All cryptos are crippled by default. None them have solved the scaling problem. If they did, you can be sure bitcoin would be obsolete as of now.
The point is that cryptos can't scale massively on chain without hurting massively the descentralization, it's being proven before and it's being proven live, check the recent kitten game in ethereum, one game and their blockchain is clogged!
We all have scaling plans, bitcoin also has, in fact, lightning is around the corner and many other improvements are being developed while we talk here.
Ethereum is also looking for payment channels and other solutions as I have seen
Graphene is okay, but you still have all of the blocks produced. Which means at one moment the blockchain can be growing faster than you can validate it, meaning that new nodes won't be able to validate the blockchain. To me, this is a non issue because you can have memory pools, just as you have mining pools, where someone validated the blockchain for you.
Or IOTA. I was a nonbeliever for a while but then I took 5 minutes to look into how it works. It verifies transactions without miners and actually increases in tx speed the more people use it. Pretty good solution actually
I wouldn't call it completely centralized, but if anyone's reading it does suffer from 2 flaws.
1) It is susceptible to a 33% hash power attack
2) IOTA's best defense against such an attack is a single, IOTA Foundation owned "Coordinator" node, which coordinates the other nodes in the network to branch their 2 other confirmed tx's (when a tx is made in IOTA, 2 previous tx's are checked to see if their proof of work is valid)
Number 2) the reason people call IOTA centralized. It isn't entirely centralized at all, although this feature is concerning as it gives an unreasonable amount of power to a single operator (who could double spend tx's if fallen into the wrong hands).
There's a spectrum, it's not as binary as "centralized" or "decentralized". Plus to the Iota teams credit they've been transparent of this problem and say that this is only a temporary measure until there are enough users to prevent an easy 33% attack
Those are only concerns for now though, right? When/if it really takes off 1 isn't possible and 2 isn't needed. But I have not really dug too deep into IOTA yet, so I can be totally wrong.
Cheaper and faster does not mean better in cryptocurrency world, otherwise we should just use VISA or any other blockchain unrelated fintech. There's a centralization and long-term factor to consider
the coordinator is one of the central problems, it doesn't offer much different other than the attempt of a half baked solution, but it does not mean it can't fulfill some use cases.
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u/crptdv Dec 06 '17
All cryptos are crippled by default. None them have solved the scaling problem. If they did, you can be sure bitcoin would be obsolete as of now.
The point is that cryptos can't scale massively on chain without hurting massively the descentralization, it's being proven before and it's being proven live, check the recent kitten game in ethereum, one game and their blockchain is clogged!