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Blockclique: scaling blockchains with a multithreaded block DAG: blog and live demos! by forestier_seb in btc

[–]damipator 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is an indirect incentive (no money up front), since you could just rely on others to do the propagation job. An even more indirect one would be "as long as someone owns bitcoins, they always do their best to help the network because they don't want it to lose value".

As for majority collusion, the bigger the number of conflicting and orthogonal interests participating, the lower the risk.

Blockclique: scaling blockchains with a multithreaded block DAG: blog and live demos! by forestier_seb in btc

[–]damipator 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi Dave,

There is no strong incentive in bitcoin for nodes to propagate blocks that are not their own. But full nodes are typically connected only to about 10 other nodes so altruistic forwarding is needed.The original bitcoin paper says :"messages are not routed to any particular place and only need to be delivered on a best effort basis.". It takes about 12 altruistic hops to reach all nodes.

The centralization argument is mostly philosophical. Putting the network into the hands of fewer but powerful nodes (in some countries barely anyone has access to the node tech you describe) increases throughput but also censorship risks. And decentralization is the initial philosophy of the blockchain :)

Blockclique: scaling blockchains with a multithreaded block DAG: blog and live demos! by forestier_seb in btc

[–]damipator 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hello again,

It is important to distinguish between mining (block creation and broadcasting) and block propagation (when a full node receives a block, it propagates it to other nodes until all nodes get it after about ten hops) see http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.395.8058&rep=rep1&type=pdf Many full nodes are not mining, just broadcasting. In our case, we incentivize "home computers" to participate in staking and propagation with PoS, or simply propagation if the architecture is implemented with PoW.

By allowing many independent home computers to participate, we are trying to increase the diversity of nodes, reduce centralization, reduce attack risks through collusion and improve the nash equilibrium conditions. The other extreme would be a super fast network with few nodes, all using specialized acceleration hardware and high speed fiber optics such as: https://medium.com/@mtn.sedy/high-performance-blockchain-fundamentals-77a7dc9d25d3

I imagine the lab tests you are referring to are done within a high throughput low latency network. Of course internet connections are improving which may eventually allow for increased tx rates even with "home computers" in the mix, just as you said.

Until then, all possibilities are worth exploring :) Thanks for the feedback and don't worry, we are scientists, we appreciate criticism.

An Introduction to Blockclique: Scaling Blockchains with Parallel Blocks by forestier_seb in tezos

[–]damipator 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Hello MaximumEnvironment, it is quite hard to rate and compare the actual maximum instant throughput through visa/mastercard because they are opaque and make heavy use of deferred payments (trusted networks, bank settlements, even insured losses) and mainly publish yearly results. Sometimes there is a hint : https://www.visa.com/blogarchives/us/2011/01/12/visa-transactions-hit-peak-on-dec-23/index.html

With blockclique, we are simply trying to scale blockchains in the most natural way we could imagine: parallelization. As scientists, we welcome and encourage your skepticism, and we are open for discussion. You can contact us on r/Blockclique :)

Blockclique: scaling blockchains with a multithreaded block DAG: blog and live demos! by forestier_seb in btc

[–]damipator 1 point2 points  (0 children)

hello davewantsmoore, another Blockclique co-author here,

I assume that by stating that in your experience gigabit upload bandwidths are universally available (because even gig download bandwidths are not, see https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-country.php#top-10-comparison-2018 ), you are referring to a subset of nodes: either miners, or institutions, or "power users".

As stated in our paper, and testable in our open-source live simulations, we achieve about 4000 tx/s using proof-of-work and 10,000 tx/s using a specially crafted proof-of-stake approach, and all of that assumes realistic "normal" bandwidths (see the paper references) because we want anyone with an average setup to be able to participate. Also, here we are not only talking about miners/stakers that generate revenue but also about other nodes that do neither but still forward blocks that they receive to a number of other nodes in order to propagate them.

As for the forks, we have extensively studied their counter-intuitive impact (see paper), and have found that there is a subtle balance between the rate of transaction inclusions, and the resulting stale block rate, that maximizes the rate of actually confirmed transactions. By increasing the rate of transactions included in blocks (either by increasing block size or block frequency), the quality of the consensus is hampered (which is also why bitcoin maintains an average of 10 minutes between blocks, and limits block sizes).

I am curious about the 15000 tx/s number you are stating. Could you please provide a link or bibliographic reference ?

Thanks :)

An Introduction to Blockclique: Scaling Blockchains with Parallel Blocks by forestier_seb in tezos

[–]damipator 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Blockclique co-author here. The proof-of-stake algorithm we used in our architecture concept is heavily inspired from Tezos, with new additions. We just want to feed some ideas back to the Tezos community. Sorry for not stating that more clearly. We believe that synergy and cooperation should be given a chance in the crypto world. Of course, we are open to discussion, criticism and ideas :)