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LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

blog.documentfoundation.org

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Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#121

Post by kuramitropolis »

SCdF wrote: post #54
web3isgoing wrote: post #18

You would think a message board called "hacker news" would be more open to blue sky thinking. Zero knowledge proofs and a tamper proof ledger of timestamped cryptographic signatures could open up new use cases that are different than relying on central authorities. One idea, document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for thi…

idk man, I was open minded on cryptocurrency backed blockchains for a decade, I'm kind of over it now. Everything you're describing could be done with a git repo (also a cryptographically signed tamperproof ledger), 10x faster and with 1000x less baggage of a deeply scummy industry behind it. The core problem to solve with your idea is proving that a piece of data that represents someone electronically (eg a public k…

>Keybase did it by not truly doing it,

And got effectively assassinated for it.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#122

Post by kuramitropolis »

criddell wrote: post #108
brabel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ideas like you suggest have been discussed on this forum uncountably many times. Blockchains in general as well, for well over 10 years now. This stuff may look new and revolutionary to some, but if you've been here long enough you've already seen that stuff go through the hype cycle[1] and it has NOT emerged, at least so far, at the end of that curve looking good. I am currently working on some stuff where blockchai…

I've started to look at blockchains as a solution in search of a problem.

So was the Internet during the dotcom boom. And now the Internet is part of the problem. The Gartner cycle is an epicycle.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#123

Post by maccard »

emptysongglass wrote: post #102
maccard wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has use anywhere a verified supply chain is needed. Sure, in the same way that a hammer can be used for a screw, or an HGV can be used for commuting to work - i.e. it _will_ do the job, but there were plenty of other alternatives available. The thing that a blockchain does is a _decentralised_ verifiable supply chain. A verifiable supply chain has existed since we've been doing digital signatures, and RSA has exist…

You may think you're being well meaning but you aren't Maersk and can't speak for them. Maersk believes it's an advantage to them to use a blockchain. Maybe we ought to ask Maersk why they chose it. Everything I read in this thread is dripping with vehemence, hate, ridicule, or certitude (your I haven't seen a demonstrable use case in 15 years). If the kind of echo chamber you want to build is the one where you've wo…

I don't think your reading of my comment is fair at all. I think I was perfectly reasonable and avoided using words like culty and repressive. Instead of talking about the issues youve gone straight for a personal attack.

You're right, I can't speak for maersk, but given this is a pseudonymous internet forum where in this thread they are touted as legitimising the tech, I think it's fair game to speculate based on knowledge.

> When I try and point out one useful thing is a blockchain, oh that thing is a different kind of blockchain.

Meanwhile, everytime I ask for a problem that a blockchain solves, I get back problems that are better solved _without_ blockchains, or solutions that don't actually solve the problem in the first place.

I'm open to having my mind changed, I really am (it's happened many times on this forum), so please, feel free to share some of the problems that are being solved.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#124

Post by web3isgoing »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #82
web3isgoing wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vitalik, or maybe a charitable non profit organization, signs two PDFs: one says "our new public key is X" and the other says "our new public key is Y." Both of these documents verify correctly, but how do you know which is the latest? One approach is to use Twitter as your append-only timestamped ledger, and broadcast a link to the latest file on IPFS. Another is to build a new centralized service and promise it is…

How about he doesn't sign the PDF that is wrong? If you're imagining that this is part of some key rotation procedure, what about signing a document that says "until April 20th, 2022, 0:00 UTC our public key is X"? And then if the central source gets hacked, people will be suspicious of the PDF for a few hours, but nobody will do anything disastrous. Edit: you can also add chaining to the documents themselves: "until…

In this example it is key rotation, but you do not know when your key will expire, so you cannot put that in the message. Imagine you have a key, and later realize it may or may not be compromised, so you decide to rotate.

You can be in the habit of writing "I signed this message at date K" but if any of your old keys are compromised, the hacker can sign a new message with today's date to spoof a new rotation event. Without ordering these events by time, you cannot know which is the newest.

One solution is to have a log showing the timestamped key rotations. A company can store everybody's timestamped key rotations on a sqlite database and promise it won't ever be modified, or you can put these state changes in a distributed ledger. If the value of the key rotation events outweighs the cost of submitting transactions to the ledger, it may be worth it. This is unrealistic with Eth L1 but more realistic in something like a recursive zk rollup on L2.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#125

Post by web3isgoing »

drdrek wrote: post #66
web3isgoing wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the negative comments on this thread read like knee-jerk reactions. I'd wager that many of them see blockchain as Bitcoin, and they are not cognisant of newer developments like zero knowledge proofs, verifiable computation, and smart contracts running on a zk rollup.

