Quote from: oda.krell on November 10, 2015, 09:33:14 AM

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-1447108649

Basic 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?")

I don't have enough knowledge of the field to look for bugs. However, the paper has been circulated for a month or so, at least, and was presented at the Monteral scaling conference. So, if there are bugs, they must not be very obvious.

On the other hand, it is hard to foresee all the bad things that could happen in systems that that include human elements. One example of a problem that was not quite foreseen when bitcoin was designed is the extreme concentration of bitcoin mining (with 54% of the hashrate now in the hands three Chinese pools). The protocol becoming the property of a single company was another. The fast price rise (that made the block reward be worth ~$8/tx) was yet another.

So, who knows what failure modes the "NG" blockchain coudl have.

Anyway, I see little chance that the proposal will be implemented in bitcoin. There is already too much software developed out there that assumes the current design. Implementing a change of that magnitude would be like swimming in molasses. Maybe some altcoin will adopt the idea.