Research group "R3" recently put out a report scrutinising coloured coins or Bitcoin 2.0 developments. The detailed report expressed some quite esoteric ideas about the abilities of off-chain activities. It sounds like Flavien Charlton, of Coinprism and Colu fame, has these well under control. Complex concepts are never seem to be far from the crypto mind. I can't help but feel lie this might be a last gasp on behalf of block size debate?
Bitcoin 2.0 and sidechains or "Watermarking" are responsible in the main for cooling off the passionate XT or BIP 101 fires. That is, unless Gavin Andreson can turn it around and with that fine i highly doubt it. At the moment it is not even clear if he wants to. Digging further you discover that Mike Hearn (formerly XT) quite for a private contract. That contract being to become the leader of R3! Clearly these are some frantic moves and they are in last gasp territory. The bitcoin community is still not huge and when there's no love i guess some people just have to get paid.
With semi independent side chains to the main blockchain higher transaction volumes can easily be handled. These auxiliary apps have to check in with the bitcoin blockchain every so often but are not subject to the same decentralised lore as bitcoin itself. They are less resistant to manipulation, sometimes just due to the size of their user base, but also because many sidechains are created and maintained by centralised organisations.
Companies like NASDAQ, Bitfinex, BTCC and Kraken are using and developing these systems gain some degree of corporate control over their sidechains. This is a concern for some tinfoil hat bit coiners who have in the past been able to revel in bliss at the fact that bitcoin is fundamentally free from capitalist control. Blockstream have created a compromised here with "federated sidechains". Organisations can share control over a sidechain, in this way creating some decentralisation in a different way, using mutual benefit rather than proof of work. It is all still a compromise.
Can we have our cake and eat it with our funny hats on? Now that we are developing private blockchains tied to our public blockchain, is the face of bitcoin becoming privatised. How public is public enough?
Data size has a significant impact on how effective the public ledger can be. On the one hand we want information to be available for all and on the other average people have to be able to actually use this information in a practice way. People need to be able to get insight that is useful for them and big data can become a wash. If the blockchain is too large only corporations will be able to fully harness it, download and search times become an issue. Data can also become so global and disaggregated to be useful for local purposes.
We are talking stats here, not simply transactions. It is not yet known what kind of information may be useful on the ground in San Francisco coffee shops and for the unbanked. Micro-transactions may also drastically distort data on the global scale and impair the publics ability to participate. We already have companies like Elliptic and fiatleak.com to help us interpret bitcoin data and they are centralised in their own way. Moving forward data is obviously going to be important, but it is unclear weather we can split our data and still have the same purity. Could accessible data be just as important as fast cheap transactions.
So do we trust the bitcoin 2.0 companies and have aggregated data on the bitcoin blockchain that may or may not be more relevant and user friendly? Can we use sidechains and federated companies for local statistics or do we band together and create guru's and super computers at our local crypto-dojo? A combination would be ideal, but I haven't seen many club flyers.
Bitcoin 2.0 and sidechains or "Watermarking" are responsible in the main for cooling off the passionate XT or BIP 101 fires. That is, unless Gavin Andreson can turn it around and with that fine i highly doubt it. At the moment it is not even clear if he wants to. Digging further you discover that Mike Hearn (formerly XT) quite for a private contract. That contract being to become the leader of R3! Clearly these are some frantic moves and they are in last gasp territory. The bitcoin community is still not huge and when there's no love i guess some people just have to get paid.
With semi independent side chains to the main blockchain higher transaction volumes can easily be handled. These auxiliary apps have to check in with the bitcoin blockchain every so often but are not subject to the same decentralised lore as bitcoin itself. They are less resistant to manipulation, sometimes just due to the size of their user base, but also because many sidechains are created and maintained by centralised organisations.
Companies like NASDAQ, Bitfinex, BTCC and Kraken are using and developing these systems gain some degree of corporate control over their sidechains. This is a concern for some tinfoil hat bit coiners who have in the past been able to revel in bliss at the fact that bitcoin is fundamentally free from capitalist control. Blockstream have created a compromised here with "federated sidechains". Organisations can share control over a sidechain, in this way creating some decentralisation in a different way, using mutual benefit rather than proof of work. It is all still a compromise.
Can we have our cake and eat it with our funny hats on? Now that we are developing private blockchains tied to our public blockchain, is the face of bitcoin becoming privatised. How public is public enough?
Data size has a significant impact on how effective the public ledger can be. On the one hand we want information to be available for all and on the other average people have to be able to actually use this information in a practice way. People need to be able to get insight that is useful for them and big data can become a wash. If the blockchain is too large only corporations will be able to fully harness it, download and search times become an issue. Data can also become so global and disaggregated to be useful for local purposes.
We are talking stats here, not simply transactions. It is not yet known what kind of information may be useful on the ground in San Francisco coffee shops and for the unbanked. Micro-transactions may also drastically distort data on the global scale and impair the publics ability to participate. We already have companies like Elliptic and fiatleak.com to help us interpret bitcoin data and they are centralised in their own way. Moving forward data is obviously going to be important, but it is unclear weather we can split our data and still have the same purity. Could accessible data be just as important as fast cheap transactions.
So do we trust the bitcoin 2.0 companies and have aggregated data on the bitcoin blockchain that may or may not be more relevant and user friendly? Can we use sidechains and federated companies for local statistics or do we band together and create guru's and super computers at our local crypto-dojo? A combination would be ideal, but I haven't seen many club flyers.
No comments:
Post a Comment