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

Blockchain-Flavored WASI

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 42 posts

Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI

#31

Post by matthewbauer »

MadSudaca wrote: post #29

The level of negativity received by this article only because it’s related to blockchain is almost comical. More so for the fact that the name of the aggregator includes the name “Hacker”.

Haven’t blockchains become tools of big banks and scam artists nowadays? No part of that is the same as hacker to me at least.

Especially when this is a proposal not a real product, I think it’s very appropriate to tell Oasis Labs this is a dumb idea. At least from a technical perspective, maybe not a scam artist one.

Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI

#32

Post by pdpi »

fb03 wrote: post #27
matthewbauer wrote: post #25

Putting an experimental systems interface in an immutable blockchain seems like a bad idea. Why not just use linux x86 or Emscripten asm.js or even JVM? That wouldn’t get you as many HN hype points I guess.

I am still failing to find the reason why they are trying to put 'blockchain' together with everything else these days. It is exquisite for ledger/proof-of-work systems, but not much else. Sounds like they're randomly taking guesses at what fits well with what, and the building upon.

I don't know much about _this_ particular project, but "wasm + blockchain" is not that silly an idea.

The ethereum crowd is dead set on making the "Web 3.0" thing take off, and getting smart contracts to evolve into full-fledged distributed applications (dapps in the lingo). In that context, the ewasm project is a pretty damn serious attempt at leveraging the wasm specification as a better VM for dapps than what the current EVM provides.

Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI

#33

Post by yarrel »

Asmod4n wrote: post #28
viach wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any time you do a generalization, you are wrong.

The Blockchain is the slowest and at the same time most energy hungry Datastore mankind has ever build. And in the case of bitcoin it's not fit for the job it was developed for.

It was designed to help create a timestamp for blocks of transactions. It's doing that just fine for Bitcoin.

Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI

#34

Post by woah »

sunsu wrote: post #6

"Slow Database"-Flavored WASI Any time you see the word "blockchain" replace it with "Slow Database" in your head and see if it still makes sense.

This is a cheap throwaway joke that has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the article. It would have been possible to make this joke by only reading the title.

Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI

#35

Post by guiomie »

"Bitcoin has UTXO+transactions+proof-of-work, Ethereum has accounts+smart contracts+proof-of-work (soon to be CBC Casper), and Oasis has accounts+confidential smart contracts+BFT"

Love how the author plugs his blockchain in that sentence as if it is in the same league as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI

#36

Post by wmf »

guiomie wrote: post #35

"Bitcoin has UTXO+transactions+proof-of-work, Ethereum has accounts+smart contracts+proof-of-work (soon to be CBC Casper), and Oasis has accounts+confidential smart contracts+BFT" Love how the author plugs his blockchain in that sentence as if it is in the same league as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

That's content marketing 101: You write about a general trend and you give a few well-known examples plus your own product. It's very common on Medium and LinkedIn.

Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI

#37

Post by nosuchthing »

yarrel wrote: post #33
Asmod4n wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Blockchain is the slowest and at the same time most energy hungry Datastore mankind has ever build. And in the case of bitcoin it's not fit for the job it was developed for.

It was designed to help create a timestamp for blocks of transactions. It's doing that just fine for Bitcoin.

There's no way for the blockchain to validate time stamping due to fluctuation in hash power and the nature of an adversarial network with untrusted data.

What's been happening is blocktimes wildly fluctuate, anywhere from 20 seconds - 90 minutes + even though the software attempts to calibrate for 10 minutes.

Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI

#38

Post by acdha »

pdpi wrote: post #32
fb03 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still failing to find the reason why they are trying to put 'blockchain' together with everything else these days. It is exquisite for ledger/proof-of-work systems, but not much else. Sounds like they're randomly taking guesses at what fits well with what, and the building upon.

I don't know much about _this_ particular project, but "wasm + blockchain" is not that silly an idea. The ethereum crowd is dead set on making the "Web 3.0" thing take off, and getting smart contracts to evolve into full-fledged distributed applications (dapps in the lingo). In that context, the ewasm project is a pretty damn serious attempt at leveraging the wasm specification as a better VM for dapps than what the…

It’s a better VM, sure, but the core problems are conceptual: there’s no way to fix bugs and programs still have to rely on outside sources for triggers. All a blockchain adds is the ability to get VC funding to expensively reinvent the trusted third party but with less efficiency.

Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI

#39

Post by jobigoud »

nosuchthing wrote: post #37
yarrel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was designed to help create a timestamp for blocks of transactions. It's doing that just fine for Bitcoin.

There's no way for the blockchain to validate time stamping due to fluctuation in hash power and the nature of an adversarial network with untrusted data. What's been happening is blocktimes wildly fluctuate, anywhere from 20 seconds - 90 minutes + even though the software attempts to calibrate for 10 minutes.

He just means things are unequivoqually ordered in time, so each block is a time stamp. Not necessarily running at constant frequency as our other time keeping tools.

Re: Blockchain-Flavored WASI

#40

Post by reggieband »

_nhynes wrote: post #24
reggieband wrote: post #18

I don't see the benefits of jamming the square peg of language builtins into such a narrow use case. > the runtime translates WASI args_get and args_sizes_get > for the zeroth arg to the blockchain address() function. There is nothing intuitive about that for me. In most languages, exposing the blockchain interface as a module feels like it would be a significantly cleaner implementation. If I want to compile against…

> > zeroth arg > There is nothing intuitive about that for me. It looks a lot like how a command-line program has the program name as the zeroth argument. The address just happens to be the name of the program in a blockchain context. > exposing the blockchain interface as a module feels like it would be a significantly cleaner implementation I'm not so sure. I think that the goal here is to allow developers to progr…

> IMHO even the ideas of "block" and "chain" are implementation details in the same way as the journal of a traditional database is an implementation detail.

The internals of a database are one thing, but the semantics of the language builtins seem like another. It almost feels akin to someone suggesting we change the underlying implementation of "println" (or whatever language builtin outputs to stdout) to automatically write to a new row in a database. I mean, I could adjust to such a weird idea but my initial impression would be we are forcing an existing abstraction onto a problem rather than choosing a truly suitable abstraction.

> Exposing these details as a library means that the program is tied to not only the blockchain, but a particular blockchain runtime.

Not necessarily, I'm considering something more like Go's cloud API: https://github.com/google/go-cloud You could easily have a "blockchain" API with any number of runtime backends.

I understand what the proposer was suggesting: a single semantic meaning for "print" across all programming languages that will map onto blockchain. I just don't agree that it is a good idea.

Post reply on HN