
The sorry state of the blockchain - luisivan
http://blog.luisivan.net/the-sorry-state-of-the-blockchain
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PaulHoule
I respectfully disagree.

I think there is a big role for open blockchains, but if 20 traders want to
sit under a buttonwood tree and run their own blockchain there is no problem
with that.

One of the reasons why blockchains took so long to arrive is that from a
conventional "distributed systems" point of view they are a nonstarter. If you
double the number of nodes, you don't increase the capacity of the system to
do work. You increase the security, you avoid the "long tail" latency problem,
and you can execute "smart contracts" without adding communications overhead,
but the economics are not favorable to execute your "smart contract" on 10,000
nodes at the same time.

If you really want to crush permissioned blockchains you need to figure out
some way to keep the security benefits of blockchains but shard them in such a
way that you can add more nodes and increase the workload capacity. If you
don't do that, permissioned blockchains will win for most applications./

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luisivan
Thanks for the comment, I understand the problem, but honestly I think you can
just have a distributed database with Paxos/Raft and some code in the
machines, and that's it. And it's OK! Just that it's not a blockchain, and
calling it that way creates this crazy confusion we're embedded in.

~~~
PaulHoule
You can also take the same software that you'd use in a public blockchain and
put a lock on it. For instance, the Consensys folks set things like that up
for banks.

