A discussion forum in the Bitcoin blockchain | Hacker News Reader

A discussion forum in the Bitcoin blockchain

bitaps.com

I don't see what the appeal is on having a permanent message board. Certainly almost everyone who has spent a lot of time online has said something that they wish they could take offline.

I think what we really need is more transience in online discussions. If I said something when I was 14 years old that shouldn't come up when an employer searches for me. I was a completely different person then. Heck, that's why I don't use my real name on HN.

This seems like a step in the wrong direction.

However, there are real concerns for censorship.

The fact that today's 14 year old are most certainly creating records which will be viewed in the future is incontrovertible. The result will be, I think, that employers (and other decision makers) will learn not to judge someone for comments made when they were 14.

The fact that our lives are increasingly documented means that we'll all have to be less judgmental about our shared weaknesses and growing pains, and that's a good thing.

This is the most optimistic thing I've ever read. I hope you're right.

Consider the inevitable conclusion that all information shared "publicly" will eventually make its way to the public domain.

That's an optimistic take on it. I could imagine that there will be companies who score the personality development of a person for HR departments.

Thats a pretty decent idea, though, isn't it?

Some people aren't comfortable with being rated like that. Others complain that personality profiling is still largely inaccurate and would rather not have their futures based on it.

It's a bit like the IQ testing for employment placing.

This is also the opinion of Back to the Future writer Bob Gale. See his comments on privacy here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/21/how-back-to...

The flipside is searching for an obscure technical problem or bug, and finding a link to a forum that claims to have a solution... only to have the server respond with a 404, or timing out entirely, or seeing a parked domain.

The 14 year olds of tomorrow will learn not to shitpost under an easily identifiable alias, the employers of tomorrow will learn that a decade old "GGEZ" doesn't disqualify someone from employment, and the me of tomorrow might be able to finally figure out this piece of software doesn't work.

When it comes to blockchain-based message boards, I feel like it's a question of when not if. There's a small but vocal culture that has demand for censorless social media. You can see it bubble up when Reddit bans entire subs[1][2][3]. We've had other discussion about blockchain-based social media too[4]. The difficulty seems to be in creating a viable currency/social model and not technological feasibility.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/1/14478948/reddit-alt-right-b...

[2] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-23/reddit-bans-pizzaga...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/09/...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12401403

I disagree. I'm all for permanence - Internet is already too ephemeral. Personally, I love discovering old discussion threads I participated in 15 years ago. It's nostalgic.

Isn't bitcoin and other blockchains validated by "proof-of-work", meaning a nontrivial amount of energy is required to post something to this discussion forum?

I mean it's nearly indefensible to even add an energy overhead to financial transactions, but this...

Notwithstanding the bandwidth and storage costs associated with downloading an maintaining a multi-GB blockchain.

A quick note: I don't know what you think it means, but the word "notwithstanding" as a preposition means exactly "in spite of" or "despite" (even when it comes after the words it modifies.) It sounds like you're using it as "to say nothing of"...

Requiring proof of work to make forum posts could seriously cut down on spam.

Yeah. But the proof of I'm-Not-a-robot is usually a simpler captcha or image task. Preventing low quality posts by humans is probably easier with voting, flagging, minimum message lengths, minimum interval between posting etc.

> I mean it's nearly indefensible to even add an energy overhead to financial transactions

Come on now. How much energy is devoted to securing the traditional financial system? I'm talking about buildings, personnel, armored vehicles, weapons, lawyers, courts, etc.

Other blockchains are secured by different mechanisms than proof-of-work, and research is ongoing into more efficient ways of achieving distributed consensus.

That's a valid point - but it would certainly attractive to not require either of the two costs. Sounds encouraging that there is research in the field.

Bitcoin miners "mine on" the Merkle tree root hash of all the transactions in a block. Therefore, the amount of transaction data does not affect the amount of energy expanded.

However, as block space is limited, actually using the Bitcoin blockchain as a discussion forum is prohibitively expensive, because miners only want to include the highest fee-transactions.

This seems to belong to Locked Post[1], a "free, anonymous, secure, uncensorable, decentralised and eternal post board".

[1]: https://lockedpost.com/

"You cannot make a post while messages are pending (Post sequence number: 282 is currently pending confirmation in the Bitcoin Blockchain"

Using the Bitcoin blockchain for forums is a really bad decision: high fees, tiny data buffer, high confirmation times. These are the kind of decisions that kill your project from the beginning.

I'm not sure about whether or not that isn't a good thing though.

The quality of the bits tends to go up as they become more scarce. Compare the telegraph of old with todays internet.

The Internet (and the Internet Protocol) is used for everything, including building cars, brewing beer, making drugs, moving funds, cctv, building security, controlling UAVs and cars, etc.

Very few cared when Telegraph cable was torn and took weeks to repair. Now if the Internet Protocol is unavailable - the whole enterprise is paralyzed [0].

[0] http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/08/01/southwest-pilots-want-...

