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by gfodor 1741 days ago
HN comments that use the word "never" should raise eyebrows.

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

2 comments

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.

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.

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.

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/

Please tell me how an Avalanche blockchain is able to handle billions of global P2P transactions a day.
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.
It's not about "never say never". It's about HN being notoriously bad at predicting trends.
> 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?