Litecoin (available on Coinbase) News: Litecoin (available on Coinbase) (LTC) creator Charlie Lee sat down with CoinDesk at Consensus 2018 to talk CryptoKitties, blockchain inefficiencies, and money.

Litecoin (available on Coinbase) News: The Problem with Blockchain is…

“Blockchains are inefficient by definition,” Lee stated. He explained that a decentralized system requires the replication of data, meaning that a whole bunch of computers have to keep track of all the data, rather than just one computer keeping track of it all. It requires a lot of extra work to keep things decentralized and this makes the decentralized systems less efficient when compared to a centralized system.

At the moment, Lee continued, there are very few actual applications that need a fully decentralized, or trustless, system. Much of what is being put on the blockchain these days doesn’t need to go on the public blockchain. These applications would run just as well on a regular, centralized system, and may actually work better on one.

The example Lee gave was CryptoKitties. While he enjoys the fact that CryptoKitties are like digital trading cards that can’t be copied, “you don’t really need a public blockchain to do somETHing like CryptoKitties.”

Remember that when CryptoKitties first started, the game nearly crashed the Ethereum (available on Coinbase) network. That’s because blockchain, as it’s been set up, doesn’t scale very well. For somETHing like a trading game, which is all that CryptoKitties really is, it doesn’t need a trustless system to operate. If Google or Amazon had a smart contract system set up, Lee said, CryptoKitties would work fine on it, and it would run more efficiently.

People are still experimenting with what does, and does not work on (or require) a public blockchain, CryptoKitties being one of these experiments.

The one thing that does work is money, Lee said, and that’s what Litecoin (available on Coinbase) is all about.