Building for the Blockchain • Hacker News Board

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#141

Post by eyezick » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 9:54 PM UTC

joosters wrote: post #132

dahdum wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of dapps don't need oracles to run. Anything that does is still more trustless than a centralized solution would be, reducing the counterparty risk to the oracle alone. As mentioned elsewhere, a lot of work is also being done on decentralizing the oracles. Like PoW / PoS protection, this raises the cost of an oracle attack high enough to reduce the risk to acceptable levels for more sensitive applications.

If your code doesn't reach out beyond the blockchain, then there's very little it can actually do. You are limited to twiddling balances of coins. This turns out to be great for making casinos and ponzi schemes, but little else. To do anything more meaningful, code needs to interact with the real world. And this is generally the point at which blockchain apps lose all of their purported benefits, like decentralizatio…

> If your code doesn't reach out beyond the blockchain, then there's very little it can actually do.

Asset issuance, voting, wills, identity/reputation systems, land registries.

Fundamentally, a blockchain is just public, transparent immutable data history. Of the above sample cases, all it takes is for the powers to be to recognize the data as a reflection of the real world; which is a barrier outside of the technology.

And sidenote, decentralized oracles will literally tie outside world to the blockchain.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#142

Post by eyezick » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 9:56 PM UTC

Jasper_ wrote: post #64

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can solve this by using multiple oracles and a stake-based consensus algorithm to de-incentivize malicious reporting.

I am unable to find anything about using multiple oracles in Ethereum. Do you have any information about this?

Augur (mentioned on the article) is fundamentally a decentralized oracle

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#143

Post by joosters » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 9:56 PM UTC

ericb wrote: post #123

dozzie wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's another aspect, unforgeability. The interesting thing about the blockchain is that it is a very hard to forge data-set, by design. You can take a proof of work blockchain and look at the hashes of the blocks in it, and based on the number of 0's in each block (the difficulty), you can know how much energy (and cost) went into mining that block. So if there's a danger of forgery, or you have an interest in sec…

Just because each block has had gigawatts of computing power thrown at it doesn't make the block's contents correct, or 'the truth'. Case in point: every stolen bitcoin or ethereum wallet. The blockchain is storing the wrong owner of these coins. Every hack can be considered a forgery, and the miners will happily validate it.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#144

Post by jklepatch » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 10:00 PM UTC

rsp1984 wrote: post #78

Monegro believes that this paradigm shift affects the way that developers should think about their applications: “The combination of shared open data with an incentive system that prevents “winner-take-all” markets changes the game at the application layer and creates an entire new category of companies with fundamentally different business models at the protocol layer.” Ok, thin protocols + fat apps --> fat protocol…

Early blockchains like bitcoins might have this thin/fat protocol aspect, but this is much less true of newer blockchains like ethereum. Granted, with programming languages like Solidity we are still quite limited but there are some interesting developments ongoing, like possibly integrating the webassembly tech with some blockchains, to allow more flexibility on the application layer (see ewasm for ethereum).

But generally speaking, this protocol issue is of little interest for end users.

What is of interest to them is the fact that their data can become decentralized with the blockchain, and the power balance can be shifted back to them. With all the tech majors becoming so powerful thats a really big deal.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#145

Post by joosters » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 10:05 PM UTC

eyezick wrote: post #141

joosters wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your code doesn't reach out beyond the blockchain, then there's very little it can actually do. You are limited to twiddling balances of coins. This turns out to be great for making casinos and ponzi schemes, but little else. To do anything more meaningful, code needs to interact with the real world. And this is generally the point at which blockchain apps lose all of their purported benefits, like decentralizatio…

> If your code doesn't reach out beyond the blockchain, then there's very little it can actually do. Asset issuance, voting, wills, identity/reputation systems, land registries. Fundamentally, a blockchain is just public, transparent immutable data history. Of the above sample cases, all it takes is for the powers to be to recognize the data as a reflection of the real world; which is a barrier outside of the technol…

Asset issuance, voting, wills, identity/reputation systems, land registries.

