431–440 of 576 posts
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Hacking around distributed hash table open source software gave me the utmost respect for the people who came up with this stuff. Crypto currencies owe a lot of their successes to the pioneers behind technologies that also power bit torrent.
It's been said that git, bittorrent, and proof-of-work were the three necessary prerequisites for the discovery of blockchains.
- Patricia-Merkle Trees proven in DC++
- DHT proven in eMule Kademlia
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It was good design to decouple the transfer protocol from the search protocol, to allow different technologies to be explored, but in practice people ended up relying on the "good enough" solution of using the web for search. Setting the precedent that media companies can seize domain names and force ISPs to block access to search engines if they don't like some of the search results (while ruining the lives of the p…
Can it be solved with IPFS-based trackers?
A few years ago I was very interested in IPFS but once I learned about the limitations it was pretty much not suitable for me. If you really insist on using IPFS then your best bet would be to have a central tracker host an IPNS based site and publish its database index as a series of json files. The javascript client will then have to query the index on its own in the browser.
The alternative would be to download the entire database and create a local index. In theory that's not a bad idea but over time your database will grow to several gigabytes. That's not comparable to just going to whatever site exist today and submitting a search term but it could be highly resilient.
The fundamental problem is that untrusted nodes can't provide search services. It's possible that they end up redirecting you to a fake listing. Blockchain style consensus doesn't work for something that requires responses immediately like a search engine.
Also bittorrent trackers are slightly more complicated than just a file store
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Can it be solved with IPFS-based trackers?
IPFS has an incentivization problem just like torrents. The main reward for torrent uploaders is fame, would that translate well in IPFS?
I make P2P tools too. [0] Let me tell you this: Bittorrent is one of the few things in the space that actually ... works. It works not in the sense that there is a white paper that should work. Not in the sense that there are a few company-made swarms hosted on industrial servers that keep everyone up and alive, so that the thing gives the impression the 'P2P' network does work. Not in the sense that there is a very-…
I'm confident Bitcoin was based on Bittorrent, there's a lot of overlap. And I feel like it has a lot of the benefits. The main problem with Bitcoin is that it's not purely decentralized (big companies can throw calculating power at it and sway decisions / dominate) and really, really expensive to run.
Bitcoin is kinda like San Francisco. They decided to stick with the current block size and that made any use case other than buying bitcoin to speculate very expensive.
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This is exactly the problem with all cryptocurrency currently. It’s a massive user experience issue, in the sense that users have to experience the technical bullshit of how the currencies work, completely missing the brilliant part of real money: it just works. I hand people money, they give me things. I swipe my credit card, I get things. I can’t remember who aid it originally, but there’s a great test you can give…
It has been a few years, and despite a few attempts, I still don't really understand bitcoin. Yes yes ledgers and proof of work and yada yada, but I still don't know what I would need to do to buy something with bitcoin right now. As I understand I need to do something that's pretty much exactly like opening a bank account, but transactions take forever, they cost money, and the currency is not accepted by any busine…
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Why couldn't you do a wire transfer?
Before 2009, export of RMB was completely prohibited. Afterwards, some restrictions were lifted, but AIUI they do not apply to J. Random Laowai.
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Aether looks cool, but why do you provide only Snap builds on Linux? I wanted to try Aether, but I avoid Snap as much as possible
We’re actually just in the middle of our move off Snap. Do subscribe to the mailing list and I can send an update once that’s out.
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It is not expected to happen in the foreseeable future, MD5 for instance hasn't broken in a second pre-image way, more than a decade after it was known to be weak. This class of attacks is MUCH harder to construct against a cryptographic hash.
Then, why did BitTorrent work on such a costly change if it's not vulnerable against it?
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> It's a tool that doesn't pitch that it's a P2P tool - it doesn't try to convince you with sob stories in how using P2P helps fight against the big bad evil web. Instead, you use it because it's genuinely the best at what it does: it being P2P is not a selling point, it's just how it happens to work, and that is exactly what it should be. This should be something that every creator who markets or sells products shou…
This is exactly the problem with all cryptocurrency currently. It’s a massive user experience issue, in the sense that users have to experience the technical bullshit of how the currencies work, completely missing the brilliant part of real money: it just works. I hand people money, they give me things. I swipe my credit card, I get things. I can’t remember who aid it originally, but there’s a great test you can give…
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> Does this hypothetical situation you describe exist anywhere outside of the hypothetical situation posited by a character in a Neal Stephenson novel? That indeed is a bunch of real situations that have happened to me in 2014-2015 and some of that is still a thing. Check your privileges, sweet summer child. Like seriously — for the first 30 years of my life it was outright illegal to have a bank account in a foreign…
> Check your privileges, sweet summer child. Please don't do this here. It is needlessly condescending and insulting..
"Does this hypothetical situation you describe exist anywhere outside of the hypothetical situation posited by a character in a Neal Stephenson novel"