Anyone with a bit of a deeper network and cryptography knowledge care to comment on this technical proposal:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-ng-or-how-cornell-researchers-think-a-radical-redesign-can-solve-bitcoin-s-scaling-issues-1447108649Basic idea seems to be to decouple proof of work blocks from transactions blocks (while keeping the two connected, obviously), without the usual trade off that means more tx -> bigger blocks.
Looks plausible to me, and actually a lot less "radical" than, say, turning Bitcoin into a proof-of-stake system. That said, I don't have sufficient technical knowledge to judge if it only appears plausible at a glance or if there's a catch I don't see right now.
(... he asked on the Wall Observer thread, thinking "What could possibly go wrong?")
This looks like an interesting idea which seems to both address the transaction limit concerns voiced by large blockers and the mining centralization due to slow propagation of large blocks feared by small blockers. It might open up new attack vectors though. First thought which comes to my mind is that if the miner currently responsible for verifying transactions goes offline/something happens to them, do we get a delay in transaction confirmations until the next block is mined? If so this would open the door to an attack where you would just DDOS or otherwise incapacitate the miner and the network grinds to a halt. Such centralization, very scare. Also what happens if the miner decides to double-spend transactions worth more than the coinbase reward + transaction fees combined? As far as I can tell the only punishment seems to be that their block rewards gets taken away retroactively by the network. Also what happens to such a reward afterwards? Wouldn't that mess with Bitcoins steady predictable inflation rate? So many questions...