Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Nominated For Nobel Prize

[dlevere]

You've got me on that one.

[Pyriel]

Ph.D. bag-holder spotted. He just ran through all the usual points any Bitcoin enthusiast would bring up, like "instantaneous transactions". No mention of the average 10-minute block time, and the fact that it's suggested you wait for 6 blocks to consider the transaction fully confirmed. So unless whoever you're doing business with trusts you enough to accept that your submitted transaction is valid, you're going to wait about 10 minutes to an hour, and possibly much more to for the transaction to finalize because those are average times. Blocks can currently take a few seconds—usually when some shady miner finds the winning nonce value, but doesn't actually include transactions; they win the 25 Bitcoin reward, but do nothing valuable for the network—to hours.

Recent "stress tests", that were conducted with a quantity of Bitcoin that translated to a few thousand dollars, pushed the unconfirmed transaction pool to, and for some nodes, past, its limit. I think there are still some transactions from the last one that haven't settled because their "no fees" fee was too low. That was over a month ago. And because of some hiccup it was causing, it was also suggested that you wait for 30+ blocks beyond the first that included your transaction to consider it finalized. At the time, the average block-time had pushed to about 30 minutes as well. Even if you hit the lottery, or paid a high enough fee, and your transaction made it into a block, the first confirmation could easily take an hour. And some guy decided to run a malleability stress test, where he essentially cloned transactions with a few meaningless fields changed. This proved to be a $0 way to clog the network.

Lately they keep talking about how blockchain technology will revolutionize finance, but they're just talking about a database distributed amongst aligned parties. There are some financial instruments where verification can take days using traditional methods, but they don't need a make-work algorithm that wastes ridiculous amounts of resources to remedy that. The whole point of the blockchain is that it works in a peer-to-peer configuration for people have no cause to trust each other, so throwing ghastly amounts of processing power at the network is the only way to secure it. Why the fuck would anyone sane want to run a private or mostly private network in that configuration?

[dlevere]

http://www.inquisitr.com/2554882/bit...gwan-chowdhry/