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The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet

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Re: The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet

#41

Post by toss1 »

natrius wrote: post #40
toss1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I'll bite, with a serious, practical question -- how would I do that this week? Please assume that I have 100 BTC at a particular address or small set of addresses, and I don't like the Chinese mining consortia. How do I actually move my value to a new chain that 1) excludes those mining consortia, 2) preserves my stored value, and 3) preserves my ability to transact with any other valid BTC address? How can I ge…

Fork Bitcoin to change the rules to exclude those miners, either by switching to proof-of-stake or just changing the proof-of-work hashing algorithm. Like this: https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic/pull/6 As I stated elsewhere, this is impractical for Bitcoin because the value of the currency would tank. For applications like the one in this article that use general purpose blockchains, forking is very pr…

OK, so the fork would accomplish goal #1, but not #2 or #3. I can have my own brand new BTCv2, but it has no value, unless I can get the majority of other BTC people to come over, and if a serious movement starts, the value on both chains tanks and needs to be rebuilt by trust, and the assumption that no one else tries the same thing.

Even when the point of the chain is not to store value, but just data, it seems that we're already losing the ability to track all the old data. Sure I extract a set of the stuff I want and carry on with the new fork, but no one else comes along, their data is lost, so they don't come along. If all I care about is a close network of friends, or perhaps an internal company data store, then fine, but how does one cleanly tear off a chunk of a network that looks like the graph of FB or Twitter? Am I missing something here?

Re: The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet

#42

Post by RyJones »

natrius wrote: post #2

This just isn't true. Yes, running your own blockchain node is infeasible, but a blockchain-based service with hosted nodes is better than a federated service. Proof-of-work creates an illusion of dependence on blockchain miners. Proof-of-stake makes it clear that blockchains are run by a corporation that wants to maximize transaction fee revenue. Transaction validators have to do the best job of maintaining a unifie…

Intel recently unveiled PoET - proof of elapsed time - in Sawtooth Lake. https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html

Re: The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet

#43

Post by natrius »

toss1 wrote: post #41
natrius wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fork Bitcoin to change the rules to exclude those miners, either by switching to proof-of-stake or just changing the proof-of-work hashing algorithm. Like this: https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic/pull/6 As I stated elsewhere, this is impractical for Bitcoin because the value of the currency would tank. For applications like the one in this article that use general purpose blockchains, forking is very pr…

OK, so the fork would accomplish goal #1, but not #2 or #3. I can have my own brand new BTCv2, but it has no value, unless I can get the majority of other BTC people to come over, and if a serious movement starts, the value on both chains tanks and needs to be rebuilt by trust, and the assumption that no one else tries the same thing. Even when the point of the chain is not to store value, but just data, it seems tha…

If you have a good reason to switch blockchains, the developers of the clients users actually use should have a good reason to support the switch. If you can't convince people to change, you're stuck with the status quo. That's just a fact of life, not a flaw of blockchains.

> Sure I extract a set of the stuff I want and carry on with the new fork, but no one else comes along, their data is lost, so they don't come along.

That's not how it works. When you fork, you typically bring the entire history with you. It's the new data after the fork that causes problems. If people don't switch or publish to both, you're stuck.

Re: The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet

#44

Post by curried_haskell »

natrius wrote: post #40
toss1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I'll bite, with a serious, practical question -- how would I do that this week? Please assume that I have 100 BTC at a particular address or small set of addresses, and I don't like the Chinese mining consortia. How do I actually move my value to a new chain that 1) excludes those mining consortia, 2) preserves my stored value, and 3) preserves my ability to transact with any other valid BTC address? How can I ge…

Fork Bitcoin to change the rules to exclude those miners, either by switching to proof-of-stake or just changing the proof-of-work hashing algorithm. Like this: https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic/pull/6 As I stated elsewhere, this is impractical for Bitcoin because the value of the currency would tank. For applications like the one in this article that use general purpose blockchains, forking is very pr…

> Fork Bitcoin

I love it when people say this shit. Ok, I'll just go fork Bitcoin. Unless I'm not a programmer. And I sure hope that somebody else follows me into my fork. Only a group of major (powerful) market players will have the ability to threaten to fork. And even then, they probably won't, for the exact reason you stated: a fracture in the currency would kill people's confidence in the currency and tank its value.

Re: The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet

#45

Post by curried_haskell »

jflatow wrote: post #38
natrius wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, by a consensus of miners, or by users choosing a new set of miners. The "main blockchain" is not a decision of the miners. It's a decision of the people. If everyone agrees that current miners are behaving badly in a proof-of-stake system, they can just choose new miners.

And who is 'everyone'? Who decides who the next iteration of 'everyone' is?

The majority of participants in the Bitcoin network? Or the majority of its computing power?

