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LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

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Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#81

Post by maccard »

sdiacom wrote: post #26
hiq wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A blockchain powers Secure Scuttlebutt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Scuttlebutt doesn't have the word blockchain on it, and from reading the protocol section, I don't think it uses a public blockchain as defined there: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/theres_no_g... So you're just talking about something else, but as Schneier argues, anything other than a public blockchain is nothing new and…

Per the Wikipedia article: > User content in SSB is organized as an append-only sequence of immutable messages, where messages cryptographically sign adjacent messages for the purpose of guaranteeing unforgeabilitity of the sequences as they are replicated to other peers. That's pretty much a blockchain. Of course, they don't call it a blockchain themselves, because the Scuttlebutt people are not running a grift, the…

> That's pretty much a blockchain

Only if you remove all of the parts of a blockchain that make it a blockchain. The definition from wikipedia isn't a blockchain, it's a Merkle Tree. They're not the same thing - a blockchain _uses_ a merkle tree. The bits that are bolted onto the merkle tree are what make it a blockchain, and are the bits that don't provide value.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#82

Post by pclmulqdq »

web3isgoing wrote: post #76
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>so that we can be sure we are verifying the correct PDF Umm, what? Someone cannot create a PDF and sign with someone else's key. This would've defeat the purpose of public-key cryptography. >it's not a great storage mechanism for this system to scale to thousands or millions of signatures Not sure how recommending a system that scales not on signatures but on messages shared is better. >Another alternative is these…

Vitalik, or maybe a charitable non profit organization, signs two PDFs: one says "our new public key is X" and the other says "our new public key is Y." Both of these documents verify correctly, but how do you know which is the latest? One approach is to use Twitter as your append-only timestamped ledger, and broadcast a link to the latest file on IPFS. Another is to build a new centralized service and promise it is…

How about he doesn't sign the PDF that is wrong?

If you're imagining that this is part of some key rotation procedure, what about signing a document that says "until April 20th, 2022, 0:00 UTC our public key is X"?

And then if the central source gets hacked, people will be suspicious of the PDF for a few hours, but nobody will do anything disastrous.

Edit: you can also add chaining to the documents themselves: "until... the private key is X. This document supercedes the doument with hash Y."

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#83

Post by sdiacom »

hiq wrote: post #46
sdiacom wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per the Wikipedia article: > User content in SSB is organized as an append-only sequence of immutable messages, where messages cryptographically sign adjacent messages for the purpose of guaranteeing unforgeabilitity of the sequences as they are replicated to other peers. That's pretty much a blockchain. Of course, they don't call it a blockchain themselves, because the Scuttlebutt people are not running a grift, the…

That's using a specific definition of a blockchain that differs significantly from e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum which are two of the most popular ones and the ones commonly referred to, along with their decentralization properties. The Schneier post I linked explains fairly how these are not novel and have nothing to do with the current hype beyond the confusing naming. Concretely, if Scuttlebutt uses a blockchain, then…

I agree with you completely, the "blockchain" term is confusing, and by the definition I'm using, Git would also be a sort of blockchain. The more that blockchain (the grift) expands, the more that the meaning of blockchain (the technology) is diluted.

A key difference to me between Git and Scuttlebutt, which in my (most likely flawed) view makes Scuttlebutt "blockchain-er", is the distributed nature of it. You add a friend on Scuttlebutt, and this will fetch their content from any node, and all their friends' contents. It has an "automatic replication across nodes" aspect which Git does not have.

[Disclaimer: I haven't used Scuttlebutt in a long while, so I may be getting the technical details of the friends-of-friends-replication thing wrong.]

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#84

Post by pclmulqdq »

dhdgrygev wrote: post #19
Brian_K_White wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just exemplified their point. original post: we're not talking about crypto comment: they're not talking about crypto but people still just say "F them crypto is bad!" this comment: F them because crypto is bad! Crypto (money, nfts) is bad, I think smart contracts are a mistake too, and I don't think LO needs blockchain either, but the objection is more like the one someone else said about, if there's some featur…

There are no real world use cases of blockchain tech besides crypto. Or can you demonstrate one?

A few more that havent been mentioned: Source control, public cryptographic beacons (eg randomness beacons, beacons containing public keys). Chaining blocks with cryptography is actually very useful.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#85

Post by azangru »

xigoi wrote: post #43
azangru wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because there are no use cases for blockchains. Someone in the comments on LibreOffice blog expressed the same opinion. Which surprised me. Has the consensus been reached among the serious non-grifting public that blockchains are useless to represent peer-to-peer trustless money? Has bitcoin been declared a failure?

