8 ms·

blockchain can be cheap (power, compute etc) and not crap. Doesn't mean every project that builds with it takes that into consideration.

cyberax 2y ago
> blockchain can be cheap (power, compute etc) and not crap. No. All blockchain is crap, no exceptions are fundamentally possible. The reality reflects that rather starkly. By "blockchain" I mean a system with a distributed consesus via proof-of-work or proof-of-stake.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  So it stops being a blockchain if the criteria for adding a block is based on something else? Or do you intend to update your definition to incorporate other consensus mechanisms as they emerge? Seems to me that a more useful definition would abstract out the consensus model such that a blockchain is essentially a merkle-linked-list together with some function for determining which of two candidate next-blocks will be the actual one, but without getting too specific for what that function is... just because there's so much potential for variation there.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    > just because there's so much potential for variation there. There really isn't. Either you expend some resource to make it expensive to attack or you stake some resource so you have something to lose to prove you're not a bad actor. I've never seen anything more creative than this.
    - EGreg 2y ago
      There are lots of other approaches - IOTA DAG, HashGraph, Ripple Consensus Process etc. I am not a fan of blockchains, though. They are overkill for most uses. But here is an example of a non-blockchain system that doesn’t even require global consensus: http://intercoin.org/technology.pdf http://intercoin.org/technology.pdf Also check out the Autonomi network
      - cyberax 2y ago
        It's not really going to work. Without a centralizing consensus, any such scheme is vulnerable to be drowned in forks. A malicious notary network can simply flood the ledger with conflicting views. So clients will have to somehow find a set of notaries that is the "best". Proof-of-stake means that there's effectively a vote on the set of "reliable" agents, and proof-of-work works because the malicious notaries can't outrace everyone else.
        EGreg 2y ago
        Sorry, but you're not exactly an expert on this. There is a huge body of literature that says otherwise, and reference implementations. You don't NEED "a centralizing consensus". IOTA did have one, called a "governor". And now they also did away with it. I had a discussion with the CTO of Ripple (back then their chief cryptographer) David Schwartz about this exact issue in 2018, when I was also connecting with Leslie Lamport and others in the industry to discuss why and how global consensus was even needed https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-technology-consensus/80 https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-technology-conse... You can also read this post here: https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-technology-recovery/82/4 https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-technology-recov... At the end of the post, it links to the mathematical results on arxiv if you're interested: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0802.0832v1 https://arxiv.org/pdf/0802.0832v1
        cyberax 2y ago
        > Sorry, but you're not exactly an expert on this. There is a huge body of literature that says otherwise, and reference implementations. Yep, and none of them managed to solve the issue of resiliency without some kind of a stake. From your own link: > Intercoin’s ledger technology requires the sender to endorse a transaction after a supermajority of validators have approved it. > Validators periodically check one another with “proof of resource” techniques. Basically, it just moves the problem of validating individual transactions to validating the set of trusted notaries via proof-of-stake. Just another rehash of crapcoin bullshit.
    - K0balt 2y ago
      POW doesn’t have to be useless work. It can be useful work, so that mining actually creates a value tied to off chain economic systems. Then you have something that actually has value, and you can then use POS to give validators both a correct incentive alignment and a way to get paid for their work. Hybrid value backed POW for token creation with POS for validation creates a really good system for digital assets. Sadly, extant systems for this are few because generating real value is actually challenging.
      - cyberax 2y ago
