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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

The problem with all that, is the fact it remains possible to create a protocol with N big institutions (governments and large tech companies, big non profit organizations and so forth) signing every block, to create a collaborative system that is perfectly suited for the same task. The system can make progresses as long a given fractions of the participants is available and so forth, there are a number of well known protocols to do so. This maintains many benefits of the blockchain and lacks many issues (fast, simple, near zero cost, controllable to a given extent -- no takeover possible, ...).

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> The problem with all that, is the fact it remains possible to create a protocol with N big institutions [...] This maintains many benefits of the blockchain and lacks many issues (fast, simple, near zero cost)

That's more or less exactly what this is. Stripe is launching an EVM L1.

The Ethereum Virtual Machine part gives it a mature tech stack with experienced developers and auditors. Plus, well-tested smart contracts that have already processed billions of dollars on other chains can be deployed on Tempo.

The "Stripe L1" part will ensure that it's fast, simple, near zero cost.

I don’t get it yet.

If we skipped the whole blockchain part, wouldn’t it be faster, simpler, cheaper? What value does the whole blockchain, EVM, L1 offer? Don’t they fully control the network? Don’t they decide “everything” anyway?

I’d love to understand it, I’m not a hater, just a developer who don’t quite get this announcement.

They say it's permissionless.

That can mean different things.

It can mean anyone can use it without needing to sign up.

It can also mean anyone can host a node, i.e. become part of the network, without needing to ask anyone for permission.

The question is how far they went with that and why people wouldn't use another L1 that offers similar features without having Stripe looming over it.

good questions - and your questions are, or could be, actually rhetorical. Yes, they are the validator and thus they control the transactions. It could be as simple as having a Database at the end ... Well I can think of two things:

1- they start by owning all validators, maybe they expect to open validators to other entities at some point in the future. If these entities don't collude together, we could expect some sort of neutrality

2- Marketing - because crypto is coming at an ATH and why not getting some good marketing for free (or almost)

And people mentioning costs, this is not particularly relevant. L2s are extremely cheap by most standards, let alone by Stripe standards which charge horrendous fees.

My questions were not rhetorical. I’m actually interested in the space (fintech, web3, blockchain, etc), but in this space particularly, it’s hard to discern marketing gimmick from use cases where these technologies actually provide real value, so I’m being critical of these announcements while at the same time keeping an open mind.

There has been a huge amount of tooling and programs written for EVM that you instantly have access to

> signing every block, to create a collaborative system that is perfectly suited for the same task.

Indeed you can! We even have a name for that! Its called a blockchain.

> This maintains many benefits of the blockchain and lacks many issues (fast, simple, near zero cost, controllable to a given extent -- no takeover possible, ...).

Blockchains can do all of these things.

Perhaps you are thinking of "bitcoin", instead of "blockchains"? Bitcoin, something that was created a whole 17 years ago, indeed has many drawbacks compared to modern blockchains.

such modern blockchains as "classical consensus"

No bizantine distributed agreement (work / stake), no blockchain. Otherwise we can name everything as everything.

> No bizantine distributed agreement (work / stake), no blockchain.

Actually yes there is a blockchain. The word you are looking for is "Federated Blockchain".

https://101blockchains.com/federated-blockchain/

> Otherwise we can name everything

No, because we literally have a word for this already. Federated Blockchain. It is a well known concept.

There is no bright line difference between proof of stake and any other type of consensus, committee or voting body. Proof of work of course is very different.

The difference is enormous: in one case, you don't need any centralized N entities, just a big percentage of the network, whoever wants to participate, runs the protocol and there are no 50 institutions / companies that can block it without reaching the majority of work / stake. In the other case, you are delegating the consensus to a fixed amount of parties. Now, we against the crypto / blockchain shitstorm advertised the alternative of old-style federated consensus with N trusted organizations for years and years. And now, no: you can't say, this is a form of blockchain. You admit failure and acknowledge that classical consensus was good enough and even better in most cases.

I wrote exactly a whitepaper about that, and ironically named it roughchain [1].

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L0Me9si4iMclOq8n-oG2yNQf...

There's always a comment in any HN blockchain thread where the commenter disproves the need for a blockchain by proposing just to use a blockchain instead.

M of N big institutions signing a thing doesn't really make it a blockchain

Your protocol has to use a consensus mechanism if you want to reliably make progress, and be able to recover if you make mistakes, this is exactly what a blockchain solves

That you _can_ solve it with a blockchain doesn't mean that you can _only_ solve it with a blockchain.

M valid signatures of N authorities is a consensus mechanism that just needs public keys. You don't need a blockchain if you're prepared to trust a set of authorities like stripe and their trusted partners.

It's not a consensus mechanism in the rigorous sense, it's more similar to a reliable broadcast protocol (less powerful)

It's just a very unreliable consensus mechanism. Why is this being held up as a benefit?

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