> I'm not sure about whether or not that isn't a good thing though.

I am sure because we can quickly analyze this from a computer science perspective. We are trying to use data structures and algorithms that don't fit for the problem they are trying to solve (forums).

You can say that future blockchains can be a better fit but we need to see yet if those future blockchains are something new or just using concepts that we already had but with a new label.

Agreed. This is the late 90's web stage of let's try using the block chain for everything, even though it is vastly inefficient. The hype will die for a while as fees get too expensive then might come back later once the infrastructure of higher layers is there to support things.

Business expecting to piggy back on a free block chain deserve to go under.

Why wouldn't they just embed the hash of the message, or even the hash of a chain of messages? (AFAIK people have been doing this for a while for other applications).

There was a much more sensible attempt at this with bitmessage [0] but anonymity and security guarantees are hard, and everyone receives everything is a really expensive strategy for a messaging protocol.

tl:dr those that don't research prior work are bound to create useless stuff.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitmessage

I'm not sure this is the same thing. Bitmessage has a different use case (person to person messages).

You can send bitmessages that are entirely public as well see 'Chans'.

Thank you for clarifying. I did not realize that. I have a bunch of questions but I won't turn this into Reddit :) I'll just go off and research

out of curiosity, and probably topic, the 70chars limit is probably due to the protocol, but, is there a way to post longer messages? or what do people do to "certify" longer messages on the blockchain? I heard pitches where companies told that they were securing contracts and so on (not sure if they just post the hash or what).

PS: Does anyone of you know what kind of API/implementation this site use to post the message on the blockchain? i'm new to the topic but quite interested

Why is this valuable or desirable? I keep trying to figure this out.

Having spent a lot of time thinking and talking about this concept, this is valuable because you can attach cost-of-suffering to entities participating in an open conversation with an aggregate.

Consider the use of Twitter's platform as (currently) allowing a small subset of knowledgeable users to leverage viral behaviors to spread their belief systems into a larger aggregate, without the larger aggregate being able to defend against it.

> because you can attach cost-of-suffering to entities participating in an open conversation with an aggregate.

In a modern world, isn't this just "you must pay a fee to post here?" It actually doesn't seem to prove work was done by the author?

> Consider the use of Twitter's platform as (currently) allowing a small subset of knowledgeable users to leverage viral behaviors to spread their belief systems into a larger aggregate, without the larger aggregate being able to defend against it.

I've been considering this problem, but I think these kinds of work proofs are really just proof of minimum economic status.

A blockchain, when applied properly, can provide levels of trust in a way that is not directly associated with the proof of work they run. Bitcoin uses SHA256 for POW, which is pretty well understood by now to be secure and hovers around cost efficiency.

Using the trust embodied in the blockchain allows for the mapping of comment, author, topic commented on, participants in the topic (a sub-aggregate) and a general context in which the topic is shared (web link and/or IPFS link). This can be done without making any of those things part of the POW.

Yes, anonymous comments and topic submissions can be made, but those may have a lower associated karma attached to them, similar to what we have here in HN. With a bit more code (Script), one could add voting based on value (i.e. I could vote you down with $20 if I had over $20 of karma associated with my account), transparency in voting (you could see it was someone with high karma commenting on x/y/z articles voting you down), and any other analytics anyone thought would be valuable in determining trust levels.

BTW, I am not indicating karma is a one-to-one mapping with value injected into the blockchain by market growth or trades. For example, I couldn't vote you down with $200 of fiat just because I didn't like what you said. I would have to "earn" the karma from upvotes from other users over time, which would be tied to my source address used to pay for voting on other users. When I actually went to vote, a portion of the revenue would go to the platform operator (HN equivalent), a portion to the submitter of the topic, and a portion to the person I voted up (or down).

So what you're saying is that basically you have verification that the conversation you see is one that took place and that there are a fixed set of identities (not people) who had that conversation?

Can't we just schlep a merkle tree over the top of any forum software and get similar guarantees? And isn't this sort of false due the lack of convergence of the block chain over long partitioning events?

You could totally do that with IPFS today, but I think the problem is that social commentary occurs in a centralized location. If you play Rust, the analogy would be being able to talk to someone while within a given zone.

Seems like it might be good for entering minutes or important legal discussions, things that need to be preserved. But just chit-chat? Nah.

You guys need to know about Steem: https://steemit.com/

This one is touching:

"Jordan and Jeremy I Love You Forever & Loved Being Your Father."

https://bitaps.com/66791de561fd235bf1b16924642903af8b8013aa5...

Slightly off topic, but aren't all of these alternative uses for block chains going to explode their size and cause more storage and bandwidth to be used on many servers around the world?

A good way to deal with that is the transaction fee. If you are willing to pay for the space + resources, then perhaps you've earned it.

But, this generally means that you will prioritize smaller, more high value things like large financial transactions (moving $10 million costs 400 bytes, complaining about the core developers take 2kb). And so in my opinion this payment model makes a ton of sense.

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