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Building for the Blockchain

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Building for the Blockchain

#111

Post by EGreg »

xchaotic wrote: post #71
EGreg wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite part about the blockchain is that it is a standard building block for decentralized byzantine consensus. Throw Ripple's XRP Consensus algorithm at 50-100 nodes and you know that 30% or more would have to be compromised to break the guarantees. That's really cool because I can code the rest of the interface (front end etc.) with sloppy security and then ACTUALLY BOLT ON a secure layer with guarantees at th…

It's nice in an utopian kind of way, but it's actually less efficient - i.e. more costly overall. So you're talking Facebook paying for their hosting by showing ads vs you trying to charge customers real money or slow down their computers. I have a guess which one is going to prevail.

Hmm how do you figure?

Having people host with several nodes running a consensus algorithm is worse than trusting all your data to one actor in "the cloud"?

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#112

Post by dozzie »

elmar wrote: post #65
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #11

People are trying to solve a lot of interesting problems with blockchain, but I fear it's become the ultimate shoehorn solution for the modern era. See also: https://tonyarcieri.com/on-the-dangers-of-a-blockchain-monoc... I've had meetings with prospective clients that opened with, "We have $problem, can we use blockchain to solve it?" where anything that doesn't qualify as a blockchain is cast to the wayside because…

Does your problem gets easier/solved with a permissionless ownerless database, if "yes" then you need a public blockchain, if "no" you need something else.

If "yes", then you still don't need blockchain. There are better protocols, like DHT. The only time you need blockchain is when you need to tell which of the two related statements was issued earlier and at the same time you absolutely have to have no trusted third party that assigns timestamps to the statements.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#113

Post by sharemywin »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #30
woah wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that blockchain is overhyped right now, but I don't understand the common sentiment on HN that "you don't need a blockchain, just an append-only decentralized database with Merkel root logs", as if that's something easy to build. What is this hypothetical non-blockchain, where are you going to get it, and why not just use a blockchain if that's what you need?

> I don't understand the common sentiment on HN that "you don't need a blockchain, just an append-only decentralized database with Merkel root logs", as if that's something easy to build. In my case, this sentiment accompanies an implementation in the form of an easily-deployable open source microservice. https://github.com/paragonie/chronicle If it's too hard for people to build, they can use what I wrote. > What is…

This sounds a lot like ripple:

...

Are people still fighting about this or have they come to a consensus?

I'm probably the worst person to represent whether there's a consensus or not since I'm one of the designers of Ripple. But the important thing, at least in my opinion, is that there is no "secret sauce".

The software is open source. People are free to modify it however they please. We run the exact same software that we make available on our public servers and our validators. Others are free to run validators and they do so.

As it happens, much of the network infrastructure is run by us today. But we are more than happy to turn that over to others who are willing to do it.

Why do you care if something is decentralized? The main reason is usually that you don't want the users of the system to be forced to accept changes made by an owner/operator of the system whose interest may be averse to them. Ripple is decentralized in this sense.

For example, eBay is not decentralized. They don't warehouse their goods. But if eBay the company says no auctions of adult merchandise, then there will be no such auctions. It wouldn't matter if every user disagreed with the policy. Their only recourse would be to re-create what eBay had done, that is, to themselves implement eBay's secret sauce.

By contrast, Ripple has no secret sauce. Anyone can run their own servers. If we make changes people don't like, nothing requires them to run the code with those changes. If Ripple disappeared and users of the ledger wanted it to continue, nothing would stop them from continuing it.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/40448/is-ripple-...

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#114

Post by Asdfbla »

bitcoinmoney wrote: post #108
ericb wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, although I might add "trustless" in there.

i think trustless == ownerless. do you agree?

There's more dimensions to that though. Can participants have identities? If yes, then you don't need proof-of-work, for instance but can have a distributed ledgers with conventional algorithms for Byzantine agreement etc.

Might be just my misinterpretation, but when I hear blockchain I usually just think of conventional totally trustless and identity-less protocols that necessarily require proof-of-work - which is a security level which is not needed for most applications.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#115

Post by EricDeb »

m1sta_ wrote: post #76
EricDeb wrote: post #56

So far the main benefit is democratizing investment, as has been stated here before. I love that I can get in on early stage projects without being a well-connected angel investor. Coins are like new, sexier penny stocks.

The only reason this wasn’t possible in the past was because too many people got ripped off.

Undoubtedly that will happen again, but maybe this time third party validation systems will improve?

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#116

Post by dozzie »

TheDong wrote: post #36
arkona wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A distributed, append-only cryptographic ledger Pardon my ignorance, but isn’t that what a blockchain is?

