| > Nothing about blockchains prevents censorship. The decentralization of block producers helps. For instance we saw a few years ago that a few payment processors could decide to not support wikileaks donations, meaning that the only non-cryptocurrency way to donate to them was to mail them cash in an envelope. A government seeking to do the analogous thing would need to effectively make the network soft-fork a rule in disallowing payments to wikileaks addresses, something much harder to do. > I'm certainly happy to be shown this is wrong. Got resources? I have never seen any legitimate public blockchain claim 100x improvement from PoS over PoW. I'd be surprised if it were more than 3x for ethereum. One very powerful upper bound in any non-sharded blockchain without validator delegation is that every full validator must process all transactions, and we want validators to be able to do so with relatively weak hardware (e.g. a Macbook Pro). Certainly, a 100x increase in ethereum TPS would violate this upper bound; for instance, the current state size (2GB) is not designed to fit into RAM, and hence every transaction must do a random disk read and write onto a hard disk. The actual computation can be pretty expensive too, e.g. I've seen a benchmark that ECDSA verification takes 500ms on an i5 processor. The "broadcast mode limitation" you mention imposes another upper bound, but I do not think it is sharper than then validation upper bound. > The practical outcome will be indistinguishable from a healthy banking system, won't actually stop fraud, will be subject to the exact same controls that other physically rooted banks are subject to So this is more subjective but I have to disagree here, depending on what you mean by "healthy banking system". We've learned from history that to have banks run on fractional reserve yet not be subject to frequent bank runs, we have to make them hold reserves in some central bank. And even if you just set up an "anti-escrow service" you have anti-fraud and AML laws to comply with. The end result is that there are huge capital requirements to create new banks most places in the world and fraud still occurs; the capital requirements lead to an oligopolistic industry that doesn't actually provide the consumer services it exists to provide very well. This seems pretty backwards to me. I think in the near-term, payment channel hubs will be much cheaper to stand up than banks and the trust model will be the same as on-chain payments: if you accidentally pay someone off-chain you have no recourse. It seems that building fraud protections on top of this base is more sensible. |