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I'm no expert in bitcoin or other decentralized blockchain technologies, or in the theory of computation for that matter, but I have a nagging question: When they claim that the Ethereum network would function as a global, decentralized "world computer", then what should I assume to be the hardware architecture running its instruction set or, in other words, what is the basic, atomic unit of computation that the network (or other blockchain technologies) can perform. If we think of regular computers, then no matter in which language an application ( i dislike the word 'app' :) is written in, eventually we end up talking about the x86 instruction set, the microcode that makes up each instruction, and, finally, the actual transistors logic that run them. I somehow feel this is important to ask because we have to take into account the energy efficiency of computation. For example, if we think about the x86 ADD instruction, there is an approximately fixed amount of energy it dissipates when it is performed. ( This is a pretty interesting subject in intself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle ) What would be an equivalent ADD instruction or other basic unit of computation on the Ethereum computer and how expensive would it be? If it involves one or several distributed blockchain operations, then it seems to me that this model would be neither energy efficient, nor performant, especially if we take into account the distributed factor, which means that such an operation would be very costly since getting one bit of information from one end to the other requires an arbitrary number of routers along its path, and those consume energy to operate. So I guess what I'm trying to ask is if this is practical in any useful way. |
http://gavwood.com/Paper.pdf