        > It can be useful work It can be in theory, but in practice there are no tasks that fit the definition. All attempts to use something like protein folding ended up in failure.
        K0balt 2y ago
        >no tasks…. Umm, I don’t think that’s true at all. Digital content platform, for example, is a perfect task to generate outside value. Data storage is another example with many chains in that category thriving. Database is another, gpu compute/render, lots of useful tasks. You are basically saying that computational resources cannot be used to do valuable work, which is a premise that I think is questionable at best. You don’t see a lot of hype around these projects because they aren’t intended to be speculative- teams in this space try to avoid wild speculation driven value cycles, because it is damaging to their economic models.
        cyberax 2y ago
        > Digital content platform, for example, is a perfect task to generate outside value. Yep. Storing CSAM materials against your will is great. Maybe interspersed with pirated movies. To add insult to injury, it's also not reliable enough for archival purposes for important data. So far, I haven't seen any actually useful proof-of-work schemes that truly benefit the society.
    - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      Or you participate in some activity which provides a service, like filecoin. Or you get somebody's approval of the block's contents, like in a permissioned blockchain. I think we'll also see something where you do key-signing parties all at the same time as a way of providing sybil resistance. Or proof of having voted on whatever it is (the outcome of the vote would then go into the block). Stake and work are just the easy ones to implement because they don't even try to be simultaneously useful. Personally I'm not very excited about blockchains because I think global consistency is overkill for pretty much everything, and is in many cases harmful. But it's hard to take anyone seriously who classifies a technology as by-definition-useless. Its current forms are weak enough to defeat at face value, no need for propaganda. As for the future ones... Maybe they be useful, we'll see.
      - jazzyjackson 2y ago
        Hm, thanks for the argument, I guess I'm turning it into semantics; filecoin and "permissioned block chains" sound more like reputation / web of trust systems. So to me it only becomes blockchain when there's some consensus mechanism not based on people making choices (because then we're just back to having a DB with auth...)
        __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        It's a little different than a DB with auth. They have to make those choices in the clear, and they have to follow whatever rules are enforced by the protocol while they do it. Unlike a DB with auth, if the process is trustworthy then the people don't have to be. Can such a thing exist? I dunno, but there's no evidence yet that it can't, and golly it would be cool if it did.
      - cyberax 2y ago
        "Permissioned blockchains" are basically isomorphic to git repositories. They certainly are useful, but they aren't "blockchains" in the regular sense.
        __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
- acaloiar 2y ago
  I'm afraid you're redefining what a blockchain is. A blockchain is a distributed ledger. Distributed ledgers are an application of distributed conensus, which is a truly interesting field within computer science.
- EGreg 2y ago
  You’re being downvoted because you’re making sweeping unsupported assertions, likely based on an ideological opposition to blockhain. I am guessing it has to do with anger at FTX and other negligent participants in the wider “crypto” ecosystem that has very little to do with blockchains. But that is a “non sequitur” (Latin for “it does not follow). If I am wrong in my assumptions and you have an actual argument supporting your assertions about “all blockchains” being crap, please do elaborate on the substance.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    The reality is: blockchain has failed in EVERY area it's been tried, except for illegal/unregulated payments. Assets tracking? Failed. Interbank settlements? Failed. NFT and art? Spectacularly failed (wanna an NFT for that spectacle?).
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
If you've picked mesh networking, then you care about partition tolerance. But blockchains prioritize consistency. So I think using blockchains on mesh networks puts you in a disadvantaged situation re: the CAP theorem. There's got to be a way which better aligns the application layer with the constraints of the physical layer.

