challenges their economic worldview
Not sure how this is relevant to the discussion about Bitcoin hypes and Ethereum.
In particular, I don't see why the people who implemented Ethereum shouldn't like Bitcoin. And even if they do dislike Bitcoin, I'm pretty sure this is not because it challenges their economic worldview, as Ethereum challenges the common economic worldview even more.
"One problem is usually called the "nothing at stake" problem, where (in the case of a consensus failure) block-generators have nothing to lose by voting for multiple blockchain-histories, which prevents the consensus from ever resolving"
Thanks. I've looked at etherium and it's an intriguing idea. How do you think it stacks up vs something like ripple or hyperledger, which are based on the byzantine fault tolerance idea?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 31.4 ms ] threadHowever, if you are talking about Blockchain technology and applications beyond currency and gambling, there may be something onto it. For example, check out Ethereum:
https://www.ethereum.org/
This allows you to enforce and reward contracts in a very flexible and completely decentral fashion. Also, "agreeing on one truth/history" has been replaced from "power of work" (arms race to burn energy resources) to a more subtle decentral reputation system. This is more about finding consensus among the network participants as intelligent individuals, rather than who's able to invest more energy/hardware resources more quickly.
Creative stuff like Ethereum has not just the potential to replace payments, but enables companies that are totally differently structured than what we find today. If that's for better or worse, I'm not sure.
But if there's any justified hype about Bitcoin, it's about emerging projects like that - not about Bitcoin itself.
Bitcoin is the only Blockchain implementation that has gained any kind of traction, and that is due to the incentive model working out. People just don't like it because it challenges their economic worldview.
Would you mind pointing to the relevant sections?
I wasn't able find criticism about Proof-of-Stake there. Instead, the beginning describes the problems with Proof-of-Work (which Proof-of-Stake tries to address). The large middle part describes some systems which mix both PoW and PoS.
> People just don't like it because it challenges their economic worldview
Not sure how this is relevant to the discussion about Bitcoin hypes and Ethereum.
In particular, I don't see why the people who implemented Ethereum shouldn't like Bitcoin. And even if they do dislike Bitcoin, I'm pretty sure this is not because it challenges their economic worldview, as Ethereum challenges the common economic worldview even more.
It is a good, generalized overview of the faults in proof-of-stake consensus systems.
"One problem is usually called the "nothing at stake" problem, where (in the case of a consensus failure) block-generators have nothing to lose by voting for multiple blockchain-histories, which prevents the consensus from ever resolving"