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AutoDapp: a proposal to decentralize existing web apps

raymondcheng.net

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Re: AutoDapp: a proposal to decentralize existing web apps

#11

Post by auston »

viraptor wrote: post #3

So I'm not familiar with the dapp apps internals like the ones described in the article. Does anyone have a quick summary of: How do you do user authentication and other "secret data" cases if the data is visible to everyone? Let's say there's an app with user-configurable webhooks which need to be used by the server, but shouldn't be announced to everyone.

Cofounder of QuikNode.io here - this is kind of a “it depends” question/answer. What chain are you using? Ethereum? Bitcoin? EOS?

At a high level you could encrypt the data (URL) you want to send the webhook to, then (let’s say you’re using Ethereum) you could subscribe to an event & make sure you have the decryption key there to decrypt the URL & actually forward on the webhook.

In terms of the user auth question, you can use signed requests or just signatures in general - I love the localcryptos.com implementation of user login, for instance.

Happy to answer more questions like this, just email me: auston@quiknode

Re: AutoDapp: a proposal to decentralize existing web apps

#14

Post by addisonj »

q3k wrote: post #9
addisonj wrote: post #8

Hrm.. interesting idea! The tl:dr; appears to be "we built a blockchain based query logger" where essentially the consensus appears to just be that it is valid SQL, and defines an ordering of the statements. Then once everyone agrees to apply the change, then it is applied... With (AFAICT) no interaction with the DB during the consensus process? This seems to be a bit naive of features like locks and transactions tha…

This is naive of any real-world, large scale use of RDBMS systems. Not to mention any actually distributed storage systems.

Agreed. You aren't going to get this to work with Wikipedia. But I could see some utility on the small scale (if it weren't easy to break with conflicts). A Discourse install for local discussion in an oppressive regime run across a few hundred commodity computers could be pretty hard to shut down and reasonable to have work for 50k people, the weakness here is that one bad actor could disrupt it just by flooding it with valid but conflicting writes (not to mention being able to just issue deletes against all the state if all actors are treated equally)

Re: AutoDapp: a proposal to decentralize existing web apps

#15

Post by verdverm »

Taek wrote: post #6

"For the purposes of this blog, we will narrowly define blockchains as a Byzantine-fault tolerant consensus protocol" I don't think this is a useful definition. Blockchains are about trust and control, not Byzantine fault tolerance.

And they seem to be doing poorly on the trust element. My lack of trust in the controlling entities is why I left the space.

Bitcoin is more centralized ( via the mining cartel) than the existing banking system. The wealth gap is greater in crypto than the analog world too.

Re: AutoDapp: a proposal to decentralize existing web apps

#16

Post by verdverm »

CJefferson wrote: post #13

One thing I was trying to find. Is it possible to completely erase things from history? Because if not, the first time someone uploads something illegal to your decentralized wikipedia and it gets into the block chain, you are in trouble.

I have yet to see this issue addressed in a meaningful way.

Re: AutoDapp: a proposal to decentralize existing web apps

#17

Post by trevyn »

CJefferson wrote: post #13

One thing I was trying to find. Is it possible to completely erase things from history? Because if not, the first time someone uploads something illegal to your decentralized wikipedia and it gets into the block chain, you are in trouble.

How does Bitcoin handle this?

Re: AutoDapp: a proposal to decentralize existing web apps

#18

Post by iwalton3 »

CJefferson wrote: post #13

One thing I was trying to find. Is it possible to completely erase things from history? Because if not, the first time someone uploads something illegal to your decentralized wikipedia and it gets into the block chain, you are in trouble.

This is difficult to handle without some centralized authority. One example I can think of is Aether [1], which has a non-decentralized blacklist for illegal content [2] that they can use to handle these instances.

It could also be possible to broadcast some kind of signed take-down message that could be propagated through all of the nodes. If I remember right, Aether said that the centrally hosted json file was needed for legal compliance though.

[1] https://getaether.net/ [2] https://static.getaether.net/Badlist/Latest/badlist.json

Re: AutoDapp: a proposal to decentralize existing web apps

#19

Post by dboreham »

trevyn wrote: post #17
CJefferson wrote: post #13

One thing I was trying to find. Is it possible to completely erase things from history? Because if not, the first time someone uploads something illegal to your decentralized wikipedia and it gets into the block chain, you are in trouble.

How does Bitcoin handle this?

It doesn't.

Re: AutoDapp: a proposal to decentralize existing web apps

#20

Post by theK »

verdverm wrote: post #16
CJefferson wrote: post #13

One thing I was trying to find. Is it possible to completely erase things from history? Because if not, the first time someone uploads something illegal to your decentralized wikipedia and it gets into the block chain, you are in trouble.

I have yet to see this issue addressed in a meaningful way.

I am very curious about this ideology.

The whole world seems to see indelibility of data as a problem in this context. Yet immutability is seen as a generally good thing for a lot of other software cases. Further we cannot manipulate past events and there even is something about repeating history when you don’t know it.

So why would we really want to delete past data? From this standpoint wouldn’t deleting data be similar to trying to cover up the past? Sure we might also try to label it “humankind’s childish try to assert itself over the unstoppable arrow of time” but that is just too Freudian to me.

Is there some big idea I’m missing that explains the favoring of the “mutable past” view?

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