I’ve just read about SegWit2X and that led me to open a new thread here because I’d like to share this thought with you all:
Since about 2 years ago, I’m a big fan of a small altcoin named Cryptonite (XCN). It was back then when I realized that Bitcoin must fail at some stage simply because nothing can grow forever (blockchin) and 7 tx/s is not nearly enough for any currency to consider it a real alternative to FIAT. Optimizing one of the two leads to the other being even worse off.
So I discovered Crpytonite, started mining (still am, @ ~5MH, peanuts) but I’ve really started to like the coin and the community. It’s very much under the radar and at one stage was almost completely forgotten by everyone but then suddenly there was a spike of interest in China. Prices skyrocketed. Turns out it was all just a pump & dump (of course). But it got more people interested and the development has been taken on again. People are believing in the concept (including me) and I think that’s great.
The concept is quite remarkable. The mini-blockchain splits the concept of the blockchain up into 3 parts. That is because the blockchain actually fulfills three different tasks:
- hold address balances
- show latest transactions
- cryptographically interlock the blocks and embed the PoW to find consensus.
The mini-blockchain splits the concept up into three different entities, each one optimized for its task and all cryptographically interlocked with each other:
- the accounts database
- the prune-able mini-blockchain
- the proof-chain (headers only)
You can read more about it here:
https://cryptonite.info/wiki/index.php?title=Mini-blockchain_scheme
So what am I trying to achieve with this post?
I don’t know, really … I just see all the trouble with bitcoin and everytime I think “man, if only we could just switch to Cryptonite. All problems solved …”
Anyway, I just wanted to shed some light on this coin as I’m a big fan and I hope some of you guys find is as interesting as I do.
I’ve added a pull-request to get it added to bisq. Btw, I think it would make for a nice Base currency some time in the future (fully supports multi-sig as it’s based on a BTC fork). Once it has gained more popularity and when bitcoin is finally gone under, although I doubt that will ever truly be the case. The brand is just too strong. And granted, Cryptonite’s name is a little unfortunately chosen 
I’m really interested to see what others might think of it.
Well, I wish you good luck with that coin.
I think that it is a bit too much to say that Bitcoin will have to fail. I am pretty confident that Bitcoin will continue to grow and develop and if it ever reaches a point where it can’t upgrade without a hardfork, then it will do so. For now soft-fork solutions seem promising.
To be honest, Lightning Network allows for virtually any rate of transactions per second and any size, without even increasing the size of a blockchain. It would be a bit much to say at this point that it will not work.
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Hey,
thanks for your opinion!
I know I did some provoking claims in my post but that’s only to underline my doubts about the LN (and to provoke people into starting a discussion here).
This article here got me thinking about it:
I don’t want centralization. And I felt like this is the right place to share that.
I wonder whether BTC could implement the mini-blockchain as a hard-fork. That might be a solution I’d like.
I will read this more in detail when I got the time, but the whole point of the article appears to be trying to prove that it is hard for a LN to connect to a random peer without sacrificing decentralization. The point is that LN payment channels are primarily created to connect peers that do many transactions, the network effect is a great benefit of course. This article assumes that connection to the network will be random and that people you will need to pay with it are random. Here is the thing, an average user doesn’t need to send coins to random peers regularly, he can use on-chain transactions for that. The likely way this is going to look like is that people would open payment channels with services they often use, like local stores and popular online stores. Those local and online stores will likely be closely connected to each other as well, so this will connect 90% of people to 90% of places they need to use. That is a good scaling solution right there, as it offloads a lot of work from the blochain. I noticed that many comments pointed out this assumption of random connection as well, including Vitalik Buterin.
I will read it more carefully later, I just glossed over it, but a proof that LN can’t do what it wasn’t intended to do with very far fetched assumptions that matter the most in here is not really worrying. The author seemed very determined to give generous assumptions in the critic’s favor, all the little ones inside the article, but where it matters the most, the connection part, completely gave the worst possible scenario here on adoption, which is complete randomness.
That’s a fair point and I guess only time can tell whether the public’s transaction behaviour tends to be more of a random nature or more of a centralized one.
It’s definitely a good thing of the LN to offer a solution for the repeated, centralized case. That would definitely cover scenarios like salaries and rent payments.
Well on the other hand, there also is a good portion of transactions that are more random by nature. Doing those in a regular, on-chain fashion means that in the long run, LN doesn’t solve scalability for good. It only takes a fixed portion of the workload away from the blockchain (workload = workload / x). That equation with workload -> limit inf is still inf though.
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Indeed, we will have to wait and see. The revolution is still young, no one can imagine how this will end up.
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