
Reclusive Engineer Is Plotting the Death of Blockchain - tim333
https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2019/01/09/this-hermitic-engineer-is-plotting-the-death-of-blockchain/#5d945b6f378e
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weregiraffe
Meanwhile, a Mad Reclusive Engineer is Plotting the Blockchain of Death.

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tCfD
Good luck to this guy, but it seems every solution to a blockchain scaling
problem is ultimately the creation of a blockchain decentralization problem,
and vice versa.

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SI_Rob
I suspect that sentence would remain true even if you took the word blockchain
out of it and replaced it with any network paradigm that is intended to
operate on a global scale. The speed of light becomes a hard ceiling very
quickly, and the only ways to get around this are to have a non global
network, submit to the realpolitik of limited domain centralization (sharding)
and the risk of unaccountable subjective influence it brings, or settle for a
glacial transaction rate.

~~~
tim333
Here's kind of how they deal with it from their FAQ

>To allow high scalability a Tempo ledger is split into a very large shard
space, allowing a huge degree of concurrency. To avoid a double spend across
any of the shards, the shard a wallet lives on is determined by its public
key. This makes sure that any spend from a wallet will always start on the
same shard. When combined with the logical clocks and gossip, this Tempo to
always find the total ordering of related events, allowing double spends to be
quickly detected and ignored.

~~~
SI_Rob
I don't think this actually addresses the problem at all unfortunately, as a
gossip protocol that has to flood a global network is going to require, sooner
or later the affirmation or rejection of a truth value from all nodes in that
network, and it is the accumulation of latency between all of those nodes that
becomes the upper bound on transaction frequency.

To have full decentralization you must not bypass, obscure or exclude any
cohort of nodes from having a proportionally fair influence over the
settlement of a common shared truth value, and this means you run smack into
hard limit of geography-scoped cumulative latency as a scalability dead end in
one direction, and decentralization dead end in the other.

There's a reason why high frequency trading shops have all settled on the same
solution to their own (far simpler) latency-scaling network dilemma, which is
to house their nodes as close as geometrically possible to the settlement
forum. This is the terminal stability state toward which any purportedly
decentralized truth settlement network will progress given enough time, as the
people, er, "actors" with the best geography are fated to win the latency
leverage race and with this advantage, come to control the definition of in-
network truth values.

