Kim Dotcom reveals more about his blockchain-inspired alternative Internet • Hacker News Board

Re: Kim Dotcom reveals more about his blockchain-inspired alternative Internet

#41

Post by Kinnard » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 2:14 AM UTC

radarsat1 wrote: post #7

Aside from ad hominems though, what does HN think about the idea of a blockchain-driven internet? Genuinely curious.

The question is almost too broad to respond to. 'a blockchain-driven internet' . . . there are so many things that could mean.

My expectation is that we will see blockchains taking up role somewhere between servers and databases.

I recommend Janet Abbate's "Inventing the Internet". You will feel like a prophet after reading it.

I think you could call it an Internet of blockchains rather than 'a blockchain-driven internet'. But the blockchain really is a Pandora's box . . .

Re: Kim Dotcom reveals more about his blockchain-inspired alternative Internet

#42

Post by XorNot » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 3:49 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #13

styles wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that like anything, it's exploitable. Just see the example of bitcoin where a mining pool had over 50% of the computing power. If the internet was driven by a block chain, with enough money and time, you could "control it". http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-miners-ditch-ghash-io-pool-5...

Owning 50% of the mining infrastructure is not an exploit. The system is designed with that in mind - anyone in control of that much hash power has no incentive to use it, because the value of the currency would instantly evaporate. They in fact have strong incentives to avoid putting themselves in that position - because it devalues the currency (which they have invested so heavily in), and makes them a target for a…

It's a huge design flaw though. The original intention of the blockchain in Bitcoin was to make it so it was decentralized...except the increase in computational difficulty, the winner-takes-all payouts, and the electrical cost, of course means that eventually the only people running the blockchain are large centralized organizations.

At which point one can wonder, why bother being distributed when we're still ultimately invoking trust in several groups? Couldn't we do this a lot more simply and efficiently by just having everyone delegate a private key signing operation to these groups so that it's just based on maintaining consensus, rather then burning CPU time on computationally hard problems?

Re: Kim Dotcom reveals more about his blockchain-inspired alternative Internet

#43

Post by XorNot » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 3:51 AM UTC

chejazi wrote: post #20

radarsat1 wrote: post #7

Aside from ad hominems though, what does HN think about the idea of a blockchain-driven internet? Genuinely curious.

The blockchain's distributed consensus algorithm manages the network tokens (e.g. Bitcoins) very well. These tokens and their corresponding transaction data are small in size. Storing large web documents in the blockchain will blow up its size and consume significant network resources. If you wanted to mitigate those effects, you could restrict publishing based the tokens you spend - e.g. you can store 4kb per "coin"…

Bitcoin manages 7 transactions per second globally. The internet is...somewhat faster then that.