cyberax 2y ago

> blockchain can be cheap (power, compute etc) and not crap. No. All blockchain is crap, no exceptions are fundamentally possible. The reality reflects that rather starkly. By "blockchain" I mean a system with a distributed consesus via proof-of-work or proof-of-stake.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
So it stops being a blockchain if the criteria for adding a block is based on something else? Or do you intend to update your definition to incorporate other consensus mechanisms as they emerge? Seems to me that a more useful definition would abstract out the consensus model such that a blockchain is essentially a merkle-linked-list together with some function for determining which of two candidate next-blocks will be the actual one, but without getting too specific for what that function is... just because there's so much potential for variation there.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  > just because there's so much potential for variation there. There really isn't. Either you expend some resource to make it expensive to attack or you stake some resource so you have something to lose to prove you're not a bad actor. I've never seen anything more creative than this.
  - EGreg 2y ago
    There are lots of other approaches - IOTA DAG, HashGraph, Ripple Consensus Process etc. I am not a fan of blockchains, though. They are overkill for most uses. But here is an example of a non-blockchain system that doesn’t even require global consensus: http://intercoin.org/technology.pdf http://intercoin.org/technology.pdf Also check out the Autonomi network
    - cyberax 2y ago
      It's not really going to work. Without a centralizing consensus, any such scheme is vulnerable to be drowned in forks. A malicious notary network can simply flood the ledger with conflicting views. So clients will have to somehow find a set of notaries that is the "best". Proof-of-stake means that there's effectively a vote on the set of "reliable" agents, and proof-of-work works because the malicious notaries can't outrace everyone else.
      - EGreg 2y ago
        Sorry, but you're not exactly an expert on this. There is a huge body of literature that says otherwise, and reference implementations. You don't NEED "a centralizing consensus". IOTA did have one, called a "governor". And now they also did away with it. I had a discussion with the CTO of Ripple (back then their chief cryptographer) David Schwartz about this exact issue in 2018, when I was also connecting with Leslie Lamport and others in the industry to discuss why and how global consensus was even needed https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-technology-consensus/80 https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-technology-conse... You can also read this post here: https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-technology-recovery/82/4 https://community.intercoin.app/t/intercoin-technology-recov... At the end of the post, it links to the mathematical results on arxiv if you're interested: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0802.0832v1 https://arxiv.org/pdf/0802.0832v1
        cyberax 2y ago
        > Sorry, but you're not exactly an expert on this. There is a huge body of literature that says otherwise, and reference implementations. Yep, and none of them managed to solve the issue of resiliency without some kind of a stake. From your own link: > Intercoin’s ledger technology requires the sender to endorse a transaction after a supermajority of validators have approved it. > Validators periodically check one another with “proof of resource” techniques. Basically, it just moves the problem of validating individual transactions to validating the set of trusted notaries via proof-of-stake. Just another rehash of crapcoin bullshit.
  - K0balt 2y ago
    POW doesn’t have to be useless work. It can be useful work, so that mining actually creates a value tied to off chain economic systems. Then you have something that actually has value, and you can then use POS to give validators both a correct incentive alignment and a way to get paid for their work. Hybrid value backed POW for token creation with POS for validation creates a really good system for digital assets. Sadly, extant systems for this are few because generating real value is actually challenging.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      > It can be useful work It can be in theory, but in practice there are no tasks that fit the definition. All attempts to use something like protein folding ended up in failure.
      - K0balt 2y ago
        >no tasks…. Umm, I don’t think that’s true at all. Digital content platform, for example, is a perfect task to generate outside value. Data storage is another example with many chains in that category thriving. Database is another, gpu compute/render, lots of useful tasks. You are basically saying that computational resources cannot be used to do valuable work, which is a premise that I think is questionable at best. You don’t see a lot of hype around these projects because they aren’t intended to be speculative- teams in this space try to avoid wild speculation driven value cycles, because it is damaging to their economic models.
        cyberax 2y ago
        > Digital content platform, for example, is a perfect task to generate outside value. Yep. Storing CSAM materials against your will is great. Maybe interspersed with pirated movies. To add insult to injury, it's also not reliable enough for archival purposes for important data. So far, I haven't seen any actually useful proof-of-work schemes that truly benefit the society.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
    Or you participate in some activity which provides a service, like filecoin. Or you get somebody's approval of the block's contents, like in a permissioned blockchain. I think we'll also see something where you do key-signing parties all at the same time as a way of providing sybil resistance. Or proof of having voted on whatever it is (the outcome of the vote would then go into the block). Stake and work are just the easy ones to implement because they don't even try to be simultaneously useful. Personally I'm not very excited about blockchains because I think global consistency is overkill for pretty much everything, and is in many cases harmful. But it's hard to take anyone seriously who classifies a technology as by-definition-useless. Its current forms are weak enough to defeat at face value, no need for propaganda. As for the future ones... Maybe they be useful, we'll see.
    - jazzyjackson 2y ago
      Hm, thanks for the argument, I guess I'm turning it into semantics; filecoin and "permissioned block chains" sound more like reputation / web of trust systems. So to me it only becomes blockchain when there's some consensus mechanism not based on people making choices (because then we're just back to having a DB with auth...)
      - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
        It's a little different than a DB with auth. They have to make those choices in the clear, and they have to follow whatever rules are enforced by the protocol while they do it. Unlike a DB with auth, if the process is trustworthy then the people don't have to be. Can such a thing exist? I dunno, but there's no evidence yet that it can't, and golly it would be cool if it did.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      "Permissioned blockchains" are basically isomorphic to git repositories. They certainly are useful, but they aren't "blockchains" in the regular sense.
      - __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
acaloiar 2y ago
I'm afraid you're redefining what a blockchain is. A blockchain is a distributed ledger. Distributed ledgers are an application of distributed conensus, which is a truly interesting field within computer science.
EGreg 2y ago
You’re being downvoted because you’re making sweeping unsupported assertions, likely based on an ideological opposition to blockhain. I am guessing it has to do with anger at FTX and other negligent participants in the wider “crypto” ecosystem that has very little to do with blockchains. But that is a “non sequitur” (Latin for “it does not follow). If I am wrong in my assumptions and you have an actual argument supporting your assertions about “all blockchains” being crap, please do elaborate on the substance.
- cyberax 2y ago
  The reality is: blockchain has failed in EVERY area it's been tried, except for illegal/unregulated payments. Assets tracking? Failed. Interbank settlements? Failed. NFT and art? Spectacularly failed (wanna an NFT for that spectacle?).

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

If you've picked mesh networking, then you care about partition tolerance. But blockchains prioritize consistency. So I think using blockchains on mesh networks puts you in a disadvantaged situation re: the CAP theorem. There's got to be a way which better aligns the application layer with the constraints of the physical layer.