That said currently ethereum has many L2 solutions (https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/layer-2-scaling/) that "run in parallel" and result in low gas fees.
So far I've not seen any hint of an "embarrasingly parallel architecture" that can satisfy the safety requirements that a blockchain also does and run smart contracts. I'd be happy to read up if you can point me to any research or projects that I've missed.
Ethereum has so much network effect that these other projects need to actually pay people to use them over Ethereum. Not to mention they're also more centralized.
A lot of other platform projects are providing bridges which makes it possible to use those projects as some sort of an L2 for ethereum. If a lot of dapps starts migrating to those instead of to native L2 solutions it can get ugly.
However, the actual technical research paper with rigorous mathematical proofs is still going through peer review, but if you email me I am happy to share it with you.
Really, what you need is a distributed hash table (like MaidSAFE), or randomness beacons (like Algorand) to select a subset of the network. This paper shows mathematically that the probability of a double-spend goes down exponentially with the number of notaries, and having the entire network secure every transaction, no matter the size, is wayyyy overkill:
If you don’t like ME saying it — here is VITALIK HIMSELF saying it, the guy is quite honest and straightforward about its limitations: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/08/19/vitalik-buterin-e...
Vitalik Buterin: Using Ethereum is expensive, and its blockchain is ‘almost full’
He also said blockchain's 'problem' is that every computer verifies every transaction
Actually Ethereum 2.0 should be “fast enough” for many applications. It’s still going to be doing a global consensus, but at least it will be able to handle actual real world usage - people paying for coffee, let’s say, or voting in elections.
In fact, a major reason that so many ICOs from 2017 were considered scams is that the tokens could not actually be used for their intended purpose. Teams like Kik Messenger discovered this early on and moved away:
https://medium.com/kinblog/kin-pushing-ahead-next-steps-on-t...
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2019/09/19/por...
The more important reason flash loans work on Ethereum is that Ethereum runs programmatic contracts that can take the output of a function call from a different contract as their input. This is something that doesn't exist outside of the world of smart/programmatic contracts.
The blockchain just provides the immutable ordering of transactions and credible neutrality of access-control needed for the state of programmatic contracts to accrue value.
Been hearing that for years. Anyone yet have anything running that allows a digital currency to scale without being vulnerable to the attacks Bitcoin can resist?
For the time being, no one has found vulnerabilities in it.
What can I say, the first generation of any technology is laughably inadequate as a replacement for what came before. That is why for example hardlh anyone uses Bitcoin in everyday transactions and why we still don’t use technology to secure voting, but that will change. As an aside, I don’t think blockchain is the best technology for voting but it’s the buzzword that people understand:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/russian-blockchain-voting-sys...
Vitalik himself acknowledges this, the guy is quite honest and straightforward about its limitations: https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/08/19/vitalik-buterin-e...
Vitalik Buterin: Using Ethereum is expensive, and its blockchain is ‘almost full’ He also said blockchain's 'problem' is that every computer verifies every transaction
Actually blockchains are a first-generation technology that do global consensus for every block, which literally means all transactions in the world must go through one computer in the world (the miner) although it’s a different one each time. And the situation is actually worse, since you don’t know who would mine the next block in advance, every transaction must be sent to every potential miner! Imagine if BitTorrent had every computer store and seed every movie instead of using DHT.
The ability to send or loan arbitrarily large amounts for a fixed fee is a symptom of centralization. In a fully distributed network, transaction fees would have to be proportional to transaction size!
Almost every other protocol on the Internet does not have such bottlenecks in its design. No one asks how many emails or websites can be served per second. Blockchain is trying to secure every transaction using the entire network! That is why so much electricity is wasted just to do 7 transactions per second.
The next generation of crypto will actually be able to power payments using embarrasingly parallel architecture. Until then, we have blockchain.
Ethereum is nicknamed the “world computer” for a reason. Gas fees are super high for small transactions like paying for coffee or voting in a secure election. Just one app KryptoKitties can clog up the entire network.
We built Intercoin apps on top of Ethereum (https://intercoin.org/applications) but we are not going to wait around for Ethereum 2.0 - which is blockchain also. Kik Messenger and others have long gotten off.