
Tomorrow's Apps Will Come From the Bitcoin Protocol - svenkatesh
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2014/03/decentralized-applications-built-bitcoin-great-except-whos-responsible-outcomes/?
======
betterunix
I hope this is not the case. Bitcoin demands a massive energy investment
(every watt used by the attacker must at least be matched by a watt used by
the honest parties), and in the future we are going to need to be more careful
about power utilization.

~~~
wwweston
To emphasize the point, this isn't just true to the extent that energy is
scarce:

"the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via
(infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can
predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy
the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate
(conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would
reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. And this statement is
independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source
yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual
energy increase."

[https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-
meets...](https://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-
physicist/)

By making an economic exchange computationally expensive, we may have invented
another way to make economic activity ecologically expensive.

~~~
intelliot
It's too early for anyone to say whether this concern is a real problem, but
here are a few points that you should analyze further:

1) ASICs. In the early days of Bitcoin, one of the biggest concerns was: "Now
that computational power is worth real money, aren't malicious hackers going
to become rich and powerful by harnessing botnets? And more normal people's
computers will join botnets as hackers are directly incentivized, by bitcoin
mining, to exploit users more often."

With the rise of the Bitcoin-specific ASIC, that suddenly became a total non-
issue. It's completely worthless for a normal desktop PC to mine for bitcoins
now: their total computational power, as measured in SHA256 hashes per second,
is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the high-end ASICs that are mining
today.

Problem solved.

Though governments will try to get involved, and no one can definitively
predict the winner in advance -- I believe it's most likely that private
industry, incentivized by Bitcoin's mining rewards, will create the most
advanced specialized chips for Bitcoin. They're already pushing much lower
nanometer processes than general purpose CPUs!

2) Energy expense of current monetary system. People, computers, ATMs, POS's,
paper, time expenditure, inflation/hyperinflation, uncertainty, economic/debt
crises, counterfeiting, unemployment - all problems that could be reduced or
eliminated by Bitcoin.

3) Future technology. Before cars were invented, one of the biggest concerns
was: "How are we going to get rid of the horse manure that's piling up in the
world's densest cities?"

Infrared radiation isn't the only way to release heat to space. And even if it
were, no one could say that it's not possible for humans+technology to
amplify/improve this process.

~~~
gamblor956
1) ASICs generate a lot of heat, so that problem is not solved.

2) People, computers, POS, time expenditure, currency fluctuation,
uncertainty, economic crisis, and unemployment are problems which are either
not addressable by Bitcoin or not meaningfully impacted by it. Bitcoin isn't
some magical economic cure-all. It's just a means of exchange.

3) This is a straw man. Horse manure disposal was not a primary concern before
cars were invented. The primary concern was how to transport goods before they
spoiled. Improved cargo transportation technologies _and refrigeration
technologies_ changed the economic landscape, not cars.

4) Infrared radiation is the _primary_ way in which heat is released in to
space. The sum of all other means of heat loss from the Earth is currently a
rounding error compared to heat loss by radiation. It would take an absolutely
_massive_ investment in technology to change that.

~~~
sroerick
2\. Parent was simply comparing the infrastructure supporting the bitcoin
netwrok with the infrastructure supporting credit card processing. The
question isn't "is Bitcoin wasteful?", the question is "Is Bitcoin more or
less wasteful than the current payment infrastructure?"

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ZachPruckowski
Have they solved the "you need the whole blockchain" bit? Like do blockchain-
based apps still require you to download the whole she-bang to participate? I
know for bitcoin the blockchain is like 14GB or so, and that's for (only most
of the) financial transactions for a small (on a global scale) community. If
you want to do something with a bigger target audience or more complex data
needs, are you going to wind up needing a separate hard drive to participate
after a year or two?

~~~
pkulak
And how about the 7 transaction/second limit? If Bitcoin really does start to
be used for everything, it's going to hit that wall really quick.

~~~
martindale
This is an arbitrary hardcoded limit.

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eximius
Did anyone else get bothered by the author saying that the Bitcoin Blockchain
is more like a cloud service than P2P services?

The Blockchain is literally almost exactly like P2P File sharing except the
file can be updated across nodes in an extremely limited context.

~~~
dvanduzer
She's saying some subtle things about what a "system" is. BitCoin and
BitTorrent have almost nothing in common as protocols go.

At a high level, BitTorrent's DHT uses some notion of consensus to communicate
between peers about who is on the network and where they and their files are.
There is never system-wide coherence of the DHT, but the algorithm (Kademlia)
doesn't require anything like that. BitCoin's notion of consensus requires
that coherence in all but the last ~10 minutes worth of the blockchain.

Zooming out even farther, BitCoin requires the entire network for anything to
happen at all. BitTorrent leverages the entire network to speed up
interactions between two individual nodes.

If you're still not convinced, consider what happens if 40% of the network is
cut off from the rest for a large period of time. After the extended network
partition ends, and the two big swarms rejoin, what do users find is
different?

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EGreg
I also don't really understand WHY you need all that massive expenditure of
energy for a distributed timestamp server to work.

All you need is a network of computers that agree to run timestamp services,
and then sign any info with enough timestamps from enough computers. That will
give an uppsr bound on the time something was signed. The lower bound is
trivial to provide by the transaction originator - simply sign something using
enough timestamp services values as a salt.

A timestamp service simply outputs a random number for each previous minute
and is available to sign things using the next number.

In order to defeat this scheme, an attacker needs to execute a Sybil attack
against all the timestamp servers. The only time you really NEED to make
something really expensive is to be let in as a timestamp server. This can be
done on a reputation system, essentially proof of stake for new miners only.
But not for each transaction!

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joaomsa
Are there any resources that go in depth about how the blockchain works or how
it differs from traditional DHT implementations?

~~~
dvanduzer
This is Bruce Schneier's favorite explanation of the blockchain:
[http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-
protocol-a...](http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol-
actually-works/)

Comparing it to a "traditional DHT" is like kind of like comparing SQL and
NoSQL. This is a good start on why that doesn't work:
[http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-
tolerance/](http://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/)

------
al2o3cr
Needed: Markov-chain creation of Bitcoin articles as-a-service.

