[pphysch]

Even an ideal blockchain-ified P2P "Web 3.0" is a silly fantasy on par with NAT-less IPv4. First they reinvented gold & databases, now they are reinventing IP.

Flat networks are a thing of the past, when you could keep the whole Internet in a paper directory on your desk. Blockchains may be used for settlement and accounting within small networks of international firms, but they will never service the latency and throughput needs of 8 billion netizens.

[osense]

I suggest you look into blockchains like Solana and Fantom, there have been some technological advancements lately that allow crazy fast and cheap transactions (with some other downsides of course).

I think of the current state of crypto as a kind of a wild west situation, there's still so much to be discovered and there's a lot of competition between different tokens to see who can do something better than the others. Saying that it's too slow right now doesn't mean it still will be a couple years down the line.

[pphysch]

Fantom: "Each network built in Fantom is independent from one another."

Solana: "Many [Solana] clusters may coexist. When two clusters share a common genesis block, they attempt to converge. Otherwise, they simply ignore the existence of the other."

Continuing my analogy, now they've gone and reinvented NAT/"IP federation", and destroyed the global P2P nature of Bitcoin. They've readded middlemen to online payments. Remind me what problem they are solving?

[osense]

Middlemen? Since when is a cluster of decentralized nodes a middleman?

Yes, it turns out that making a decentralized system both secure and scalable is a difficult problem, so people have been looking for ways to deal with it and improve on the original solution of Bitcoin (which, by the way, as I'm sure you know, has incredible energy consumption just to validate less than 5 transactions per second. How is that global?). I don't think that organizing decentralized nodes into some sort of bottom-up structure takes away from the P2P nature of blockchains. Just because a solution to a problem is not trivial and easy to understand (which Bitcoin is from the point of view of many more contemporary protocols), does not make it invalid.

At least Solana is a level 1 protocol, as opposed to some other solutions like sharding or zkRollups which add even more complexity.

[kybernetikos]

Theres some great work being done on zk roll ups you might be interested in.

[pphysch]

Congrats to Vitalik or whomever on reinventing settlement banks.

[kybernetikos]

Well, only in the same sense that a blockchain is a reinvention of a government currency issuer - there's a sense in which that's true, but it misses the really interesting stuff.

With correctly implemented zk roll ups, the security guarantees are the same as transactions on the main chain. The changes that are rolled up are proved to have taken place correctly, and an end user can extract their money from the roll up even if the roll up network stops functioning. They're also fast. Those are some nice advantages over a settlement bank.

[gfodor]

HN comments that use the word "never" should raise eyebrows.

You're not wrong if you assume technology is fixed. But it ain't.

[acdha]

The only way I can see your comment being correct is if you're open to redefinitions of “blockchain” which do not require either immutability or the global public ledger. The current blockchains handle a vanishingly-small fraction of global financial traffic using far more equipment, data, and power — there's no magic wand which can allow you to scale up by many orders of magnitude without architectural changes.

That could be solved by splitting into local blockchains so the global network only handles transactions between local banks but that seems like it's basically giving up most of the benefits claimed in blockchain marketing.

[kybernetikos]

The Ethereum roadmap has sharding coming soon, and architectural changes aplenty. Of course in the near term the approach for scaling is rollups, zk-rollups in the mid term and optimistic rollups in the short term (already running).

Those approaches still have immutability and a global public ledger but that ledger no longer lists every single transaction.

[pphysch]

Right, and we will eventually choose to forgo toilets and defecate in the streets again, because "never say never".

Please address my argument instead of this unconstructive purity-testing nonsense.

[gfodor]

Your argument is refuted by the fact the technology to solve the problem you claim will never be solved literally already exists, one version of which has a market cap of almost $10B.[1]

Claiming that a very obvious engineering problem incentivized to being solved is the same as imagining us being incentivized to regress in the way you mention is also weird.

[1] https://www.avax.network/

[pphysch]

Please tell me how an Avalanche blockchain is able to handle billions of global P2P transactions a day.

[gfodor]

I presumed you were using “blockchain” as a short hand for “distributed fault tolerant system that solves Byzantine generals problem.” If not then I agree blockchains in the literal sense probably are a transitional tech.

[Kiro]

It's not about "never say never". It's about HN being notoriously bad at predicting trends.

[thaumasiotes]

> Right, and we will eventually choose to forgo toilets and defecate in the streets again, because "never say never".

It's happened in the past; why would you rule it out in the future?