Re:There aren't that many uses for blockchains
by whatisweb3 on Thursday August 11, 2022 @09:42AM
(#32425403)
This argument rests on the idea that blockchains cannot operate without Proof of Work, but this statement is untrue as there are several decentralized blockchains running today and securing millions of dollars on Proof of Stake.
Ethereum has successfully merged Proof of Stake on all of its test networks, and is aiming for a complete merge on the main network some time next month.
Re:There aren't that many uses for blockchains
by whatisweb3 on Friday August 12, 2022 @04:14AM
(#32435776)
This is an extremely poorly researched article. If somebody were to spend a dozen billion dollars to gain 51% control of Eth PoS, the users could coordinate to ignore their chain, or even burn their stake and destroy their purchased funds.
You can read about the economics of it here:
And to prevent that takeover by a single entity (AKA 51% attack) it uses a very expensive (as in processing power) mechanism - proof-of-work to delegate the right of adding new transactions to the chain. And that makes is unscalable because as the network grows, you need more processing power. It flies in the face of economies of scale. It's a feature not a bug but that also makes it unsuitable for any business use cases.
Like any other market, consolidation will eventually lead to 2-3 whales will end up controlling majority of the nodes and can control an entire chain. In fact some of the new age blockchain startups are straight up centralized. What they are peddling is anything but a shared, permission-less and trust-less blockchain.