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by frazbin 1669 days ago
Being able to query arbitrary past blockchain history is kind of gross, because you can neither partition nor elide any of the data under consensus- your verifiers need to have a copy of everything. Leads to expensive nodes cause disk space and RAM use explodes. Not an uncommon complaint about immutable programming techniques generally. Idk, kinda seems like a bad tradeoff to me. But then again if you're building it on top of the literal money fire that is bitcoin, who cares about scalability and resource use!
1 comments
jude- 1668 days ago
> verifiers need to have a copy of everything.

Hate to break it to you, but if your consensus rules permit forks, then there's no getting around this. A fork can be mined arbitrarily far in the future that builds off of a block arbitrarily far in the past.

We intend to partition state by application, for applications that are willing to trade smart contract composibility for more block space: https://gist.github.com/jcnelson/c982e52075337ba75e00b799421...

> But then again if you're building it on top of the literal money fire that is bitcoin, who cares about scalability and resource use!

Show me a more resilient blockchain and we'll build on that instead. Popular systems see lots of usage; news at 11.

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frazbin 1668 days ago
well basically you have to throw out proof of work and then it's fine. If that's a philosophical thing then you're constrained to highly inefficient systems that yeah, are designed to fork like you say. But if you're okay with any kind of proof of stake setup, you don't have to consider forks, because you trust your validators.

Ultimately it comes down to what you like about the blockchain chimera. Some people like proof of work for its own sake; they think that's the way forward. Some of us think that public distributed append-only log structures with cryptographically enforced permissioning are super interesting all by themselves, maybe even MORE interesting without proof of work!

Long term I don't think it's going to be any fun until a larger subset of homomorphic computing is cheap enough to run distributed-consensus style. In the meantime all I know is it's a lot more fun once you stop trying to be the source of truth for the universe, and accept proof of stake as a natural compromise necessary to keep playing with our toys w/o burning up.

I'd be happy to share but you'll have to message me. And I'm an idiot.

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