Professors From 7 US Colleges, Including MIT and Stanford, Have Teamed Up To Design a Cryptocurrency Capable Of Processing Thousands of Transactions a Second (fortune.com) 109
Some of the brightest minds in America are pooling their brain power to create a cryptocurrency that's designed to do what Bitcoin has proved incapable of: processing thousands of transactions a second. From a report: Professors from seven U.S. colleges including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley have teamed up to create a digital currency that they hope can achieve speeds Bitcoin users can only dream of without compromising on its core tenant of decentralization. The Unit-e, as the virtual currency is called, is the first initiative of Distributed Technology Research, a non-profit foundation formed by the academics with backing from hedge fund Pantera Capital Management LP to develop decentralized technologies.
Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency and the first payment network to allow parties to transact directly without needing to trust each another or to rely on a central authority. Yet, while it has built a following among developers, anarchists and speculators, mainstream adoption remains elusive. That's in no small part the product of its design, where inbuilt restrictions have constrained its performance and scalability and, as a result, reduced its usefulness as an everyday unit of payment, DTR said in a research paper. The academics are designing a virtual coin they expect will be able to process transactions faster than even Visa.
Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency and the first payment network to allow parties to transact directly without needing to trust each another or to rely on a central authority. Yet, while it has built a following among developers, anarchists and speculators, mainstream adoption remains elusive. That's in no small part the product of its design, where inbuilt restrictions have constrained its performance and scalability and, as a result, reduced its usefulness as an everyday unit of payment, DTR said in a research paper. The academics are designing a virtual coin they expect will be able to process transactions faster than even Visa.
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. Non-profit.
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All they really need to do is decrease the likelihood of an attack. 51% is terribly low. It needs to be closer to 60-70%
80%, it's the only way to be sure.
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All they really need to do is decrease the likelihood of an attack. 51% is terribly low. It needs to be closer to 60-70%
Double spending with bitcoin is harder than just getting 51% of the available CPU power. For it to be effective, you also need to find someone willing to sell you something in exchange for bitcoin, something valuable enough to cover the cost of that much CPU power. Then you need to get them to just give it to you like that, without using an escrow service, without waiting for the payment to settle. Then you need to be sure that this person will not try to get revenge, either through the court or through a h
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I fully expect that anyone with the resources to pull off a 51% attack will have a plan to exploit it before they buy that much compute power.
You don't get that much money by being stupid. Unless daddy was rich... there are a few cases of that.
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. And repeat as many times as you can across as many wallets as you can, and then quickly cash out by exchanging your double-spent Bitcoin for another currenc
As soon as you transfer it to cash, the person who does the transferring is going to know your bank account, and going to know who you are.
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Remember that the 51% doesn't allow you to steal people's money: it only allows you rollback transactions that already happened. You still need to figure out how to execute the second half of the scam.
1) Complete transaction of X merchandise in exchange for cryptocurrency
2) Roll back transaction
3) Profit
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"non-profit foundation formed by the academics with backing from hedge fund Pantera Capital Management LP"
Right. Non-profit.
They won't be holding any pre-mined coins. Nope. Not a one.
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Why do you assume there will be any mined coins at all?
Human nature.
If they're serious about making a real crypto currency, creating a built in deflation mechanism would be a pretty poor starting premise.
Who said anything about a deflation mechanism?
I'm talking about people mining a few coins for their personal retirement funds while it's still easy to do.
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"non-profit foundation formed by the academics with backing from hedge fund Pantera Capital Management LP"
Right. Non-profit.
They won't be holding any pre-mined coins. Nope. Not a one.
Serious question: why wouldn't a bank, which primarily wants to use its blockchain to make secure transactions, start out by loading its network with all the "coins" it wants? The bank, I would have expected, does NOT want new coins in the system. It just wants to use the coins as tokens of data(actual funds) transfers.
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That's how the venezuelan petro is supposed to work. No idea if it does
One could probably make an educated guess based on how well everything else in the Venezuelan economy works.
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Hedge funds take people's money and invest it on their behalf (they're expected to pay it back some day). Many religions do the same, except for the paying back part. The Vatican, for example, has an extensive investment portfolio.
Constitution restricts Government (Score:1)
The Constitution of the United States is unique in that it restricts government, not The People.
Have they not heard of lightning? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't get me wrong.... its a fun experiment to try and come up with new experimental types of blockchains and transactional systems.
But Bitcoin already has a pragmatic solution called the Lightning Network [lightning.network] that uses second-layer networks allowing wallets to safely transact off the chain, resulting in extremely high scalability and low fees --- as a result it is not even limited to "Thousands of transactions per second".... indeed to be a competitor in payment processing, Millions of Transactions per Second may be required ---
so when you think of scaling; just making a native blockchain capable of thousands of TPS sounds impressive at first, at first, But its really not much in the grand scheme of things --- when you're talking about transitioning from experiment to real-world use.
