I have an entire section (#8) of my whitepaper dedicated to analyzing and explaining Byteball.
It is an interesting discovery. It has flaws (and not just related to the consensus algorithm). And my design is not Byteball, but there is one aspect which is similar to one aspect of Byteball, yet my design would not work if it was only Byteball.
One of the main flaws of Byteball that you should be aware of besides the messed up transaction fees and distribution, is that the consensus of the blockchain can become entirely stuck if > 50% of the witnesses collude or stop functioning. Then it requires a (political gridlock potentially) hardfork to unstuck the blockchain. Ditto Tendermint, Casper, and all Byzantine agreement variants (that includes DPoS, yet the whales can vote to unstuck it without a hardfork). Note there is a mechanism for voting in new witnesses, because it requires a total order so it will in practice never work out because total orders don’t exist in nature.
Yeah Byteball has something important in it, but it is not really the solution.
Iota has an entire different consensus than Byteball, and it doesn’t work without centralized servers. We’ve already been down that technical debate in the past, so I won’t repeat it and get trolled again by Iota shills. Readers can either learn to recognize that I know what I say, or they can suffer the same fate as all the other times I’ve been doubted.
And no, bitcoin can’t adopt any of these things. bitcoin isn’t ever going to be anything more (which is sufficient). Learn to accept that and move on. Lightning Networks is , which is thus the same as saying it is never going to scale up in terms of relevance).
Published at Thu, 23 Feb 2017 13:05:54 +0000
