Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: DECENTRALIZED crypto currency (including Bitcoin) is a delusion (any solutions?)
by
enet
on 31/01/2016, 11:50:10 UTC
"Bitcoin continues because it doesn't allow multiple Partitions"

Hmm, you have a steep background in relativity, but somehow things go wrong somewhere. Bitcoin partitions all the time - that's the default for everything. Nodes only synchronize ex-post, hence the block cycle.

I'd humbly suggest to start with some through research of some basics:

* computers are electronic elements with billions of components. how does such a machine achieve consistent state? see: Shannon and von Neumann and the early days of computing (maybe even Zuse)

* partitions, blocks, DAG's, .... all this stuff generally confuses the most fundamental notions. after investigating this matter for a very long time, I can assure you that almost nobody understands this. I'll give an example: in any computer language and modern OS, you have the following piece of code:

Code:
declare variable X
set X to 10
if (X equals 10) do Z

will the code do Z? unfortunately the answer in general is no, and its very hard to know why. the answer: concurrency. a different thread might have changed X and one needs to lock X safely. in other words data or state in modern computing is based on memory locations. programs always assume that everything is completely static, when in reality it is dynamic (OS and CPU caches on many levels). These are all human abstractions. The actual physical process of a computing machine is not uniform. In fact it is amazing that one can have such things at all exist, since Heisenberg discovered its impossible to tell even the most elementary properties of a particle with certainty. Shannon found that still one can build reliable systems from many unreliable parts (the magic of computing).

With regards to your basic thesis you're right and wrong at same time. Total coordination is impossible even on the microscopic level. Bitcoin implements a new coordination mechanism, based on the Internet, previously unknown to mankind. It's certainly not perfect but that notion leads nowhere anyway. The foundations of computing is how one treats unreliable physical parts to create reliable systems (things that are imperfect add up to something which as reliable as necessary).