[marsRoverDev]

Or perhaps replacing bitcoin with something that doesn't have fundamental flaws in its design.

Hence why a lot of us think it has no inherent value into the future. Of course, those in on the ponzi scheme will disagree with this sentiment.

[jxub]

Nano previously called Raiblocks is an amazing candidate for fee-less, instant transactions. The block-lattice approach is a fundamental breakthrough that overcomes the limitations of blockchain in terms of cost and speed.

Stellar is also a worthy contender although it wasn't designed with the purpose of payments, but decentralised currency/crypto exchanges.

The Lightning Network daemon codebase on Github is a beautiful well commented piece of Golang code though.

[gruez]

>The block-lattice approach is a fundamental breakthrough that overcomes the limitations of blockchain in terms of cost and speed.

Not really. DAG/lattice based cryptocurrencies offer different security guarantees compared to blockchain based ones.

[buckie]

They also have different scaling tradeoffs as they scale really well (the graph can be arbitrarily wide as tx's can run in parallel) when most transactions are causally unrelated but hit bottlenecks with every "killer app" that gains traction (graph narrows as more and more transactions become causally related).

I'm not sure what domains see this problem crop up but I've seen it in quant finance strategy execution. Say you have 1k strats that you want to run in parallel but risk needs to bound the bank's per-equity positions globally. When the strats work on different subsets, DAG approaches aren't a problem, but when most of the strats trade APPL/IBM your once very wide (parallel execution) graph narrows significantly (becomes more sequential) as the strats need to check with risk w.r.t. AAPL/IBM sequentially.

NB: for this reason, causal approaches are pretty rare to see today (though it depends on the domain as high latency contexts don't really care).

[jxub]

I know that there might be spam problems if one manages to precompute the local PoW hashes (solved by pruning the chain), but I would love if you explained more this security problems. Are they consensus-related as some people in reddit suggested? If this is the case, it might be good for Nano to get someone like @aphyr to audit the code.

[jameshayton]

My understanding is that Stellar is both a payment solution and a platform for facilitating decentralized exchanges. The two go hand in hand.

Nano is also interesting, but limited. In terms of moving value around, I think Stellar is more compelling.

[kylnew]

It’s funny to say ‘replacing’ bitcoin to me because we talk like it had a strong value and use in the past but really this has all just been speculation since the start. We all seem in agreement that blockchain as a technology is legitimate but none of these currency implementations float my boat yet because of how highly speculative the whole market is right now.

Aside: last week up I looked it up and sure enough there’s a ‘PonziCoin’ out there

[zdfjkhiuj]

I don't think the blockchain is a good technology. Traditional databases or something like Git solve the same problems better. I have an ideological desire to see more trustless and peer-to-peer systems and I think they'll take hold eventually, but at the moment blockchains are worthless.

[sidibe]

It's a good technology if you agree with the goals of libertarians today which is that we should be able to do everything without trust. Having trust is such a huge shortcut of energy and enables you not to have to completely do everything yourself. It pretty much enabled civilization to begin with, but many people now have given up on trusting anything and don't think they have the agency to improve any sort of trusted authority.

[kylnew]

There’s a lot more I could know about the practicality of blockchain but the value of the technology is still more real than the currencies that live on it. It seems to me, in my perhaps naive opinion, that in the long run blockchain might just be a way to make digital certificates of authenticity for digital goods that need a guaranteed uniqueness feature.

[johnx123-up]

As I previously posted here in HN, this author suggests PGP for immutable database where Bitcoin is projected as serious use case http://rajeshanbiah.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/technology-predic...

[imtringued]

The lightning network can also be used for atomic swaps to exchange cryptocurrencies with each other. If a vendor accepts lightning payments in theory you could pay with any cryptocurrency you want. In a future like that it's likely that bitcoin could become insignificant.