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The liquid sidechain doesnt have public transactions, uses confidential transactions. It has been running for years.

There is a decent amount of bitcoin and assets issued on bitcoin over there

A bunch of exchanges and VCs are the validators, so it sacrifices some security but not in practice

There are hundreds of billions in crypto assets traded on validator networks



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It has 1200 validators, compared to 260,000 on Ethereum, and it's basically impossible for anyone to run a node at home because it requires 300Mbps+ internet connection to run one.

The problem with this you can't yourself verify what is happening on the chain, you have to trust that the node operators are acting in good faith and not censoring transactions or forming cartels to manipulate history.

This is ok if you only have a small amount of money or are using it for games or something that doesn't really matter. But it'll never be able to run the global financial system or store things of large value.


It looks like for the end customer this is no better than a closed payment platform(think of visa network or ACH) unless they provide at least read access to the blockchain ledger/database. If that's the case it's not worth the name of crypto currency.

They also say in 5 years will provide full(r/w) access to the public clients/nodes...I wouldn't hold my breath.

It has "fraud" prevention built in, charge backs, compliance etc...how would that work on a public blockchain? I believe they lie and they know it will never be released as a public/permisionless blockchain.


The problem with almost all alternative crytpo currencies is that somewhere deep down non-decentralized skeletons are burried. Either the protocol doesn't scale to more than a dozen validators, or there is some key node hosted by the devs (I think this is the issue with stellar).

The network effects are on Ethereum, with virtually the entire DeFi space on it.

Moreover, Bitcoin doesn't have the necessary opcodes for secure/trustless bridges to sidechains.

Rootstock, for its part, is controlled by trusted third parties, so doesn't come close to providing the trustless-ness and permissionless-ness guarantees of Ethereum.

Unsurprisingly, Rootstock has insignificant adoption, with Ethereum having on the order of one thousand times more capital/users utilizing it.


Well someone has to write the code and run the nodes. I’m not on the side of clearing houses but I don’t see the improvement bid switching to a system run by a crypto foundation and a few blockchain validator companies.

How does it solve the problem in any way?

If we take a step back, we should also realize that no other cryptocurrency has this problem. You just let the throughput be higher and it works, because 1 KB/s is completely absurd in 2023.

Any transaction still has to make it on to the chain. A side chain would be like us playing catch in the back yard and thinking we will somehow be padding our major league baseball stats. It doesn't matter until something happens where it counts.

If you find someone to play catch with, that's great, but the whole point of a global transaction network is that anyone can send a balance to anyone else.


There is great irony that a technology predicated on all transactions being public, has by far the most inscrutable, opaque, secretive market.

I know it's because almost all trading takes place off-chain on secretive unregulated or lightly-regulated exchanges, but I still find it a significant demonstration of the limited scope of the technologies basic tenets (see also my comment about how it's not "trustless" in a meaningful way).


Because cryptocurrencies are dependent on the reliability of distributed systems and cryptography. Both concepts are extremely tricky, the only true way of validating them is by trying to break them and failing, this takes time. But the floodgates have been opened.

Also, who cares if there are several cryptocurrencies? If they have good properties (fundamentals) and people find them valuable, why not?


It's not.

The trust issue is real, china's great firewall is real and the crack down of sec is also real.

And without anyone exchanging your bitcoins no one cares.

And I'm comparison to our fiat a ton of critical features are missing like money laundering.


I don't see how this is even comparable to Bitcoin. It's not open and it's not decentralised.

It has the unfortunate problem that, like sidechains, it doesn't exist.

We already have altcoins. This might be an actually innovative altcoin. But it's not really going to be Bitcoin.


Why not use another, more liquid cryptocurrency like BTC or ETH then?

On the basis that the cryptography remaining unbroken and the protocol-genetated incentives creating a validator set too large to coopt are more reliable trust assumptions than the trusted third party controlling a traditional dark pool being competent and trustworthy.

>>It's not: it's the fault of gas making it impossibly expensive to use the most basic tool in execution, splitting your order into smaller trades and applying logic to when you choose to trade.

Yes that makes sense.


The trustlesness comes with a heavy price of Proof of Work with its wastefulness, complexity and vulnerability to various attacks. I can understand why financial institutions don't want that part.

Yeah there's no way to the transaction rate of PayPal or Visa without the use of side chains -- modifying the blockchain protocol only results in linear changes to scalability.

It's difficult to write secure code.

It's difficult to administrate a secure system.

It's a new market where release early, release often is important.

BTC transaction are largely untraceable and irreversible.


Except that they are though...You can go run a validator on Eth or Cardano right now.

The reason this works is the third-party auditor. The blockchain doesn't add any value on top of that.

It's true, work on other systems like proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work are in active development. It might be too hard to backport to bitcoin specifically, but other cryptocurrencies don't have to be this bad in the future.
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