Building for the Blockchain • Hacker News Board

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#181

Post by EGreg » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 11:18 PM UTC

joosters wrote: post #159

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…

Ripple is not trustless, so the blockchain part of it is moot. Since you have to trust Ripple (because they have full control), you might as well let them store the blockchain data on their own centrally controlled database.

What are you talking about? What exactly can Ripple do on its own network that you have to trust t not to do?

And anyway it's open source software! Why don't you go download the XRP consensus protocol from their github repo and try it. Ripple's servers won't even be part of the network.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#182

Post by fragsworth » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 11:28 PM UTC

davesque wrote: post #162

A blockchain ensures that some sequence of agreements was made in a way that everyone can trust. If everyone keeps their secret keys secure and solely in their possession, then no activity can be forged on the network by any significant likelihood. Anywhere this concept has value, a blockchain has value. That's all there is to it. The rest is fairy dust and noise. I don't really follow a lot of the discussion in this…

It seems like in most cases, the tokens are being used as a way for the developers to get funding to implement their project without the bureaucracy and costs of doing a real IPO.

That would be fine on its own, but they're almost all pretending this is not the reason for it, and that the token is necessary. This is an obvious lie in nearly every case when you dig into the details. Nearly every dapp that has its own token can be cloned to use Ether without any detriment to the product.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#183

Post by msla » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 11:30 PM UTC

davesque wrote: post #162

A blockchain ensures that some sequence of agreements was made in a way that everyone can trust. If everyone keeps their secret keys secure and solely in their possession, then no activity can be forged on the network by any significant likelihood. Anywhere this concept has value, a blockchain has value. That's all there is to it. The rest is fairy dust and noise. I don't really follow a lot of the discussion in this…

> In any other context in technology, "fat" anything is considered bad. Technologies are supposed to be "thin", simple, efficient, and composable.

I'd rather use a fat client than a thin one:

Thin client: Primarily just a display. No local processing, or effectively none. Controlled from outside.

Fat client: A processor with a display attached. Nontrivial local processing. Controlled by me.

Maybe fat clients are inefficient. Maybe I'm not thinking right. I still want control.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#184

Post by xorcist » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 11:31 PM UTC

tonyjstark wrote: post #137

ericb wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Only if the community does not decide to fork and everyone jumps to the fork like with The DAO. Then maybe you can look up everything in the old branch of your chain but nobody cares...

If any blockchain could be regarded as the truth at any time, why bother with a blockchain at all? Just let a trusted third party run a database. Or vote on its integrity if you wish to distribute trust.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#185

Post by tyrust » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 11:35 PM UTC

vvanders wrote: post #178

eximius wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with anything you said. But, separately, if you asked me if I wanted to use something to store/transmit value that was only reliable 99.9999999% of the time, I would immediately say no. At Visa scale, that means 15 transactions a day are incorrect - not delayed, just straight up incorrect. Maybe that already happens and we just don't hear about it because they can fix it without any one noticing or i…

15 transactions a day? I'm guessing that number is in the thousands, easily. Manual input at restaurants alone should hit that threshold. As you correctly pointed out, reversing the transaction is very low friction, which is something I've not yet seen presented in any blockchain based solution.

Visa claims to handle 150 million transactions a day [0].

(150 * 10^6) * (1 - .999999999) =~ 0.15

[0] - https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/...

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#186

Post by platz » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 11:35 PM UTC

meri_dian wrote: post #168

davesque wrote: post #162

A blockchain ensures that some sequence of agreements was made in a way that everyone can trust. If everyone keeps their secret keys secure and solely in their possession, then no activity can be forged on the network by any significant likelihood. Anywhere this concept has value, a blockchain has value. That's all there is to it. The rest is fairy dust and noise. I don't really follow a lot of the discussion in this…

Well said. Wealth is built through control, while a distributed ledger rejects control by design. Now distributed ledgers have utility, but that does not necessarily mean they will create business value for entrepreneurs and investors. It's almost like how regulation has value in society, but regulation is decidedly not profitable and businesses usually reject it.

> distributed ledger rejects control by design

Assuming you convince 1) 100,000 miners your blockchain has value, such that 2) the distribution of control is spread out among those miners uniformly. Both of which is a pretty big assumptions.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#187

Post by Terr_ » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 11:36 PM UTC

davesque wrote: post #162

A blockchain ensures that some sequence of agreements was made in a way that everyone can trust. If everyone keeps their secret keys secure and solely in their possession, then no activity can be forged on the network by any significant likelihood. Anywhere this concept has value, a blockchain has value. That's all there is to it. The rest is fairy dust and noise. I don't really follow a lot of the discussion in this…

> A blockchain ensures that some sequence of agreements was made in a way that everyone can trust. [...] The rest is fairy dust and noise.

Amen. "Blockchain" is today's fad just like the "nanotech" mania of yesteryear. That doesn't mean there aren't advances and opportunities, but it feels like 90% of the people promoting it can't even give a high-level explanation of why it's a good fit for their use-case.

> For example, why would be want a "fat" protocol?

This may seem weird, but bear with me: I think this is like people talking about intellectual property (copyrights, patents, franchises, etc.) The underlying idea is that you can create some core framework which everyone wants to use (or can't avoid) and that therefore you can collect rent (or at least sew up an incredible starter bonus) making it more consequential than the individual pieces.

The current internet is (perhaps thankfully) a contrast, where nobody (AFAK) is making big bucks off of TCP-IP/HTML/Browser licensing fees.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#188

Post by xorcist » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 11:38 PM UTC

cturner wrote: post #140

kang wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, decentralized system will be always slower than centralized one. Its a good thing its slow. 1 hour blocks are even safer (and effectively we do convert blocktime to an hour by waiting for 6 confirmations). So no, you can't "do" more, only be more noisy.

> Technically, decentralized system will be > always slower than centralized one. This is not a reasonable response to the parent: bitcoin is significantly slower than other systems of its class. Ethereum is an equivalent system and faster. (Others are much faster still) There are application where speed matters. For example, to sort things out while all the lawyers are in a room.

Ethereum slowed to a crawl as soon as people started trading kittens on it. And I remember seeing transaction fees in the hundreds of dollars when popular ICOs were happening. Which probably didn't help you if you were stuck on one of the exchanges which simply turned Ethereum processing off in times of high load.

Not inspiring confidence in the statement that it is faster than other systems. Compared to Bitcoin it is off by a constant factor, and constant factors aren't really what we're interested in here.

Storing an economy in a fully replicated global ledger has its limitations, there's no getting around that.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#189

Post by ThomPete » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 11:39 PM UTC

The negativity in this thread reminds me of the internet in the early nineties.

If someone had said that one day there will be a company that does billions by allowing people to fundamentally share their cat pictures and send each other happy birthday messages people would have laughed their asses off.

The blockchain can be seen as a giant immutable feed. Make of that what you will.

Re: Building for the Blockchain

#190

Post by ruiquelhas » Tue, Jan 09, 2018, 11:41 PM UTC

qyv wrote: post #72

rrecuero wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main benefit of blockchain is that it is trustless and censorship-resistant. You don't need to trust any business entities. You can transact with someone in a zero trust environment on the other side of the world

Just because you use a blockchain doesn't make your implementation trustless, nor censorship resistant.

Actually, according to the original definition - https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/92ee8d9a99... - it does, since blockchain is bitcoin (and vice-versa), and as far as anyone can tell, currently it is indeed trustless and censorship resistant.

The problem is that some people adopted blockchain as some kind of weird gimmick to wrap extraordinary claims such as the ones in the original post and promote scams (altcoins, appcoins, whatever).