Opinion
Narula: Permissioned blockchains are more decentralized than ICO projects
“I put permission blockchains as being more decentralized than these so-called ICOs we're seeing, or initial coin offerings. Because quite frankly, if you can do an initial coin offering, if you can raise money, that means that there's an organization behind wh…”
Insight
Narula: Blockchains are anchors of trust, not databases; minimize on-chain data
“They're not a system for data storage. They're not a database. They're a piece of a puzzle, an anchor of trust. And so I think the real way we should be using blockchains is we should put as little on them as possible.”
Insight
Narula: Simple metrics for measuring decentralization can be easily gamed
“Simple mechanisms for trying to define it and trying to use it as a measure could pretty easily be gamed.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Narula: Premature exchange regulation risks stifling crypto competition
“I think in this industry in particular, a regulatory moat too early could really stifle competition. We could end up with a few small, large exchanges which have a tremendous amount of control.”
Assertion Supported
Narula: Bitcoin was the first intermediary-free digital payment system
“It took me a little while to realize this, but this was actually the first time that this had ever happened. This was the first time we could make online digital payments without a bank or another financial institution in the middle.”
Assertion Partly supported
Narula: Bitcoin has operated reliably for 10 years without protocol compromise
“So proof of work has been, though it consumes a lot of electricity, it requires a lot of electricity to run the specialized hardware, has been working pretty reliably for 10 years. It's very impressive, actually. A lot of people never thought that it would wor…”
Insight
Narula: Delegated Proof-of-Stake gains performance by increasing coercion risk
“Because there's a smaller number of people engaging in the protocol, you can get higher transaction throughput. You can get better performance. However, there's also a smaller number of people participating in the protocol, meaning it might be easier to coerce…”
Insight
Narula: Decentralization is a proxy for fairness, accountability, and openness
“I think decentralization is actually a proxy for other features that we might want to have. Things like fairness, accountability, standards, openness, lack of gatekeeping. Decentralization is what enables us to have all of these different things.”
Disclosure
Narula: MIT Digital Currency Initiative employs two Bitcoin Core developers
“Bitcoin development right now is concentrated in three institutions, but actually quite widespread around that. One of them is actually my own. We employ two Bitcoin core developers.”
Assertion Supported
Narula: Four mining pools control over 50 percent of Bitcoin hash rate
“About four of them comprise over 50% of the hash rate.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Narula: Decentralized networks cannot unilaterally push bug fixes or updates
“Because you see, these systems are very hard to upgrade. You have to get the agreement of everyone to start to run the new code. And remember, developers don't really have the ability to just push out and update when they want to. What this means is that it's …”
Assertion Supported
Narula: Bitcoin's seven TPS throughput limit is an easily modified parameter
“Bitcoin doing seven transactions per second is a choice based on two numbers in the code. One could change these two numbers very easily.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Narula: Bitcoin guarantees security based on incentives rather than identity
“The really cool idea behind Bitcoin and its successors, was that these systems, ah, guaranteed security based on incentives.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Narula: Bitcoin solved Sybil attacks by tying identities to economic cost
“That was the insight behind Bitcoin. We were going to address the Sybil attack problem by making these identities actually cost something. So they weren't set ahead of time, but they were allocated according to how much people were willing to participate or pa…”
Assertion Partly supported
Narula: Public confidence in banks stands at only 32 percent
“Banks are definitely bad, with only 32% confidence, but they're not the worst.”
Assertion Supported
Narula: Byzantine consensus tolerates active malicious adversaries on a network
“This is the idea behind Byzantine consensus, that we can tolerate not just computers failing, but we can actually tolerate malicious adversaries on the network who might be trying to subvert agreement.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Narula: Paxos algorithms power data center scheduling at most large companies
“A form of consensus an algorithm specifically called Paxos and variants are used inside most large companies today in order to control sort of the scheduling and the design of their data centers.”
Assertion Supported
Narula: Permissioned blockchains revive 1999 MIT Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm
“In 1999, 10 years before Bitcoin, an algorithm called Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus was formulated at MIT by Barbara Liskoff and her student Miguel Castro, and interestingly enough, though industry didn't really take this algorithm and do anythi…”
Insight
Narula: Cryptography enables nodes to construct independently verifiable database views
“Every single node can construct an auditable, verifiable database view on top of this append-only ledger. This is really the key insight here. And the reason that it's auditable and verifiable is because we're using cryptography, hash functions, and digital si…”
