On 2016-01-24 1:11 PM, ianG wrote:
There's some thinking about sharding the blockchain because that's the only way to go massively scaled to say IoT levels. Also a lot of thinking as to what happens when you relax the anonymity condition.
Need to shard the blockchain if we are going to replace the US dollar, if everyone in the world starts using a cryptocurrency to buy eggs and milk.
Need to go proof of stake as it has become apparent that the interests of miners are not perfectly aligned with the interests of the bitcoin business community.
Unfortunately, these things are easier said than done. Hard to figure out how to shard the blockchain and still efficiently solve the Byzantine Generals problem every few minutes. I have been puzzling at this for some time. Seems as if it should be doable, and indeed it is easy to find a seeming solution http://blog.sldx.com/three-challenges-for-scaling-bitcoin/, but it always turns out that the seeming solution makes it possible for someone to profit from bad behavior. It is hard to shard the blockchain while having incentives aligned in every shard. To shard the blockchain we need global alignment of incentives with merely local knowledge.
Simple proof of stake solutions turn out to require considerably more work than the current proof of work solution.
I still think this is doable, but it is tricky. _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography@randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
