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vbuterin
scalability_paper
TeX2015–2016
vbuterin / scalability_paper

scalability_paper

Discover this repository through its Hacker News conversations.

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5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
109GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What people are saying

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month5 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-04-12 17:50:35 UTC to 2016-09-02 18:15:39 UTC.

012015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 commentsApr 20152015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsDec 20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsSep 2016

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Apr 20152015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC110
May 20152015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20152015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20152015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Aug 20152015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC110
Sep 20152015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Oct 20152015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Nov 20152015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Dec 20152015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jan 20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Feb 20162016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Mar 20162016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20162016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20162016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20162016-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jul 20162016-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Aug 20162016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20162016-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-10-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

5 sources
lhl·Sep 2, 2016
The Bitcoin whitepaper [1] (which is very short, concise, and definitely worth the read) describes how the Merkle trees might be pruned (transactions could be pruned when all outputs are spent) and in fact Bitcoin 0.11 added pruning (and 0.12 added further compatibility for pruned nodes). Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum lead) also posted a description of how Ethereum will implement State Tree Pruning [2]. These are short/medium-term scaling solutions. Many people are pushing sidechain [3] / child-chains [4] as longer-term ("Visa" level) solutions. * Lightning Network [5][6] is what Blockstream and others are pushing for Bitcoin scaling. * Raiden Network [7] is the Ethereum version, and may come out before Lightning, funnily enough. For those interested in the topic matter, Vitalik wrote a pretty dense paper on blockchain scaling last year [8].
Read the rest
While sidechains will be an option, Ethereum is also pursuing on-chain scaling as well. Sharding is scheduled for the upcoming Serenity release [9] (which also switches to Proof of Stake (Casper), another important scaling-related change). Writeup on Serenity PoC2 [10]. In general for scaling atm, processing/network latency/bandwidth for initial sync is more of a bottleneck than raw storage. By that measure, I'm actually a lot more interested in the on-chain tx-processing that Casper/PoS might bring [11]. Of course there's no requirement for a single chain to handle everything. Especially over the past few months, we've seen a few relatively smooth migrations to multiple chains as Bitcoin tx processing has "maxed out" (or more recently as fungibility/privacy issues have loomed). At the same time, Bitcoin volatility has stabilized, so it might be just the natural life cycle for blockchains to "scale" until they can't. It's still early days, so who knows? [1] https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paper [2] https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/ [3] https://gendal.me/2014/10/26/a-simple-explanation-of-bitcoin... [4] https://www.ardorplatform.org/ [5] https://lightning.network/ [6] https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf [7] http://raiden.network [8] https://github.com/vbuterin/scalability_paper/blob/master/sc... [9] https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/53 [10] https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/03/05/serenity-poc2/) from March [11] https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/760185856057638913 (phew, maybe one day HN will have markdown support, maybe one day...)
In Maybe Blockchain Really Does Have Magical Powers
kanzure·Jan 5, 2016
> Another thing I look forward to are links to interesting alternatives like SCP Some "see also" on that topic, then .... https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3u1m36/why_arent_w... http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/sharding-th... https://github.com/vbuterin/scalability_paper/blob/master/sc... (Unless you don't mean the SCP that was presented during Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong, and rather the other more widely known SCP....)
In On the dangers of a blockchain monoculture

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