Glad you like it. I'm not planning on returning to this topic, as I'm far from an expert (I did this section of videos on the blockchain partially to get myself to learn the material) and so I expect others will do a much better job in this area.
I agree with you that it is not clear if the so called distributed ledgers really have the properties of immutability, non repudiation etc. etc. or if it's only marketing. It seems to me that the party that controls the access to the ledger (for example a certificate authority) can create new players out of thin air and so can manipulate consensus at will. We could then skip a step and let the certificate authority itself manage a centralized database for us... Or maybe it's supposed to work with a commission that regularly sits around a table and decides who is allowed to participate and the members then exchange all the relevant public keys with each other? The world of private ledgers is so foggy, and I would love to see more content from you to make some sense out of it. Maybe you could make a video on Hyperledger Fabric?
In public blockchains the thing which stops the creation of more miners is the fact that mining consumes real resources -- be that money, or electricity, or something else. In private blockchains you either need to use the same techniques (which arguably is wasteful, and not really effective if the "scarce" resource is cheap for a determined attacker to obtain), or just trust whomever does admission control. At which point you have to ask what benefits you are really getting from using a blockchain based solution.
Bitcoin attempts to simulate an environment of trust by expending criminal amounts of energy. If anything, it just shows us how valuable trust can be, certainly when taken at face value (that is, on a brute force basis, as one might expect from Proof of Work). I agree with your opinions.
Fun fact: as of 2021, it takes as much energy as powering an average US household (for a month!) to process a single Bitcoin transaction. Imagine a system that uses a months worth of household electricity to process a single starbucks coffee transaction... this single transaction also produces about half a metric ton of CO2. All this for a system that processes 3/4 transactions per second on average, globally. It’s a clever technical solution, but it’s one of the worst resource allocation systems I’ve ever seen, and it’s pretty bad for the environment. Anyway, I’m not a blockchain developer so what do I know 🤓
A blockchain can be built in a managed and private environment which is probably very similar to some existing cloud services. Nonetheless, its operation remains supposed to be decentralized and resilient to external censorship and regularization even after the creator and network are identified. It makes little sense if a private counterpart can be destroyed even easier than a public one. Bitcoin has shown its resilience through numerous government bans. What is the private chain proving the same level of strength in reality?
You misunderstood the concept of Bitcoin. Everything is about incentive, what is the incentive for people to have a cryptocurrency that is managed by just 5 nodes. The government would have control of these 5 nodes. That is the purpose of Bitcoin, decentralization without government control. Don't you think the government devalues our currency?
I love the clear way you explain things. Do you have any plans on doing one on Proof of stake consensus?
Glad you like it. I'm not planning on returning to this topic, as I'm far from an expert (I did this section of videos on the blockchain partially to get myself to learn the material) and so I expect others will do a much better job in this area.
Thank you for sharing so much insight
I agree with you that it is not clear if the so called distributed ledgers really have the properties of immutability, non repudiation etc. etc. or if it's only marketing.
It seems to me that the party that controls the access to the ledger (for example a certificate authority) can create new players out of thin air and so can manipulate consensus at will. We could then skip a step and let the certificate authority itself manage a centralized database for us...
Or maybe it's supposed to work with a commission that regularly sits around a table and decides who is allowed to participate and the members then exchange all the relevant public keys with each other?
The world of private ledgers is so foggy, and I would love to see more content from you to make some sense out of it. Maybe you could make a video on Hyperledger Fabric?
In public blockchains the thing which stops the creation of more miners is the fact that mining consumes real resources -- be that money, or electricity, or something else. In private blockchains you either need to use the same techniques (which arguably is wasteful, and not really effective if the "scarce" resource is cheap for a determined attacker to obtain), or just trust whomever does admission control. At which point you have to ask what benefits you are really getting from using a blockchain based solution.
Bitcoin attempts to simulate an environment of trust by expending criminal amounts of energy. If anything, it just shows us how valuable trust can be, certainly when taken at face value (that is, on a brute force basis, as one might expect from Proof of Work). I agree with your opinions.
I would be interested to know your opinion on the concensus service of the Hedera hashgraph DLT?
Honestly? I've not looked at it closely enough to form an opinion. Sorry. :-|
Is Bitcoin able to achieve complete consensus?
To answer that you'd have to come up with a precise definition of what you mean by "complete consensus".
Fun fact: as of 2021, it takes as much energy as powering an average US household (for a month!) to process a single Bitcoin transaction. Imagine a system that uses a months worth of household electricity to process a single starbucks coffee transaction... this single transaction also produces about half a metric ton of CO2. All this for a system that processes 3/4 transactions per second on average, globally. It’s a clever technical solution, but it’s one of the worst resource allocation systems I’ve ever seen, and it’s pretty bad for the environment. Anyway, I’m not a blockchain developer so what do I know 🤓
A blockchain can be built in a managed and private environment which is probably very similar to some existing cloud services. Nonetheless, its operation remains supposed to be decentralized and resilient to external censorship and regularization even after the creator and network are identified. It makes little sense if a private counterpart can be destroyed even easier than a public one. Bitcoin has shown its resilience through numerous government bans. What is the private chain proving the same level of strength in reality?
You misunderstood the concept of Bitcoin. Everything is about incentive, what is the incentive for people to have a cryptocurrency that is managed by just 5 nodes. The government would have control of these 5 nodes. That is the purpose of Bitcoin, decentralization without government control. Don't you think the government devalues our currency?
This video is not judging cryptocurrencies, it's evaluating the idea of using proof of work for non-cryptocurrency scenarios.