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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

As a protocol, it's not great. There's a lot more flexibility in a lot of the new consensus protocols coming out that can run Turing-complete contracts etc. Look at all the hoops that need to be jumped through to do stuff like colored coins, payment channels, etc. in Bitcoin vs protocols with smart contracts.

Anyway, that's irrelevant. If Bitcoin is for some reason the best protocol to be used, why would someone want to enrich the current holders of Bitcoin (of which I am one, by the way). Transferring value to Bitcoin necessitates buying Bitcoins from existing Bitcoin holders, enriching them for no reason. Why wouldn't a bank or other financial institution just start from a clean slate?

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> There's a lot more flexibility in a lot of the new consensus protocols coming out that can run Turing-complete contracts etc

Agreed. But most open source protocols are/were not great. IPv4, SMTP, HTTPv1 all have massive flaws. Once open protocols start gaining momentum though, it's very hard to convince everyone to switch (and bitcoin has by far the most momentum behind it). That said, I'm very interested in Ethereum too.

> necessitates buying Bitcoins from existing Bitcoin holders, enriching them for no reason

If you use bitcoin purely as an intermediary, then you are buying and selling it at the same instant, so it really doesn't affect the price at all. The only thing that makes the price go up is more people hodling it.

Can you point me to some of the consensus protocol work? That's always seemed to be the more interesting aspect of BTC to me, but the other requirements of the currency have made that harder than just the smart contracts alone.

https://www.ethereum.org/ and https://www.stellar.org/ are two interesting ones to check out.

Thought ethereum was basically the BTC protocol under the hood?

Stellar has a consensus protocol?

Last I checked, there's a single blessed node dishing out verifiable data. It's nicer than having a remote API that just hands you a trusted number, but it's a far cry from Nakamoto Consensus.

Yes, so the one I am most familiar with is Tendermint (disclaimer, I'm friends with some of the people involved). This is a genuinely novel consensus protocol that is inspired by DLS and PBFT (classic Byzantine consensus stuff), and also runs smart contracts using the same languages as Ethereum. Ethereum themselves are trying to do something similar (Casper), but to the best of my knowledge it is not ready yet.

Great, thanks for the info - I'll check into those.

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