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Thoughts on blockchain scalability
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= The consensus basket = If you make a list of all the properties that make up a good consensus system you might end up with a basket with the following things inside it: * Decentralization * Censorship resistance * Byzantine fault tolerance * Open, equal participation * Privacy / pseudo-anonymity Unfortunately, you cannot have everything and keep scalablity. If you want to have more scalable p2p networks just reduce the number of nodes, and lose decentralization. If you want to make consensus “less wasteful”? Go ahead with [https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ PoS] and remove equal, open participation. What about making the data structures more “efficient”? Well, [http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/the-enduring-challenge-of-compressing-ra/240049914 compressing random data is mathematically impossible]. Bitcoin is an example of a consensus system that sets every parameter in the consensus basket to max settings [http://unenumerated.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/money-blockchains-and-social-scalability.html to get the most secure system possible]. As a result, Bitcoin is the least scalable of any blockchain system today, yet also one of the most secure. If you were to lower any of its settings you would lose it’s full benefts. There is no way around this. I know many people were hoping to disprove this relationship or find a chink in its armour, but if you look hard enough, you’ll see that every recent paper on scaling has gone from trying to find that one great discovery to lowering different settings in the consensus basket. What this says to me is that there is no silver bullet for scalability. Instead, researchers are starting to ask – “well, do we need a billion dollar network to secure every payment or can we use something else?” <span id="towards-adaptable-consensus"></span>
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