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by joeblau 2033 days ago
I'm not a Bitcoin advocate, I just recognize the value the invention provided and I recognize that this whole cryptocurrency space relies on it being successful for long enough for anything else usurp it. If Bitcoin got hacked right now, everything crashes with it.

Compared to Bitcoin, there are consensus mechanisms that are a lot faster (3 orders of magnitude), cheaper (almost free transaction cost), near instant finality (seconds, not 1 hour) and leave almost zero carbon footprint. They just haven't been proven out at scale yet.
2 comments
brandonmenc 2033 days ago
> there are consensus mechanisms that are a lot faster (3 orders of magnitude)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this still falls far short of like, VISA.

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chemeng 2033 days ago
PoS and Sharding on ETH (part of ETH2) should theoretically allow it to surpass VISA's transaction bandwidth. (Visa Currently reported to be around 65k Tx/s, though average volume is somewhere in the 1-5k Tx/s)
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joeblau 2033 days ago
You're not wrong :-D
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DennisP 2033 days ago
Yes, and the production launch of that new consensus mechanism is what happened today on Ethereum. It runs on a minimum of 16K nodes, and last I checked had about 60% more than that.
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