Why Altcoins are Technically Flawed with Nadav Kohen - WBD369

Mr Obnoxious

Peter McCormack

Technology, News, Politics, Money, Investing, Finance, Bitcoin

4.8 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 July 2021

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Location: Remotely
Date: Friday 25th June
Company: Suredbits
Role: Software Engineer

Bitcoin's proof-of-work blockchain solves a specific problem: achieving consensus of a distributed ledger without a central authority. Out of this decentralised network, new properties emerge like censorship resistance and probabilistic finality.

Bitcoin's success led to an explosion of altcoins, with most claiming to improve upon Bitcoin somehow, whether it's speed, privacy or scalability. However, blockchains are a delicate balance of specific tradeoffs, and these altcoins pale in comparison to Bitcoin's decentralisation and censorship resistance.

While changing a parameter might seem to add functionality, it can also introduce unintended consequences. To resist influence and attacks, Bitcoin must remain decentralised by allowing for easy validation.

Can we achieve sufficient privacy and functionality on the second layer? And why are other consensus methods, like proof-of-stake, flawed?

In this interview, I talk to Suredbits software engineer Nadav Kohen. We discuss why blockchains must scale with second layers, proof-of-stake vs proof of work, and tradeoffs of privacy technology.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You don't want to use the blockchain unless there's actually some kind of dispute.
0:07.0	All cooperative transactions in the world can exist off of a blockchain, and there's no reason to actually use a blockchain for them.
0:14.7	Hello there from Bedford in the United Kingdom.
0:18.2	How are you all doing?
0:19.8	Big game tonight.
0:20.8	I'm sorry I keep talking about football every week, but come on it's massive.
0:23.7	England are playing Denmark for an opportunity to get to the final of the Euro 2020 tournament.
0:29.7	We've never been a final my entire life. I'm very excited about this keep your
0:34.9	fingers crossed hopefully England will make it I will be there I will be cheering
0:38.8	them on so fingers cross for that one anyway welcome, welcome to the What Bitcoin did
0:43.4	podcast which is brought to you by Gemini, the only place I am using for buying
0:47.3	Bitcoin. I'm your host Peter McCormack and today I have an interview with
0:51.0	Nodav Cohen to discuss some of the technical flaws with
0:54.2	alt coins but before that I do have a message from my amazing show sponsors and
0:58.6	first up today we're kicking off with my newest sponsor which is Revolute. Now I've talked about this for
1:04.0	quite some time. I had all my accounts closed by Lloy's TSB, a bank I was with for 25
1:10.0	years and I think it's because they don't like Bitcoin.
1:13.0	So Revoloue reached out to me and they said, Pete,
1:15.0	we're not going to close your accounts.
1:17.0	Come join us.
1:18.0	And do you know what, it could not have been easier to create an account
1:20.0	and move everything over.
	...

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