The choice of font and lack of contrast make this nearly unreadable for me...
The text is #0 on a #F background for me?
I was reading on Android. Perhaps the colors are different there.
Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?
181–190 of 204 posts
Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also surrounded by a ton of cargo cultism, poorly considered engineering, people who don't understand the math but claim to be gurus, and strange parasitic political views. So it's just your typical programming sub-field? (Alan Kay would say: "Field.")
Pessimistically yes, but in my opinion its problems are magnified. In part because bitcoin is a technology that so many people ascribe political superpowers to. This brings in a lot of people that normally don't push deeply into a high-complexity tech field.
Some would say that the "wisdom of the crowd" and startups are things that so many people ascribed special superpowers to, it brought in a lot of people that normally wouldn't push deeply into a high-complexity tech field.
Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?
#183I work in distributed systems, and I consider blockchain very interesting. It's so interesting I click on a lot of links on Hacker News, and sometimes I take an afternoon on a weekend or vacation to read through some of the papers. I just have a well-paying job and I don't see any opportunities lucrative enough for me to jump away. Why? Bitcoin is an experiment. Reading through the paper, Bitcoin does not scale to ge…
>Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain; instead of someone paying me to implement a blockchain and then going and finding a use for it.
That would require those who are arguing for "blockchain technology" to admit that they are Bitcoin poor and would rather talk than trade.
Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pessimistically yes, but in my opinion its problems are magnified. In part because bitcoin is a technology that so many people ascribe political superpowers to. This brings in a lot of people that normally don't push deeply into a high-complexity tech field.
Some would say that the "wisdom of the crowd" and startups are things that so many people ascribed special superpowers to, it brought in a lot of people that normally wouldn't push deeply into a high-complexity tech field.
That's cool, but how is it relevant?
Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look up "Lightning Network". This is a solved problem. You can build on top of bitcoin to scale basically as large as you want, trustlessly. The software is being developed as we speak.
Lighting network boosts the number of transactions between two people, but you need to have 'banks' to make it efficient. And even then a minimum of 2 transactions per month * 7 billion people is still a lot of data. https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...
Yes, I'm aware of these limitations. Neither of them refute my point, which is that you can trustlessly scale bitcoin basically as much as you want. Maybe you have "banks" (highly connected nodes), but it's still trustless, unlike with real banks.
Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lighting network boosts the number of transactions between two people, but you need to have 'banks' to make it efficient. And even then a minimum of 2 transactions per month * 7 billion people is still a lot of data. https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...
Yes, I'm aware of these limitations. Neither of them refute my point, which is that you can trustlessly scale bitcoin basically as much as you want. Maybe you have "banks" (highly connected nodes), but it's still trustless, unlike with real banks.
> Neither of them refute my point, which is that you can trustlessly scale bitcoin basically as much as you want.
This is unsupported. LN is a research project, not a production-ready payment system. It has plenty of limitations (trustlessness is a huge limitation), and the topology of the network doesn’t match that of a real economy (routes to fellow consumers are practically useless, since everyone wants to pay merchants). There’s plenty of work left before LN can scale properly, if it ever manages to (again, trustlessness for both senders and receivers is setting the bar as high as it can possibly go).
Scalability is secondondary for LN, trustlessness is primary. Due to this choice I predict difficulty in scaling sufficiently.
Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Proof-of-work is simply not sustainable (energy-wise), IMO, for the foundation of a global system. What have you found that is cheaper to proof-of-work that works on a global system?[1] [1] "Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work" http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
Centralized authority. With the obvious tradeoffs. :-/ Maybe there's a happy medium where trustworthiness of central authorities is appropriately distributed, but common operations are quicker and less wasteful.
> Maybe there's a happy medium where trustworthiness of central authorities is appropriately distributed, but common operations are quicker and less wasteful.
I’m working on this. It’s an implementation of a protocol called Stroem, which uses payment channels to transfer bitcoins from consumers to so-called issuers, who issue payments in exchange which consumers then send to merchants. Then merchants collect these off-chain payments from issuers, and redeem them into bitcoins on the blockchain when they wish.
This system compromises with the security of the payment receivers only (the merchants). Everything is trustlessness for the payment sender/consumer, while merchants need to trust issuers. But, if desired, the merchant-issuer trust can be reduced to almost nothing by the merchant redeeming very often (at the cost of higher fees).
And, importantly, the open nature of the protocol will ensure competition between issuers, since anyone can join the network.
Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a complete strawman. There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything .
> There is very little overlap between cryptocurrency enthusiasts and those who think blockchain technology will take over everything. Do you really believe that? Because from the outside, it seems that the only people talking about "blockchain technology" are those who have a significant amount of money invested in it. This article is a blockchain banking service saying, "hey, other people should use this solve-all…
Yes, I really believe that.
The people who are into "blockchain banking" are not actually into cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is about decentralised, trustless, permissionless, peer-to-peer networks. "Blockchain all the things" is decidedly not.
I acknowledge that this can be hard to see from the outside.
Edit: And at risk of "no true Scotsman"... the people talking about "blockchain technology" are not cryptocurrency enthusiasts.
Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bitcoin as money has all the worst properties of both credit cards (traceable, non-anonymous) and cash (irreversible, theft-prone).
It isn't intrinsically theft prone, the UI around using it is just not up to snuff yet. Credit cards, on the other hand, are intrinsically theft prone. They are a pull architecture. Every time you use your credit card, the store takes money from you. This is patently absurd, and the only reasonable definition of 'theft prone'. Bitcoin is a push architecture. You can never take my bitcoin, I can only send you bitcoin.…
> Every time you use your credit card, the store takes money from you.
No, precisely no credit cards work that way. That's why they're called credit cards.
Re: Why aren’t distributed systems engineers working on blockchain technology?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evironmental efficiently solving a problem I don't have is still inefficient. I still can't think of a mojor user for proof of work in a destributed system. I have trouble thinking of a distributed system that someone would pay for to not be centrally trusted, usually by the benefactor of employment? We always hear what a great solution blockchain is. Even if that's true, I never hear the actual problem it solves. Su…
Any time you require 1) a distributed database 2) in the face of adversarial participants, which truthfully, is less common than the blockchain obsessives would think. A centralized organization (.com or .gov) that can achieve consensus amongst participants can do just fine with Postgres and a REST API. Adversarial participants are common, but typically that's solved with a third-party overseer that administers the s…
When cash was gold and/or silver the central authority might do some minting of coin but you did not need to trust them with a ledger or not to print huge amounts of paper currency. Gold and silver were currency for thousands of years. Soon all the people who lived under that system will be dead. It will be interesting what the system of global fiat will bring in the future.