Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is Git a Block Chain?

domustower.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 55 posts

Re: Is Git a Block Chain?

#21

Post by JoshTriplett »

natrius wrote: post #15
rictic wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great idea, and some bright folks are working on it! http://ipfs.io/

I want to make sure people don't overlook this IPFS link as just a decentralized GitHub. IPFS is building a content-addressable web. Think about how BitTorrent magnet links work—it's a hash of the actual movie (or Linux distribution) you're trying to download, and using that hash, you can connect with all the people who've already downloaded it to get it from them. On a content-addressable web, pulling up the New Yor…

IPFS does look interesting, but how does it provide updateable references? What's the equivalent of "give me today's headlines", which is pointedly not content-addressible because you don't know the content yet?

Re: Is Git a Block Chain?

#22

Post by ejholmes »

ntonozzi wrote: post #7

Both git repositories and bitcoin are specialized Merkle trees. Merkle trees are incredibly useful and general; they are used in many kinds of verification, especially of large chunks of data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree

The power of the Merkle tree is pretty amazing. IPFS is a good example https://www.ipfs.com.

Re: Is Git a Block Chain?

#23

Post by natrius »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21
natrius wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to make sure people don't overlook this IPFS link as just a decentralized GitHub. IPFS is building a content-addressable web. Think about how BitTorrent magnet links work—it's a hash of the actual movie (or Linux distribution) you're trying to download, and using that hash, you can connect with all the people who've already downloaded it to get it from them. On a content-addressable web, pulling up the New Yor…

IPFS does look interesting, but how does it provide updateable references? What's the equivalent of "give me today's headlines", which is pointedly not content-addressible because you don't know the content yet?

I suspect that there's a way to identify the latest content built into IPFS, but if not, it's easy to build that on top of something like Ethereum. If you're new to Ethereum, it's a global, trustless, blockchain-based coordination platform—it gives us the ability to determine what "The New York Times" is, without having to trust someone else to tell you. The New York Times would have an Ethereum contract with storage space that only their private key can write to that would hold the hash of the latest state of the site. A site state would contain set of hashes that point to the day's articles and perhaps previous states of the paper.

In the very near future, the entire New York Times archives will be fetchable just by asking for it. Your computer will ask your neighbor for the front page for July 21, 1969, and they'll send it right over.

Re: Is Git a Block Chain?

#24

Post by nosir33 »

ejholmes wrote: post #22
ntonozzi wrote: post #7

Both git repositories and bitcoin are specialized Merkle trees. Merkle trees are incredibly useful and general; they are used in many kinds of verification, especially of large chunks of data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree

The power of the Merkle tree is pretty amazing. IPFS is a good example https://www.ipfs.com .

http://ipfs.io/

Re: Is Git a Block Chain?

#25

Post by jaekwon »

sadgit wrote: post #3

No, its not. Its just a chain. There's no block. The block in a blockchain is everything to do with distributed / trustless conscensus.

Specifically, the block is an optimization for more transaction throughput in a consensus system. Without blocks, consensus would take longer because every binary decision requires at least a couple rounds of communication amongst every "validator".

Re: Is Git a Block Chain?

#27

Post by petertodd »

ngoldbaum wrote: post #13
ntonozzi wrote: post #7

Both git repositories and bitcoin are specialized Merkle trees. Merkle trees are incredibly useful and general; they are used in many kinds of verification, especially of large chunks of data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree

I thought it was a directed acyclic graph. Care to share the distinction?

The terminology used in #bitcoin-wizards is to call it a merkelized dag, or merkle-dag.

Similarly, we also refer to "Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees", a way of hashing code originally proposed by Pieter Wuille and Russel O'connor(1) that will probably be added to Bitcoin's scripting system eventually.

Pretty much any data structure can have hash functions added to it to "merkelize" it, producing an authenticated data structure: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~amiller/gpads/

1) https://download.wpsoftware.net/bitcoin/wizards/2014-12-16.h...

Re: Is Git a Block Chain?

#28

Post by fit2rule »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21
natrius wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to make sure people don't overlook this IPFS link as just a decentralized GitHub. IPFS is building a content-addressable web. Think about how BitTorrent magnet links work—it's a hash of the actual movie (or Linux distribution) you're trying to download, and using that hash, you can connect with all the people who've already downloaded it to get it from them. On a content-addressable web, pulling up the New Yor…

IPFS does look interesting, but how does it provide updateable references? What's the equivalent of "give me today's headlines", which is pointedly not content-addressible because you don't know the content yet?

Name resolution is the answer - folks go to your /ipns/com.example.blog site, which you've updated with the new reference for your new content ..

Re: Is Git a Block Chain?

#29

Post by ejholmes »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #21
natrius wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to make sure people don't overlook this IPFS link as just a decentralized GitHub. IPFS is building a content-addressable web. Think about how BitTorrent magnet links work—it's a hash of the actual movie (or Linux distribution) you're trying to download, and using that hash, you can connect with all the people who've already downloaded it to get it from them. On a content-addressable web, pulling up the New Yor…

IPFS does look interesting, but how does it provide updateable references? What's the equivalent of "give me today's headlines", which is pointedly not content-addressible because you don't know the content yet?

I think that's what ipns is for. Basically synonymous with git refs; a link to a hash.

Re: Is Git a Block Chain?

#30

Post by chriscool »

fit2rule wrote: post #28
JoshTriplett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS does look interesting, but how does it provide updateable references? What's the equivalent of "give me today's headlines", which is pointedly not content-addressible because you don't know the content yet?

Name resolution is the answer - folks go to your /ipns/com.example.blog site, which you've updated with the new reference for your new content ..

There is some documentation about IPNS here:

https://github.com/ipfs/examples/tree/master/examples/ipns

Post reply on HN