Ultimately, layering additional peer-to-peer networks with certain safeguards and no lower bound that says a transaction takes at least X minutes, is a smart approach.
Re:Have they not heard of lightning? (Score:4, Insightful)
But Bitcoin already has a pragmatic solution called the Lightning Network [lightning.network] that uses second-layer networks allowing wallets to safely transact off the chain
So the solution to the low number of transactions per second on the blockchain is...to *not* use the blockchain?
Re:Have they not heard of lightning? (Score:5, Informative)
Lightning does use the blockchain, but it uses it as a settlement layer which makes a lot more sense than storing everyone's coffee payments on each others computers.
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Yeah, that's bullshit.
Lightning is an exchange. An unregulated bank. The "settlement layer" is just their internal processing system.
They'll be hacked or exit scammed just like all the others.
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He's "blathering" about the obvious fact the using Lightning is no different than trading in ETH for SomeShitCoin on Ethereum.
It's a fucking scam riding on top of Bitcoin, with the full backing and support of "trust us". You give them your Bitcoin, and you get a credit in Lightning. You have to fully trust those clowns and all the clowns using Lightning, and trust that you'll get your BTC back before Lightning goes tits up. That's all ON TOP of having to trust BTC. (Though the simple fact is BTC is esse
Re:Have they not heard of lightning? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Have they not heard of lightning? (Score:4, Informative)
Lightning doesn't route - it bases its functionality on open problems in computing. Spend a hour (if you must watch at 1X) on these two to get a good summary of its problems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Sidechains (Score:1)
You've re-invented sidechains.
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Thousands per second is low multiples of the number of seconds in a day x 1000, say, 2000, or 172,8000,000 transactions a day.
Which is a lot but woefully inadequate for the world in general.
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NIce name (Score:2)
Would I be able to pay with Unit-e to purchase Unity-engine based games on my Unity desktop?
So, like Ripple but with no users? (Score:2, Interesting)
Ripple is already the most-used cryptocurrency for cross-border payments (DAG-based) with years of R&D and partnerships with major banks and corporations around the world.
It'll be a steep hill to climb to get something out of the Ivory Tower to compete. This would have been cutting edge six years ago, though.
Re:So, like Ripple but with no users? (Score:4, Informative)
Many banks have used Ripple, but in most cases the purpose was to experiment, with Ripple being a convenient mechanism to manage transactions and settlement outside of the banks' own bloated and antiquated systems which lend themselves poorly to experimentation.
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These are good things if you trust Ripple Labs.
There is absolutely zero reason to trust Ripple Labs, just as there is zero reason to trust banks. I don't trust banks or bankers at all, but I trust the FDIC.
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Ripple is already the most-used cryptocurrency for cross-border payments
Are you sure?
Get in NOW! (Score:1, Funny)
I'm selling ALL my bitcoin, gold bullion and Infowars.com shares to buy in now, and anyone who isn't a libtard should do the same. This is a guaranteed investment, backed by MIT, Slashdot and the full force of the US military.
Thousands of transactions a second (Score:2)
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These people hyping e-currencies are like some huckster selling enterprise software and services out of a Radio Flyer wagon.
That's kind of an accurate analogy.
"Tennant"? (Score:3, Insightful)
"without compromising on its core tenant of decentralization"
Shouldn't that be "tenet" or is my English not as good as I think it is?
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Why would WANT credit for pointlessly being a dick?
You obviously understood what was meant, as you were able to fill in the correction yourself and extract the proper meaning.
Unless you are *actually confused* about what someone said/typed, pointing out their grammar/spelling mistakes is just an attempt to make yourself feel superior to a random stranger.
In short, it makes YOU a dick!
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So, you propose we let people continue to misuse the language without helpfully correcting them? That sounds pretty dickish to me.
As for why I would want credit, it's more about auditing my own contributions (or lack thereof to Slashdot). If I'm signed-in, I have a record of all my comments.
Hope your day improves, as you seem to be a bit irritable at the moment.
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Not pointless. Stop encouraging the world to be morons.
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Here are the researchers (Score:3)
When I read the summary I wondered whether the researchers involved had a track record of interesting work in this area, or in cryptography more generally. It took some searching but I found the list of names here: https://dtr.org/research/#rese... [dtr.org].
FWIW, neither I nor my academic cryptographer friends immediately recognized any of these people. I do see that Andrew Miller is on the ZCash board, which gives him some credibility in my book.
That I don't recognize them doesn't mean that much, but I'd be more inclined to follow this work closely if it were done by people with a solid track record in the space. Time will tell.
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I'm impressed that they actually have a macroeconomist.
No details in TFA (Score:2)
Oh goodie, another cryptocurrency... (Score:2)
Just what we needed. Now all of Earth's problems are solved.
Better, stronger, faster..... (Score:1)