Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform • Hacker News Board

Re: Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform

#141

Post by filoleg » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 6:18 PM UTC

rzzzt wrote: post #114

filoleg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's a fine name, better than most, because it's a normal English word that says exactly what it does / what it's for Just because the name says exactly what the product does and what it's for, that doesn't automatically mean it is good. In fact, imo it is bad in a lot of cases. Do you think Instagram would have gotten as popular if it was named FlexGallery, or if Nextdoor was named SpreadRumorsActVaguelyRa…

FlexGallery could work... the rest are Java class names.

Actually agreed about FlexGallery, now that I am thinking about it.

As for the rest, they just miss [...]Factory and [...]Controller prefixes, and then they truly would become typical Java classes.

Re: Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform

#142

Post by r3trohack3r » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 9:52 PM UTC

p4bl0 wrote: post #138

r3trohack3r wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the nitpick! Words do matter. I'll share my definition of these terms, for me they have very precise definitions: A merkle tree is a specific data structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree > In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every "leaf" (node) is labelled with the cryptographic hash of a data block, and every node that is not a leaf (called a…

> If you have hashes co-located with data, and data spread throughout the chain, it is not a merkle tree. Yes that's the theoretical structure but in practice its usage almost always implies data co-located with the intermediate hashes, if only because it's used to validate the integrity of a tree of files and directory and it's easier to manipulate a single structure with all the information. That's how it's done in…

> Yes, but that's just a particular kind of tree, where each node only has one child.

Yes!

I’m personally building a SSB data structure that forks into a tree, forking to allow writes from each new writer, to allow multi-device writes! It is a multi-writer append database that behaves like a CRDT.

It’s a blocktree, not a blockchain. Which is also expressable as a merkledag.

Re: Scuttlebutt social network: a decentralised platform

#143

Post by r3trohack3r » Sun, Feb 25, 2024, 9:56 PM UTC

p4bl0 wrote: post #136

r3trohack3r wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate the nitpick! Words do matter. I'll share my definition of these terms, for me they have very precise definitions: A merkle tree is a specific data structure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree > In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every "leaf" (node) is labelled with the cryptographic hash of a data block, and every node that is not a leaf (called a…

> The network reaches consensus on the state of any particular chain by validating the signatures Ok I can see that. It's the distributed consensus problem in a centralized setting. It still feels strange to call that a blockchain but maybe it can be qualified like "centralized blockchain" (which questions the need for such a structure to begin with).

> "centralized blockchain" (which questions the need for such a structure to begin with).

I’ve seen centralized blockchains used to great effect in ledger contexts where the chain is not synced, but references (hashes) of the chain are shared externally (I.e. transaction ids).

If an external auditor has a set of transaction ids that have been communicated externally, they can later audit the centralized chain and prove it has not been tampered with without having to have the full log of blocks.