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@ ishaq
2025-02-24 08:42:48
“I cannot stand the way most academics write” <- will not argue on this point to stay on the topic.
NOTE: I neither support nor care for the garbage coins that keep popping up. My arguments assume academically sound systems.
a couple of representative examples:
1. The article is hand wavy regarding Bitcoin’s decentralization. It claims, without evidence, that Bitcoin has no concentration of influence. The issue here is that gathering such evidence, despite the weaker privacy (pseudo-anonymity) on Bitcoin (and other similar pseudo-anonymous currencies) is not trivial. A couple of graph analysis studies suggest that the same lopsided influence exists in Bitcoin. And this sounds likely too, considering that Bitcoin ecosystem involves large mining operations and mining pools. Moreover, Bitcoin (and any PoW blockchain) will always require more computing power than a PoS (or other lottery mechanism) blockchain. This is because the node has to solve the PoW puzzle in addition to the work of maintaining a ledger. CPU/GPU era of Bitcoin mining ended in early 2010s. Nowadays one requires significant investment in a mining rig. Your argument should have been that Bitcoin, despite the lopsided influence that most probably exists, is less susceptible attacks/bad-behavior because of its superior market adoption. It’s not because running a Bitcoin node is cheap. Regarding true decentralization of influence, it is a hard problem. The real world influences find a way to be reflected in decentralized systems too. The property is certainly desirable and should be researched into.
2. In its passion for bashing blockchain, the article makes the strange statement that blockchain is “inefficient” and that any “centralized” solution will be “cheaper, faster, more reliable”, and “more maintainable”. This statement is a mix of incorrect claims (e.g., a centralized system is *not* more reliable) and correct but misleading claims (e.g., centralized systems are faster) because these distract from the real reasons one would choose a decentralized system over a centralized one e.g., Trustlessness. What’s worse, if one were to take these misleading claims on face value, then Bitcoin itself is a bad system because It’s not faster than Visa (25,000 tps vs. < 10 tps), it’s inefficient (requires more computing power and storage than a centralized system), and it’s not cheap (the energy cost to keep the system running is more than that of many small countries). The value of Bitcoin cannot be judged on these metrics, the benefits it brings (Trustlessness, Reliability, Ease, etc) are what make it a superior solution to the centralized Visa/Mastercard systems. It’s like saying insecure traditional programs are faster, more power efficient, and reliable compared to secure multiparty computation (MPC).
Blockchain is an instance (specific problem) of the State Machine Replication or SMR (the general problem). It is most definitely not “just a linked list”. Someone who says so has probably never read anything on Consensus. "there’s nothing inherently magical about a blockchain”. Yes! There’s nothing magical about any science. The excitement doesn’t stem from seeing magic, it stems from the possibility of a solution to a previously hard problem.
A final note, the article (at least how much I read) reads like Bitcoin is panacea for all ailments. There are significant issues in Bitcoin—Low throughput, Inefficiency, lack of privacy, etc—that others are trying to solve. The extremely misleading statement on blockchain betrays that if the author of the statement (not sure if it were you or someone you quoted) were presented with the idea of decentralized payment system before Bitcoin’s boom, he would have exactly the same talking points against Bitcoin that he is now using against Blockchain and other cryptocurrencies on it. It’s also probable that the author will sing praises of Blockchain as soon as it has its Google or YouTube or Spotify moment. Till then, one should not become dogmatic when discussion man-made technology.