If they really mean the internet, I just dont see how the bitcoin blockchain can exist without the Internet. It's not a way to transmit information without IP (or an equivalent protocol)
If they mean the Web, well, there already is something working that solve the same problems, it's call Freenet and near to no one use it (at least "normal" people. Cryptoanarchists and techies don't count)
The biggest problem with the blockchain is that every (at least veryfing) node need a full copy of it. Storing data in it mean duplicating it for every node, and it has enormous costs. Try storing 1GB of data (for example, a movie) in it...
Bitcoin works right without "the internet" or even an IP network, you can sneaker net around the Blockchain, if you like.
But indeed, Bitcoin-- and the technology in it-- doesn't generally solve the hard problems the web presents (just like the prior distributed system technology before Bitcoin didn't solve Bitcoin's issues). There is a lot of seriously misplaced hype in this space.
A bit of pedantry on your last comment: "The biggest problem with the blockchain is that every (at least veryfing) node need a full copy of it" -- this isn't true. Please see section 7 of the original Bitcoin whitepaper "Reclaiming disk space".
It's still not a suitable mechanism to store arbitrary data, however.
I personally feel DNSSEC and DANE are just a grave misplacement of trust, and hope something similar to Namecoin is pivotal in what comes after DNS. I'd rather this was the legacy of Bitcoin than a mildly interesting poke at the Fed where you don't even get the privacy afforded to you by a credit card transaction over TLS... oh dang, sorry, my jaded cynicism slipped in again.
The blockchain is to the web as the web is to television and radio. It's an infrastructural component and any time we have new infrastructure we redistribute our resources to gain the most benefit but we never replace old infrastructure we just change our utilization of it. The blockchain is ideal for directories and metadata; data that needs to be public, immutable, and verifiable. Anything that does not directly benefit from the features of the blockchain should be handled by other protocols such as torrent or web or other.
A good part-overview and part-prediction on the blockchain.
The author however has a rather dismissive tone when he says that "The blockchain literature is packed with graduate dissertations from the Rube Goldberg school of systems design". Perhaps I misread the tone, but IMO, the most important achievements come exactly when such dots are connected together.
That said, there's not a single mention of one of the most important issues in the adoption of the blockchain today - what are the things that prevent the creation of a high throughput blockchain where each individual transaction completes much faster, in order to realistically scale to the kind of workloads that the author's uses cases are likely to throw at it?
Thanks wmf - I do recall reading that. If you notice the stats he has, if the block header verification process was done in parallel, there's a theoretical speed up from that "original best case 12s" block chain copy time to a potential 2-3s (possibly), and an actual time of 5s.
But ultimately, and correct me if I'm wrong, the very nature of the "copy all blocks to everyone" nature of the blockchain will make it close to impossible to reduce it down to the order of millisecond transactions?
Ethereum is a scam. Its author received millions of USD in funding, and after a year the only things he has delivered are blog posts that are mostly just PoS propaganda. PoS is a flawed concept, but its proponents dismiss all criticism by saying "we added all these patches and unnecessary complexity and fixed it! Look, no one has hacked it yet!".
As someone using the ethereum alpha software regularly, I have to disagree- They have produced a lot of great code so far, and it seems likely now that ethereum will be live and in operation in early March (though admittedly it'll still have some shortcomings at that point)
As for PoS vs PoW, yes PoS gives you less objectivity on "truth" in block determination- If you define "flawed" as anything less objective than "PoW" then it would certainly meet your definition. The question is how many people feel the way you do on this matter, and what impact this will have on the success of ethereum as a product.
There were several functional alpha clients even before the crowdsale. PoS vs PoW is somewhat beside the point anyway, as the codebase is still using SHA3 PoW: http://github.com/ethereum
Well, certainly "Proof of stake" has been getting more popular in the cryptocurrency community... this system has a lot less overhead than PoW, though it's still controversial for technical reasons that are hard to describe in a brief comment.
Isn't bitcoin already owned by a mining pool (ownership defined as an entity that can express 51% of the mining power)? Why is anyone even playing with this system anymore - the growth of the blockchain is controllable by a single entity! Isn't preventing that the whole point?!
The Bitcoin blockchain provides a tamper-resistant ledger to which anyone can add, but no one can delete. That's useful for a narrow range of use cases, but not revolutionary.
Bitcoin itself is in a screaming dive right now, at $215 and dropping. $214.77. $213.41. ...
If they mean the Web, well, there already is something working that solve the same problems, it's call Freenet and near to no one use it (at least "normal" people. Cryptoanarchists and techies don't count)
The biggest problem with the blockchain is that every (at least veryfing) node need a full copy of it. Storing data in it mean duplicating it for every node, and it has enormous costs. Try storing 1GB of data (for example, a movie) in it...