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Comment by pdgwien | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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"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

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