It’s probably not possible to settle lots of transactions such that (1) adding more nodes to the network makes the number of settled transactions/second increase, (2) no account is ever observed to double-spend or have a negative balance, and (3) settlement time is less-than-exponential in the number of outstanding transactions. The author notes that (1) implies a sort of transaction-reordering property which makes (3) much harder, and also that (2) is weakened in practice to make extant blockchains more efficient.
“Blockchain”? I feel like I’ve heard the word before, but not in a long time… Oh yes, wasn’t that something back in 2022? I forget what it was though. Maybe it was an early version of langchain?
Note the similarities in construction with Markets are efficient if and only if P=NP.
In english?
It’s probably not possible to settle lots of transactions such that (1) adding more nodes to the network makes the number of settled transactions/second increase, (2) no account is ever observed to double-spend or have a negative balance, and (3) settlement time is less-than-exponential in the number of outstanding transactions. The author notes that (1) implies a sort of transaction-reordering property which makes (3) much harder, and also that (2) is weakened in practice to make extant blockchains more efficient.
“Blockchain”? I feel like I’ve heard the word before, but not in a long time… Oh yes, wasn’t that something back in 2022? I forget what it was though. Maybe it was an early version of langchain?