Q: In this video, John Newbery talks about verification vs computation, and he bring it up as a big reason why he thinks bitcoin can scale but is skeptical about ethereum. I think I get the general idea of what he’s saying but I might be missing something.
Is there a qualitative difference between verification and computation? And is it the fact that ethereum is capable of performing arbitrary computation that makes the whole thing difficult to scale, or is it that specifically smart contracts that require arbitrary computation won’t be able to scale (as in those contracts would be very expensive to run).
A:
There is a big difference between verification and computation.
For instance:
- given the prime number 11,121,415,581,673,924,441, compute its prime factorisation.
- given the prime number 11,121,415,581,673,924,441, verify that 3,226,079,203 and 3,447,347,347 are its factors.