Live data from Hacker News

A discussion forum in the Bitcoin blockchain

bitaps.com

11–20 of 46 posts

Re: A discussion forum in the Bitcoin blockchain

#11

I don't see what the appeal is on having a permanent message board. Certainly almost everyone who has spent a lot of time online has said something that they wish they could take offline. I think what we really need is more transience in online discussions. If I said something when I was 14 years old that shouldn't come up when an employer searches for me. I was a completely different person then. Heck, that's why I…

The fact that today's 14 year old are most certainly creating records which will be viewed in the future is incontrovertible. The result will be, I think, that employers (and other decision makers) will learn not to judge someone for comments made when they were 14.

The fact that our lives are increasingly documented means that we'll all have to be less judgmental about our shared weaknesses and growing pains, and that's a good thing.

Re: A discussion forum in the Bitcoin blockchain

#12
post #4
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You cannot make a post while messages are pending (Post sequence number: 282 is currently pending confirmation in the Bitcoin Blockchain" Using the Bitcoin blockchain for forums is a really bad decision: high fees, tiny data buffer, high confirmation times. These are the kind of decisions that kill your project from the beginning.

I'm not sure about whether or not that isn't a good thing though. The quality of the bits tends to go up as they become more scarce. Compare the telegraph of old with todays internet.

> I'm not sure about whether or not that isn't a good thing though.

I am sure because we can quickly analyze this from a computer science perspective. We are trying to use data structures and algorithms that don't fit for the problem they are trying to solve (forums).

You can say that future blockchains can be a better fit but we need to see yet if those future blockchains are something new or just using concepts that we already had but with a new label.

Re: A discussion forum in the Bitcoin blockchain

#13

I don't see what the appeal is on having a permanent message board. Certainly almost everyone who has spent a lot of time online has said something that they wish they could take offline. I think what we really need is more transience in online discussions. If I said something when I was 14 years old that shouldn't come up when an employer searches for me. I was a completely different person then. Heck, that's why I…

you can pass laws for that in the real world. Just make it illegal for an employer to ask ANYTHING beyond what is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to get the job done and NOTHING ELSE.

Re: A discussion forum in the Bitcoin blockchain

#14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't they just embed the hash of the message, or even the hash of a chain of messages? (AFAIK people have been doing this for a while for other applications). There was a much more sensible attempt at this with bitmessage [0] but anonymity and security guarantees are hard, and everyone receives everything is a really expensive strategy for a messaging protocol. tl:dr those that don't research prior work are b…

I'm not sure this is the same thing. Bitmessage has a different use case (person to person messages).

You can send bitmessages that are entirely public as well see 'Chans'.

Re: A discussion forum in the Bitcoin blockchain

#16
post #2

This seems to belong to Locked Post[1], a "free, anonymous, secure, uncensorable, decentralised and eternal post board". [1]: https://lockedpost.com/

out of curiosity, and probably topic, the 70chars limit is probably due to the protocol, but, is there a way to post longer messages? or what do people do to "certify" longer messages on the blockchain? I heard pitches where companies told that they were securing contracts and so on (not sure if they just post the hash or what).

PS: Does anyone of you know what kind of API/implementation this site use to post the message on the blockchain? i'm new to the topic but quite interested

Re: A discussion forum in the Bitcoin blockchain

#17
Isn't bitcoin and other blockchains validated by "proof-of-work", meaning a nontrivial amount of energy is required to post something to this discussion forum?

I mean it's nearly indefensible to even add an energy overhead to financial transactions, but this...

Re: A discussion forum in the Bitcoin blockchain

#18
post #11

I don't see what the appeal is on having a permanent message board. Certainly almost everyone who has spent a lot of time online has said something that they wish they could take offline. I think what we really need is more transience in online discussions. If I said something when I was 14 years old that shouldn't come up when an employer searches for me. I was a completely different person then. Heck, that's why I…

The fact that today's 14 year old are most certainly creating records which will be viewed in the future is incontrovertible. The result will be, I think, that employers (and other decision makers) will learn not to judge someone for comments made when they were 14. The fact that our lives are increasingly documented means that we'll all have to be less judgmental about our shared weaknesses and growing pains, and th…

This is the most optimistic thing I've ever read. I hope you're right.

Re: A discussion forum in the Bitcoin blockchain

#19

Isn't bitcoin and other blockchains validated by "proof-of-work", meaning a nontrivial amount of energy is required to post something to this discussion forum? I mean it's nearly indefensible to even add an energy overhead to financial transactions, but this...

Notwithstanding the bandwidth and storage costs associated with downloading an maintaining a multi-GB blockchain.

Re: A discussion forum in the Bitcoin blockchain

#20

Isn't bitcoin and other blockchains validated by "proof-of-work", meaning a nontrivial amount of energy is required to post something to this discussion forum? I mean it's nearly indefensible to even add an energy overhead to financial transactions, but this...

Requiring proof of work to make forum posts could seriously cut down on spam.
Post reply on HN