No, that's what a write-ahead-log is, or quite a few various databases, or a git branch are. The key innovation of the blockchain was the use of proof-of-work in order to associate an amount of computer-time with a given block, and then pick, from competing views of a blockchain, which view took the most energy to arrive at... all while being resistant to a small number of subversive actors. In short, the blockchain…

> The key innovation of the blockchain was the use of proof-of-work in order to associate an amount of computer-time with a given block

Correct. In other words, proof of work is only a tool to make everybody slow in producing data while keeping everybody fast in verifying it.

> In short, the blockchain solved the Byzantine Generals’ Problem,

No. It's a common misconception, but in fact it does not solve Byzantine generals problem, with the simplest reason being that the problem requires the solving protocol to terminate (blockchain does no such thing).

> and happened to use a append-only cryptographic ledger as part of it.

The correct terminology is not "ledger", but "document timestamping". You don't need to record transactions in blockchain, they can be any statements. Cryptographers already had such systems, except that each of those required trusted third party to produce timestamps.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#117

Post by Jasper_ »

manderson2080 wrote: post #107
cslarson wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chainlink is a project to enable a network of decentralised oracles.

Here's some good background on ChainLink: https://medium.com/@signal_capital/https-medium-com-signal-c...

Reading up on ChainLink:

> Several data providers respond to this service agreement with a bid in the form of a data reply — when enough data providers have responded, the majority response is taken (or average depending on the request), outliers are removed, and data is fed into the contract.

What's to stop me from setting up 10,000 different data providers that initially provide good data to get a good reputation score, but then slowly corrupt them over time? It doesn't matter how many data providers you average if I can set up millions of them in seconds. I don't see any way to solve Sybil attacks here.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#118

Post by ShabbosGoy »

kang wrote: post #68

Naval does a much better job of explaining what the tech is about : https://startupboy.com/2014/04/01/the-fifth-protocol/ However, OP nor Naval, really understand the protocol, or wouldn't be supporting non-blockchain things like ethereum (there is nothing that you can do with ethereum but not with git). >One of these developers, Vitalik Buterin, was frustrated by Bitcoin’s immobilism I am amazed at how HN is selling…

Bitcoin is slow as hell. So you can do an order of magnitude more with Ethereum than Bitcoin.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#119

Post by ThomPete »

snitko wrote: post #109
ThomPete wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I see a lot of different areas where the blockchain will be extremely useful. The reason I think that is very simple. The blockchain allows us to create scarcity in an otherwise abundant medium. This means that potentially (and yes it will take time) we will see be able to mimic the physical space and create items that are to some extent unique (even though the can be copied. The art market is based on exa…

Blockchain is not a protocol. It's a concept because there are many different blockchains. Bitcoin on the other hand is a protocol.

Yup, you are of course 100% technically correct. But conceptually it helps me think about it like that (as the purpose overall regardless of how the blockchain is expressed is the immutable ledger)

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#120

Post by cturner »

symlinkk wrote: post #87
wcarron wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proof-of-stake as opposed to Proof-of-work

So the oracle is incentivized to tell the truth because lying will hurt the value of their tokens? What happens when someone offers them more than their tokens are worth if they lie?

Imagine a blockchain operated by a consortium of five companies. There are also second-grade members in the pool.

For the sake of example, imagine this is a market that is being used to trade fishing rights for a region off Iceland.

Each of the five has a holding of Consortium Coin on this chain. This give them voting power in any decisions that have to be made of the chain. None of the second-grade members have any Consortium Coin.

The second-grade members trade in Fish Coin and Boat Coin.

Each of the five operates an oracle feeding to the consortium. It provides fisheries stocking data, and records of dock inspections of member boats. Each piece of incoming oracle data is signed to indicate that it is backed by the Consortium Coin holdings of the operator (proof-of-stake).

A simple election/raft algorithm decides that Oracle advice is true once it passes a threshold of so-much Consortium Coin.

There are contracts signed in western countries where the five firms are listed. These contracts say - essentially - that they will operate in good faith on the chain. (If they did not, they could be sued in the usual way).

There is a direct line out of this chain into the regulator, who runs analysis algorithms against the reported behaviour, and compares that to their independent mechanisms.

Bribery could still exist off-chain. But that is not new, and we do alright at protecting against that through current systems of governance. In this scenario, the thing your proof of stake is protecting against is a non-consortium blockchain member setting up a rogue oracle.

Why is this valuable? If ppl get the model right, you can run sophisticated markets like this without any civil servants being involved. It may turn out to be policy-wonk heaven. You can cut the size of the civil service, and yet have much more nuanced regulation, and better game-theory for operating markets.

Next: a social network going where people indicate trust of one another, and act as semi-guarantors for people they have vouched for.

Next: operate sections of the legal and judicial system over the chain.

Human actions captured on a cheap, secure, distributed ledger.

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