For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?

  • nulldev
    2•11 months ago

    What’s wrong with that though? BTC handles forks just fine. Eventually one fork will win out and life will continue on as usual.

    The bigger issue this paper presents is that miners become incentivized to mine empty blocks. But can’t you just enforce a minimum transaction count on blocks?

    • magic_lobster_party
      7•11 months ago

      But can’t you just enforce a minimum transaction count on blocks?

      Miners can just create their own nonsense transactions.

      • nulldev
        0•11 months ago

        There’s only incentive to do that if the mempool is empty. If the mempool is full, there will be plenty of transactions for both the first miner and the next miner.

        Wait… This entire paper only makes sense if the mempool is near empty. If the mempool is full, then there is no reason to mine an empty/partial block because there will always be transactions left for future miners.

        So basically:

        • Mempool full = miner would mine full blocks just like intended.
        • Mempool empty = miner would mine empty blocks but that isn’t a problem because there are no transactions to process in the mempool.