
Vitalik Buterin Has Left VC Firm Fenbushi Capital - rbanffy
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/15/vitalik-buterin-fenbushi-capital-exit/?ncid=rss&utm_source=tctwreshare&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=twitter
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tiuPapa
Sorry for going off-topic, but is there any good community I can join if I am
interested only in understanding the technical side of blokchain and
blockchain development, its potential use cases and pitfalls.

~~~
thinkmassive
There’s no shortage of materials to use for self-education before you seek out
a community.

Bitcoin resources:
[https://lopp.net/bitcoin.html](https://lopp.net/bitcoin.html)

Ethereum resources:
[http://www.ethdocs.org/en/latest/](http://www.ethdocs.org/en/latest/)
[https://raiden.network/](https://raiden.network/)
[https://www.plasma.io/](https://www.plasma.io/) Vitalik’s recent scalability
blog post with many links to further reading:
[https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/01/02/ethereum-scalability-
re...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/01/02/ethereum-scalability-research-
development-subsidy-programs/)

All of the legitimate projects have a decent technical community, and many
maintain good docs and/or blogs. Personally I find Tendermint and Cosmos very
interesting, and I gained a better grasp of proof-of-stake by reading their
articles.

Run your own nodes and interact with them from your favorite programming
language.

After you have a grasp of the existing technologies used by Bitcoin and
Ethereum, I recommend learning about the issues both are trying to tackle
going forward (second layer channels, proof-of-stake, sharding). Then you’ll
be in a good place to understand the alternatives proposed by newer projects,
like using a DAG instead of a blockchain.

~~~
thinkmassive
Oh, and if you’re concerned about the cost of testing on mainnet, consider
running a dogecoin node to start off. It’s an early fork of bitcoin, so the
functionality and interface is similar, but it’s extremely inexpensive.

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pellucide
Ironically, the discussions are not related to the posted link.

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shawn
What will BTC or ETH hard drive usage look like 100 years from now? Has anyone
run the numbers?

It seems like the disk usage will become untenable, but maybe someone has a
plan to deal with it.

~~~
DINKDINK
Actual disk-storage-use* data here:

[https://anduck.net/bitcoincore_vs_geth_full_node_stats.png](https://anduck.net/bitcoincore_vs_geth_full_node_stats.png)

Ethereum's blockchain has a growth rate 2X bitcoin's. If it continues to grow
at this pace, it'll eclipse 1 TB in size in 2018. If you aren't verifying the
blockchain that you're reading and writing to, then you're using a trusted
third party. If you're using a trusted third party, why are you even using a
blockchain to begin with?

Even BitGo, a commercial payment company, has trouble maintaining datacenter
servers that can keep up with the io demands of running an Ethereum node. [1]
Doesn't bode well for the long-term viability of ethereum.

Bitcoin's philosophy has been, rather than broadcast every single state update
to every single network participant (an unscalable network design approach[2])

[1] The Challenges of Building Ethereum Infrastructure
[https://medium.com/@lopp/the-challenges-of-building-
ethereum...](https://medium.com/@lopp/the-challenges-of-building-ethereum-
infrastructure-87e443e47a4b)

[2] Lightning Network enables Unicast Transactions in Bitcoin. Lightning is
Bitcoin’s TCP/IP stack. [https://medium.com/@melik_87377/lightning-network-
enables-un...](https://medium.com/@melik_87377/lightning-network-enables-
unicast-transactions-in-bitcoin-lightning-is-bitcoins-tcp-ip-
stack-8ec1d42c14f5)

*Storage is only one part of the scaling engineering issues. Also important is the CPU and time requirements to keep a blockchain node synced.

~~~
colordrops
> If you're using a trusted third party, why are you even using a blockchain
> to begin with?

This is a common misperception of the benefits of a blockchain. It's like
saying, if you are trusting a third party on science, why use science at all?
You don't have to verify science yourself, but know that you could repeat the
experiment if you wanted or needed to. The fact that the blockchain _is_ fully
stored and verified by a number of distributed parties, and that you do have
the ability of downloading and verifying if you want or need to, is enough to
keep the system honest.

Now this statement does make sense if you are referring to your private keys.
Don't ever let any third party hold those for you.

~~~
vasco
> but know that you could repeat the experiment if you wanted or needed to

The point is that at this rate, quite quickly you won't be able to, the costs
would just be too high.