Bitcoin is wasting humongous amounts of energy during a climate and energy crisis, which makes it morally unacceptable.

That's not the argument the parent is making. They say, no use cases.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#86

Post by maccard »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #75
glacambre wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He has to broadcast his public key for this [...] through a public and decentralized ledger. Yes, but then he also has to broadcast the transaction linking his identity and public key. He could do this on twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger. So he creates a second blockchain to advertise the transaction. But then he needs to advertise the second blockchain's transaction in order to link his ide…

Herein lies the problem of linking the chain to the world. At some point, you have to trust someone to do something. In my opinion, it is fine to publish those signatures on a website you are known to control (or Tweet them out or whatever).

> it is fine to publish those signatures on a website you are known to control (or Tweet them out or whatever).

Say I tweet, post on reddit and internet archive both of those pages. When somenoe goes to verify later on, the 4 values are different to the value you've provided to me. Which of the 5 values is trustworthy? This is the problem that a blockchain verifies, in theory.

Unfortunately, there's two different answers, depending on what we're actually sharing. If we're sharing something that confirms my identity, the only correct answer is "it doesn't matter, you are not who you say you are".

If we're sharing something that proves something happened, the answer is "I need to choose one of the N options to trust", and unfortunately going down this path should leave you to "it doesn't matter, I can't actually verify what happened without trusting _someone_". The reality of both situations is that it doesn't matter whether or not the trust is centralised or not centralised, the action you take in both cases is the same - you stop trusting and look elsewhere. And Blockchains can't solve that problem.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#87

Post by mavhc »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #49
mavhc wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why shouldn't you ignore feedback that's ill informed, reactionary, or just wrong?

Maybe because it's coming from the people who read your blog and use your software?

Most of your users are idiots though, they'll just ask for a faster horse

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#88

Post by azangru »

soco wrote: post #55
azangru wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because there are no use cases for blockchains. Someone in the comments on LibreOffice blog expressed the same opinion. Which surprised me. Has the consensus been reached among the serious non-grifting public that blockchains are useless to represent peer-to-peer trustless money? Has bitcoin been declared a failure?

I'm not sure how a word processor uses peer-to-peer trustless money. The discussion shouldn't even be about crypto and blockchains, but about how crypto and blockchain can benefit LibreOffice. Given we cannot identify how crypto and blockchain can benefit anybody (well, except scammers and those 11 folks who actually transferred assets to third world countries) I believe the topic should have quickly died off but yea…

> I'm not sure how a word processor uses peer-to-peer trustless money

The parent (and the commenter on the site) weren't saying that an office suite has no use for blockchains; they were making a far broader claim that there are no use cases for blockchains.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#89

Post by pclmulqdq »

maccard wrote: post #86
pclmulqdq wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Herein lies the problem of linking the chain to the world. At some point, you have to trust someone to do something. In my opinion, it is fine to publish those signatures on a website you are known to control (or Tweet them out or whatever).

> it is fine to publish those signatures on a website you are known to control (or Tweet them out or whatever). Say I tweet, post on reddit and internet archive both of those pages. When somenoe goes to verify later on, the 4 values are different to the value you've provided to me. Which of the 5 values is trustworthy? This is the problem that a blockchain verifies, in theory. Unfortunately, there's two different ans…

Like I said to someone else, the real answer is to not sign documents that are wrong. To avoid doing this, you might have to be more precise than "my public key is X." You probably should include a timestamp, an expiration for the key, a hash of the previous message so people can tell what is supposed to supercede what, etc.

That way, if people get multiple messages from you, they can actually verify which one is supposed to be the most recent and what your key actually should be.

That will solve your problems and let you disseminate public keys through Twitter.

Re: LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback

#90

Post by heather45879 »

dhdgrygev wrote: post #19
Brian_K_White wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just exemplified their point. original post: we're not talking about crypto comment: they're not talking about crypto but people still just say "F them crypto is bad!" this comment: F them because crypto is bad! Crypto (money, nfts) is bad, I think smart contracts are a mistake too, and I don't think LO needs blockchain either, but the objection is more like the one someone else said about, if there's some featur…

There are no real world use cases of blockchain tech besides crypto. Or can you demonstrate one?

Blockchain has pretty powerful use cases in the enterprise. Ethereum provides one such solution which allows companies to have a private blockchain and programmable smart contracts in place—and with that a nice internal audit trail as well.

Blockchains can use proof-of-authority or proof-of-stake not as a means to accumulate “wealth” but firstly to secure the network from tampering while facilitating the resilient, chain of transaction records.

Ethereum is a distributed Turing machine (completely programmable)—first and foremost—and that is much more powerful than a simple coin.

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