Zero knowledge proofs have nothing to do with blockchain, verifiable computation has nothing to do with blockchain. You can use Zero Knowledge proof with many things, one of them is blockchain. This inverses the relation of Zero knowledge proof and Blockchain, Its like saying supply chains are an advancement of blockchain. Just because you can do something (poorly) with blockchain does not make it part of blockchain.…

ZK is old tech but succinct, non-interactive and general purpose ZK is not. Look at SNARK and STARK, and every other research and advancement in the last 5 years. Funded by blockchain, developed for blockchain, with hash functions optimized for use in a blockchain. This modern form of ZK underpins most new blockchain bridges, light clients, and scalability solutions.

These new ZK proofs are much different than anything in the last decades, and can be used without a blockchain. But they also do fit elegantly within the context of blockchains, like having a ZKP verifier running on EVM instead of a single website like keybase.io, to further reduce points of centralization.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#126

Post by web3isgoing »

hiq wrote: post #33
web3isgoing wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for this, and probably also a content hash of the document so that we can be sure we are verifying the correct PDF. He can broadcast this on Twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger, and it is centrally owned, and it's not a great storage mechanism for this system t…

> He can broadcast this on Twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger, and it is centrally owned, and it's not a great storage mechanism for this system to scale to thousands or millions of signatures. Public blockchains[0] are not known to scale either. I can open a Twitter account for free and publish a signature right now, and do it on several other platforms at the same time to have some kind of re…

I don't think redundancy is a clean solve. It might give more confidence to the message time stamp to see the same message replicated across 10 different websites, but this does not scale. Eventually if you do aim for a distributed database you end up down the path of consensus mechanisms and blockchains.

What I outlined is unlikely to ever be realistic on a L1, but recursive zk rollups that post proofs to L1 do scale very well and have strong security and tamper-proof guarantees.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#127

Post by criddell »

kuramitropolis wrote: post #122
criddell wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've started to look at blockchains as a solution in search of a problem.

So was the Internet during the dotcom boom. And now the Internet is part of the problem. The Gartner cycle is an epicycle.

I don't quite get what you mean. The internet was designed and used to connect networks of computers. I started using it for email, gopher, and ftp in 1989 but it was 20 years old at that point.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#128

Post by web3isgoing »

chriswarbo wrote: post #67
web3isgoing wrote: post #18

You would think a message board called "hacker news" would be more open to blue sky thinking. Zero knowledge proofs and a tamper proof ledger of timestamped cryptographic signatures could open up new use cases that are different than relying on central authorities. One idea, document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for thi…

Why introduce a ledger into such a system? There's no need for global consensus on a total ordering of events. Just use a DHT, like we've had for decades.

As I understand, DHT is vulnerable to sybil and eclipse attacks, and not really suited to the task of creating a tamper proof log. If the log and timestamping is not tamper proof, key rotations can be spoofed. Users in the network may need to come to consensus about the ordering of events, such as if signed documents A and B are order dependent. See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33639578

Simpler than DHT is just a server hosted in the US somewhere, like what keybase.io is doing, but that goes against my goal of decentralization.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#129

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

emptysongglass wrote: post #102
maccard wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has use anywhere a verified supply chain is needed. Sure, in the same way that a hammer can be used for a screw, or an HGV can be used for commuting to work - i.e. it _will_ do the job, but there were plenty of other alternatives available. The thing that a blockchain does is a _decentralised_ verifiable supply chain. A verifiable supply chain has existed since we've been doing digital signatures, and RSA has exist…

You may think you're being well meaning but you aren't Maersk and can't speak for them. Maersk believes it's an advantage to them to use a blockchain. Maybe we ought to ask Maersk why they chose it. Everything I read in this thread is dripping with vehemence, hate, ridicule, or certitude (your I haven't seen a demonstrable use case in 15 years). If the kind of echo chamber you want to build is the one where you've wo…

> dripping with vehemence, hate, ridicule, or certitude (your I haven't seen a demonstrable use case in 15 years).

> spirit of curiosity

I'm curious: what useful application of the blockchain have we seen in the past 15 years (outside of cryptocurrencies whose usefulness is apparently largely confined to pyramid schemes and paying for crimes)?

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#130

Post by web3isgoing »

SCdF wrote: post #54
web3isgoing wrote: post #18

You would think a message board called "hacker news" would be more open to blue sky thinking. Zero knowledge proofs and a tamper proof ledger of timestamped cryptographic signatures could open up new use cases that are different than relying on central authorities. One idea, document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for thi…

idk man, I was open minded on cryptocurrency backed blockchains for a decade, I'm kind of over it now. Everything you're describing could be done with a git repo (also a cryptographically signed tamperproof ledger), 10x faster and with 1000x less baggage of a deeply scummy industry behind it. The core problem to solve with your idea is proving that a piece of data that represents someone electronically (eg a public k…

The problem I outline is not about a physical to digital link. It is essentially about decentralization and using a tamper proof append-only log to store key events and signatures.

Storing commits on GitHub is neither of those things; data is owned by a single company in the US, and previously published logs can be deleted to recreate a false history.

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