This is a major worrying part about Bitcoin. Would it be really that difficult for a nation-state level player to buy enough capacity on the network to take it over?

Re: The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet

#46

Post by shiro »

natrius wrote: post #32
drdaeman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moving a blockchain-based Twitter from one fork to another is relatively easy and consequence-free. I'm not sure it's really consequence-free. It's essentially a netsplit, where the forking party lose connectivity with everyone who's left. Consider the case where Twitter (the centralized one) is suddenly falling apart over some issue into two distinct non-interoperating services. Technically - sure - it's a no-brai…

You got it. Push a new client that supports both chains to users with enough time before the switch for people to upgrade.

Technical curiosity---if I use such a client, and two block chains disagree (on, say, some history that affects the current operation), then won't I end up choosing and sticking one?

Re: The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet

#47

Post by dharma1 »

kkennis wrote: post #22
brighton36 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Blockchain' is a meaningless buzzword at this point. The innovation of Bitcoin was proof of work and/or the calibrations involved in securing Bitcoin with energy. When bitcoin became an unfundable space, the VC's and such moved into "Blockchain", which was marketed as the good parts of bitcoin, without the bad. Unfortunately, the space has seemingly gone on to only emulate the worst parts of bitcoin. Scams, ignoranc…

'Blockchain' isn't a meaningless buzzword, it's a database protocol. Its market positioning aside, there's a very real value that immutable databases offer from both a technological and a commercial perspective. The blockchain protocol isn't going to 'save the world' - but once a little air gets let out of the balloon, it's going to see a lot of adoption in both financial institutions and back offices in a wide, wide…

I agree they make sense for some interbank and business transactions where you have counterparty risk, and it looks like several banks are interested in developing their own ledger with the Linux Foundation - https://www.hyperledger.org/.

But I wonder what would drive mass adoption for every day users - aside from a collapse of the current financial system.

For general public it doesn't really matter if AirBnb or Uber or Whatsapp are decentralised or not - we use them because they have reached a point through network effects where they have a ton of users/liquidity, are reliable and have smooth UX.

Also, I'm not sure storage issues are a solved problem for immutable decentralised databases.

Fast global microtransactions could be a useful consumer app but so far there is little need for those. And the UX for fiat->crypto->fiat transactions and wallets is far from what it needs to be for general public.

Re: The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet

#48

Post by tome »

natrius wrote: post #26
drdaeman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a blockchain has rules that don't meet my needs, I can choose a different blockchain. Had this happened with Bitcoin? I think I heard there are some quite major disagreements (something about block sizes and stuff) and there are a lot of users that aren't happy. I don't remember hearing them just "well, whatever" and forking off.

Bitcoin is a special case because it's only really intended to be used as a ledger for bitcoins. Currencies are a collective delusion: they're valuable because other people think they are valuable. Any dispute over what the source of truth is for a currency's ledger strains that delusion, possibly to the breaking point. The value of the currency would suffer, which would defeat the purpose of a fork. Ethereum is a ge…

> Currencies are a collective delusion: they're valuable because other people think they are valuable.

This is not true of most currencies. Most currencies are valuable because governments force you to pay them on threat of imprisonment. Bitcoin does not have this feature and therefore, yes, it's hard to see what its fundamental value is.

Re: The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet

#49

Post by natrius »

curried_haskell wrote: post #44
natrius wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fork Bitcoin to change the rules to exclude those miners, either by switching to proof-of-stake or just changing the proof-of-work hashing algorithm. Like this: https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic/pull/6 As I stated elsewhere, this is impractical for Bitcoin because the value of the currency would tank. For applications like the one in this article that use general purpose blockchains, forking is very pr…

> Fork Bitcoin I love it when people say this shit. Ok, I'll just go fork Bitcoin. Unless I'm not a programmer. And I sure hope that somebody else follows me into my fork. Only a group of major (powerful) market players will have the ability to threaten to fork. And even then, they probably won't, for the exact reason you stated: a fracture in the currency would kill people's confidence in the currency and tank its v…

It's just an illustration. I think there will be far more valuable blockchain applications than digital gold, and those will be easy to fork.

Re: The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet

#50

Post by stcredzero »

Animats wrote: post #36
stcredzero wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't a federated system that looks like a centralized system work? What if something like Diaspora just installed itself on an AWS EC2 instance for you, and you only had to enter a credit card?

An EC2 instance is probably too much for one user. The model here is Wordpress, which is easy to install and widely used, even in its distributed form. Of course, what's happened is that more and more Wordpress sites run on centralized Wordpress. Compare: "wordpress.com" (hosted): "Create your new website for free. WordPress.com is the best place for your personal blog or business site. Create Website (button)" "word…

How about a Docker instance?
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