41–50 of 63 posts
Reading this it seems like the author comes pretty much to the same conclusion.
Is it really that simple? I feel like I must be missing something, because the hype is so real.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Though many new "blockchain" systems do achieve BFT (perhaps most notably Tendermint, which seems to be passing aphyr's Jepsen tests with flying colors), it's important to keep in mind Bitcoin falls short of achieving it: https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/765.pdf "Regarding BA, we observe that Nakamoto’s suggestion falls short of solving it, and present a simple alternative which works assuming that the adversary’s hashin…
Not a bandaid at all. Unconfirmed transactions in the "lost" chain are bringing fees with them, so it is the exact same incentive of every other transaction. Besides , how many times in history a continental network partition of the internet has happened? And it would only take a single node connected to both sides (land and satellite?), to undo all the work of the would be attacker.
Continental? No. Country-wide? Many, many times.
Imagine being in Egypt during the Arab Spring revolution when the government shut off Internet access. Imagine selling product to people for Bitcoin, seeing your client software accept the transaction because "enough time has passed", and then a few days/weeks later, when Internet access is restored, seeing your wallet balance get clobbered by the much-longer global chain.
/shudder
I have a use case for a new blockchain/cryptocurrency that I think is cool. Feel free to take the idea from me and implement it for an ICO :) I propose "whatcoin", a cryptocurrency designed to create a market for peer to peer media sharing based on the upload/download ratio model used by what.cd and other private torrent trackers to incentive seeding and penalize leeching. The whatcoin "blockchain" has a catalogue of…
There are a lot of technical problems in this what you wrote, it's only good in theory. You write that each upload/download transaction is recorded but you don't define what is a upload/download transaction. If you will use protocol like bittorrent you have chunks that are downloaded from many peers that are divided into blocks, having all those transactions in blockchain will not scale, it's just too much data. Another problem, How can you ensure that someone will not cheat in network? I can spoof that I have certain data, you will send me coins and I will not send you the data or if you confirm in source it's even more easy to cheat I will just send information that I got corrupted data even it's ok. There is a lot more other problems with this idea.
I wish everyone would realize that when they do this, they leave obvious trails in the data and so it is not worth the risk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you clarify the disadvantages of the application compromises required for option 2? I'm currently looking at Hyperledger Fabric and it falls into that category.
Sure. Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 has the option of "Channels" to limit viewership rights. In particular it restricts rights to a subset of the community. For example, you may have a 1000 parties in the community, but a particular channel may have only three (say A, B and C). Now, if one takes a Supply Chain example (a domain I'm quite familiar with), most transactions cannot be restricted to just parties A, B and C. Some…
You know what is a great database with all those properties? Your folder with git. There is nothing that you cant do with git that you can do with blockchains as a database. About the BFT part, it fails the mention the very important part that it doesnt work without proof-of-work. --- So then when should we use p-o-w blockchains? When you want to decentralize control - both, distribution & conflict resolution.
Git has a history and UTXO does not store history only keeps with the latest commit
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that is wrong AFAICT. PoW is what achieves Byzantine fault tolerance, not the blockchain. What blockchain achieves is proof of history given only the latest block's hash. This might or might not have a PoW on top of it to achieve BFT. Practical example: An authoritative server which responds only with the latest block's hash (this is cheap, think microcontroller cheap) is another way to make a blockchain useful w…
This is just semantics. "Blockchain" in the sense it's usually used means proof-of-work; hashing that incorporates the history tree predates blockchain and exists in things we wouldn't usually consider "blockchain", e.g. git.
Git is not a blockchain (it's a DAG) but that misses the point: I think the term could perfectly be retrofitted if it was the case. Things predating a term don't invalidate the new term convering them.
Either way I disagree with your opinion and there's nothing to argue further that would change either of our minds.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's a false dichotomy. And also the "lucky" is relative to the whole scheme. The value to the miner of finding a hash to make another block has gone down and will continue to go down, that's partly why transaction fees are so high. In any case, that's like saying someone is "lucky" to win a video game in Dave and Buster's. That's not the only way to incentivize validators to timestamp transactions. All you rea…
Who defines the LOCAL community?
It is not about quality. The same exact story submitted by different people or at different times may get 1 upvote and gets buried, or hits over 100 points on the front page. See this for example!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14929067
I suspect most frontpage people ask their friends to upvote a story in the first few minutes.
Check out my own list of submissions for some examples. The vast majority is 1-2 points. Including SHOW HN stuff I worked hard on such as this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13474714
Ironically, I got more upvotes on a comment I made, regarding this phenomenon.
TL/DR: "If Byzantine Fault Tolerance [0] does not create a huge advantage for your use-case, it is unlikely blockchain makes sense to consider over a traditional database." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance
Though many new "blockchain" systems do achieve BFT (perhaps most notably Tendermint, which seems to be passing aphyr's Jepsen tests with flying colors), it's important to keep in mind Bitcoin falls short of achieving it: https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/765.pdf "Regarding BA, we observe that Nakamoto’s suggestion falls short of solving it, and present a simple alternative which works assuming that the adversary’s hashin…