Thread by @el33th4xor

Bitcoin operated for 11 years without anyone going around with a pager in their pocket. In those 11 years, AWS, Facebook and Google services went down multiple times. Just a month ago, Meta went down.

finance.yahoo.com/news/metas-soc…

Now, I am not saying that every blockchain is more reliable than these centralized services. We all know of blockchains that “go backwards” (i.e. violate their own finality guarantees) and chains that stop and need to be restarted from a single image on Google Drive.

Avalanche’s decentralization has been a huge boon to us. In two years, we have had two episodes of partial failures, but unrelated parts of the chain kept on ticking. Avalanche survived through various AWS and cloud provider failures as well.

To be fair, this level of resilience comes with two tradeoffs.

1. No single entity can make unilateral updates to the system. The days when a program executed on a PC in your den are left behind in the 90s. Every chain update requires community buy in.

2. The protocol runs slower than it would if it were centralized. It’s still pretty good – with 1-2 second finality, and at 3x the average capacity of Visa’s network, Avalanche ticks along faster than any other comparably decentralized system.

But imagine how much faster it’d be if it ran, like some other chains, on a set of machines operated by a single entity!

Overall, blockchains represent the emergence of a new way of building systems.

The 90’s took us from centralized computing (mainframes and PCs) to the client-server model. Where we started being dependent on service providers such as Google and Zuckerberg etc. That dependence means they can surveil us, collect our data and arbitrarily change the game on us.

Blockchains represent the rise of Byzantine Fault Tolerant computing. It is now the era of building systems that do not have a centralized controller, where the system comprises components provided by volunteers, some of whom might misbehave, yet the service will keep on ticking.

In the 80s, academics dreamed of “object systems” where code snippets lived in an amorphous cloud and interacted. Blockchains are the natural manifestation of this vision, albeit they provide more structure and a stronger sense of unified consensus:

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/42…

This is inherently more resilient than the old client-server operated by a centralized entity. There will be problems uncovered along the way, and encounter significant failures, just like we did in the past when we developed revolutionary technologies.

farm4.staticflickr.com/3458/370087835…

Overall, there is a new crop of systems that are emerging. They differ from every other traditional system in that there is no one in charge, and when they are done properly, the results are a sight to behold. #ThisisWhyWeCrypto