Re: WCIG meeting on Verifiable Credentials, Decentralized Identifiers, and DID Ledgers

On 24 March 2018 at 01:16, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:

> On 03/22/2018 06:41 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
>> <https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qOjzppFLXtL7Is-MQ94
>> BAyJhsZ3Otc2qKVz1hC0c10M/edit#slide=id.g354c1cd95b_0_29>
>>
>>
>>
>> In slide 25 it says DID creation on bitcoin costs $15
>
>>
>> https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/
>>
>> According to the site above the median transaction fee on the
>> bitcoin network is $0.20 -- is the information out of date, relating
>> to previous maximums, or involving multiple transactions?
>>
>
> The transaction fee doesn't capture the total cost of the transaction.
> In fact, it's a rounding error on the total cost of performing a
> transaction on the network.
>
> Transaction cost varies wildly between blockchains and market swings,
> but here's one way to do the calculation:
>
> The price per Bitcoin as I write this email is $8,731.60.
>
> The block reward for a Bitcoin is 12.5 BTC as of this email. So, the
> total reward for generating a block is roughly $109,137.
>
> The total number of transactions per block has peaked around 1,537 in
> the last month or so.
>
> So 109137/1537 = 71
>
> The cost per transaction is actually closer to $71 this month (plus
> $0.20)... but that number thrashes wildly depending on market
> speculation and a variety of other factors.
>
> ... and this is the reason the Veres One Decentralized Identifier
> Blockchain didn't do an Initial Coin Offering and doesn't have a token.
> Doing either of those things leads to terrible price volatility because
> you get both institutional and inexperienced investors playing the pump
> and dump game.
>
> That number also doesn't factor in how Bitcoin mining operations and
> electric utilities externalize even more mining costs via the use of
> natural resources (water, coal, etc.) whose costs to the environment are
> not fully accounted for due to political lobbying and other practices
> that hide the true cost of mining Bitcoin.
>
> Hope that helps explain where that $25 number came from.
>

Thanks for the explanation.  That makes sense.  The bitcoin network has an
impicit fee due to inflation.  Wasnt clear to me from the slide that, that
was part of the $15 calculation.

Fundamentally block chains such as bitcoin do not scale linearly, but the
(architecture of the) world wid web does.  I'm reading more about veres one
to see what kind of sweet spot is envisioned.

Final question : does the system now have .well-known locations similar to
RFC 6920 [1]?  The use case of users owning their own hashes, in a domain
independent way, could perhaps be solved with ni:/// URIs, which strike me
as quite similar to did's.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc6920/


>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: Rebalancing How the Web is Built
> http://manu.sporny.org/2016/rebalancing/
>