[EGreg]

Well, all projects can be changed by humans.

However, the problem with Bitcoin is that it's built on a monolithic blockchain, so it's actually got a bottleneck. The miner is the bottleneck. Every transaction in the world must be sent to every potential miner, making it even more inefficient.

In most other distributed systems, when you increase the number of computers, the amount of transactions the system can handle increases. Not so with these monolithic blockchains.

Ethereum has the same problem. Vitalik even admitted it this year: https://community.intercoin.org/t/vitalik-scalability-is-a-b...

We need systems that are sharded from day 1, such as MaidSAFE and Holochain. "Embarrassingly Parallel" systems!

[cryptowizard]

That's an interesting way of putting it. Scaling will always be a problem with monolithic records like you say. I have worked on a couple of distributed ledgers with sharding and these governance models seem to be more promising. Often there is some sort of democratic voting system for stakeholders when it comes to making change to the code which can be reduced by certain cryptoecnomic rules (e.g. demurrage fees for hoarders if it uses a proof of stake consensus). You're right though, its the fact that software needs to be updated by humans so that it stays relevant and reflects stakeholder interest over time that demands decision making. And this decision making often tends to materialise in (some sort of) centralised form due to the need to regulate and promotes good decisions (i.e. by experts). The same happens through Wikipedia moderating.

[hanniabu]

Considering the other comment here about Holochain I feel like this whole comment was just meant to be an incognito way to shill Holochain.

[EGreg]

Funny that you say that.

I have absolutely nothing to do with Holochain. I attended one Holochain meetup. Since you thought that, I should say my own project is called Intercoin.org ... I linked to a page that lets you discover a lot more.

Why don’t you say this is a way to shill MaidSAFE?

I guess my shilling was too subtle for you to even notice. And that’s fine.

You know what really bothers me about HN lately... I have written tons of helpful information on all these topics at our domain BUT I AM AFRAID TO LINK TO IT in a comment because it will be heavily downvoted (-3 for now) and called a shill.

You can literally devote YEARS of hard work and bugfixing, open source the code base as I did with https://qbix.com/platform and describe exactly what the problems are and how this solves them and you can take the code and use it...

But the comment is instantly downvoted and You’re called out for shilling. Shilling what, a free and open source project? Why even bother to link to solutions anymore. May as well just stop at a few helpful but vague suggestions. I have started doing that.

In this case I thought it would be good form to mention some competing projects to illustrate a major new generation solving sharding. Turns out that’s even worse. Apparently I’m shilling our competitors now!

[neffy]

Quite possibly, but they are also quite correct - you cannot scale a full mesh network to anything remotely resembling the capacity required, it has to be some kind of sharded, p2p topology.

At which point, and the irony here is quite profound I agree, you are starting to look at something that looks a lot like the existing banking system.

[EGreg]

Yeah we need to have massively parallel systems, but that doesn’t necessarily mean what they have for banking and centralized databases... there are a lot of innovations that have happened since the introduction of Bitcoin. I could show you the actual whitepaper and link you to the pages describing the major design breakthroughs in simple terms but I won’t because that would apparently be shilling my project (Intercoin, not Holochain). Just take my word for it ... there is a lot that is far beyond blockchain.

[pfraze]

I'll vouch that EGreg isn't part of Holochain. I'm not either but it's one of the projects that I find most interesting in the distributed/decentralized computing space.