All of which reach beyond the blockchain. No-one is going to care that a 'smart contract' says that Alice owns a plot of land when Bob holds the real-world deeds.

The real world and the blockchain can only be linked when, as you say, 'the powers that be' decide to recognise the data. But then you've lost all of the advantages that the blockchain was claimed to possess. For example, if we need an entity to recognise that the land registry smart contract is valid, there's no more decentralization, and we might as well let that entity store the land registry in their own simple database. The blockchain becomes pointless and wasteful.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#146

Post by jondubois » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 10:05 PM UTC

C14L wrote: post #124

rsp1984 wrote: post #78

Monegro believes that this paradigm shift affects the way that developers should think about their applications: “The combination of shared open data with an incentive system that prevents “winner-take-all” markets changes the game at the application layer and creates an entire new category of companies with fundamentally different business models at the protocol layer.” Ok, thin protocols + fat apps --> fat protocol…

It solves some problems, especially when it comes to networks of shared information where no one actor trust any other single actor. But as usual, as soon as a lot of money is to be made, non-techies get dollar signs in their eyes and --without understanding the tool-- jump in and start using it for everything. It will be very amusing to watch, for sure.

What I like about Blockchain tech is that non technical people will never be as good or as quick at identifying opportunities as a technical people who can understand the whitepapers and look at the code themselves.

For example, some of the coins that have been going up in price recently are complete garbage and it's a matter of time before their technical limitations become apparent to non-technical people.

I think I have a pretty good idea about how easy/difficult it will be to scale different cryptocurrencies based on the algorithms they use. Many of the ones in the top 100 list right now are essentially impossible to scale beyond a certain point, eventually they're bound to hit a wall.

Most investors right now are just randomly moving their money between coins. They wait until issues start showing up and then move on to another random coin. This is very inefficient.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#147

Post by Jasper_ » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 10:08 PM UTC

manderson2080 wrote: post #131

Jasper_ wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

There's a penalty payment that each node puts up into escrow for each assignment of data, and if the data is not accurate in relation to all the other providers of that same data, the node will lose the payment. There will also likely be a small amount fo LINK required to start a node with enough reputation to gain assignments which would also increase the cost of a Sybil attack.

> There's a penalty payment that each node puts up into escrow for each assignment of data, and if the data is not accurate in relation to all the other providers of that same data, the node will lose the payment.

So, a prisoner's dilemma situation here? If one person objects, everyone loses their money? Who gets the payment? Are the coins permanently burned? If so, seems harsh in the face of accidents. If not, seems open to abuse if someone could be both the smart contract creator and a data provider. I create 100 data providers, and a smart contract, and when I detect someone new has joined my pool, cause them to lose their coins which are sent to me.

> There will also likely be a small amount of LINK required to start a node with enough reputation to gain assignments which would also increase the cost of a Sybil attack.

Ah, so an economic majority that successfully scams others and acquires a mass of tokens can use them to launch more data providers.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#148

Post by joosters » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

rrecuero wrote: post #53

0x4f3759df wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like you are moving the goalpost. edit: If UPS doesn't count then nothing is going to count.

Exactly, scalability is a moving target. You can't expect to match VISA transactions the first day

Some progress in eight years would be good, though!

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#149

Post by Jasper_ » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 10:11 PM UTC

cturner wrote: post #120

symlinkk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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).

So what does the blockchain add? Why can't this be a database set up by the consortium?

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#150

Post by tptacek » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 10:11 PM UTC

indigochill wrote: post #133

keithwhor wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re seeing everything just fine. Imagine you’ve spent your whole life investing millions of dollars in entrepreneurs. Building models and testing hypotheses with no real agency: you can’t control what the CEO does or the product the engineering team builds or the way they market the product. Your job is to provide returns for your LPs. That’s it. Now imagine, instead of spending thousands of hours interacting with…

Thanks. This is probably the most coherent pitch I've seen for tokens (and also helps me understand a little better why certain people are so attracted to them). I was of the opinion they were a pure ponzi scheme, but this gives me a somewhat better balanced understanding of what actual expectations underpin the speculation.

The most coherent pitch for tokens?