Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

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Well that's exactly what both cryptocurrencies are currently working feverishly to solve.

Bitcoin's idea is to use Lightning Network to keep the extreme majority of transactions from ever having to hit the blockchain. And it's also why the blocksize shouldn't be increased like some forks are doing, because in 100 years (or even 5 years) the size will be unmanageable.

I believe ETH has something similar, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about that ecosystem to say either way.

It's clear to everyone that the blockchain as a "data structure" isn't scalable to anything resembling "widespread usage", and that it will be a hard requirement to figure out how to either quickly and safely "prune" information from a blockchain, or get most of the transactions to stay off of it somehow.

Also, I'm sad that most of the replies to your comment are jokes or comments about how it won't matter, or how you are dumb for even asking the question. It seems when it comes to cryptocurrencies HN is just as bad as other forums online that everyone resorts to insults and "witty" one liners.

The eth devs are busy working on sharding - the same idea as traditional databases like Mongo where a primary key decides which node the data will reside. The main problem here is that a contract residing on shard A might reference a contract on shard B (much like a join between 2 shards). They are approaching this by using "transaction receipts" that would be passed from shard to shard. https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ

Don't they have something roughly equivalent to the Lightning Network on ETH called the Raiden Network as well? Or am I misunderstanding that?

Indeed - Raiden is all about payment channels - funds are deposited on the main chain and then payments can be sent over channels with no fee. Only in the case of dispute or cashing out is the main chain used to resolve the conflict. This means you could make many transactions per second of very small amounts (useful for things like gambling sites or micro-payments for content). Micro-Raiden is already active which are one-to-one payment channels - the full Raiden network is not yet live but will facilitate one-to-many channels.

* https://raiden.network/faq.html

* https://raiden.network/micro.html

You are correct, and the name Raiden is a reference to the Mortal Kombat character who shoots lightning from his fingertips.

µRaiden (two-party transfers only, no routing) is already live on Ethereum mainnet: https://raiden.network/micro.html

> traditional databases like Mongo

Kids these days. I think my head just exploded.

Mongo: The unreliable partitioned database.

Ok - I meant non-blockchain databases

I think he meant the part where you called Mongo "traditional" as your example. (vs say, DB2)

The ETH system is called Plasma (https://plasma.io/).

Plasma is separate from the sharding I thought?

Raiden and Plasma are different thoughts on scaling.

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