“We already store data. In a database. It works well”
twitter.com
twitter.com
1. He pitches it is great to track people posting illicit content on Wikipedia, then argues that crypto is pseudonymous, So why would you use that when web trackers we have today already know what I had for breakfast
2. Why would anyone want people to post illegal material on a blockchain when it is immutable? Let's assume the culprit goes to jail, but then you have billions of people now able to access illegal content, that can never be removed because it is on a blockchain
What a sales pitch.
Would be a good way to shut down a competing coin.
I remember seeing these same justifications 15+ years ago when laws were being tightened up around possession and distribution of child abuse imagery, that it's just a stream of bits, you can't criminalise that... You can, and you should.
(The extent to which it can be pursued, and to which those who are simply running cryptocurrency nodes should have any culpability for propagating said data is very much open to legal argument, of course.)
If I present the idea "circle", then hypothetically all (!!) you need is a decoder (substring location within π, and video processor) and you've got every illegal image ever made compiled into a handy video stream.
So logically (and I'm fully aware law isn't logic [and probably shouldn't be?]) there seems like you would need something else other than just possession of a number to make that possession illegal. (I'm not arguing that's the current law in any country, fwiw).
tl;dr -- at some point it is just a concatenation of bits.
Personally I believe the law is long overdue for refactoring but that it would be a twofold nightmare to first actually do it and second getting it approved through the mechanisms of legislation.
Yes, the index, which would itself be the encoding of the file. It's just Huffman coding optimising for the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter.
Sure, those numbers could have come about some other way, but they didn't.
Your hypothetical decoder is actually going to contain a very large amount of very specific data as well, so much so that the 'circle' part of it is more or less irrelevant. You've just defined a (very poor) data encoding scheme.
Courts aren't robots and people are judged by other people. Nobody will go to jail for holding a file with all possible files in it. But using that file with a specific substring index to extract something illicit, with intent, will almost certainly not make the courts happy. IANAL.
The question at hand though, is if you don't extract the illicit thing [from the Blockchain] is possession of the Blockchain enough.
FWIW I think possession has to be the measure used for child pornography and similar content, at present. But what is meant precisely by possession may need some interpretation (does one "possess" a file if one has the magnet link?) and may evolve in the future if such Blockchain attacks become of interest to the legislature.
How about if you have it but never used it, so you have the index but never expanded Pi that far, or doing the expansion would take longer than the age of the Universe, say?
So, how about if you never viewed the 'file' from the Blockchain, aren't we creeping gradually towards saying that would be fine too. Of course the law has elements necessary for practical enforcement too which we generally ignore when waxing philosophical.
No. Posession of any data should never be criminal. Just like you wouldn't send someone to prison how having a book, you shouldn't send someone to prison for simply having a picture, no matter what it is a picture of.
I don't think I have to say that obviously child rapists are the worst scum of the earth and they should rot in prison forever. But the idea that you can send someone to prison for simply having a picture(or in some countries, a drawing!!!), is just simply idiotic.
There's also the argument that it's hard to prove someone has paid for it (either with money, or with another currency - some online CP forums work by trading images rather than money), so the next best alternative is to illegalise simple possession. Granted, this also runs into some problems; the same justification can be used to illegalise child pornographic drawings, which are frequently used to groom children. Because it's very hard to prove grooming of a victim who has already been groomed, the justification would argue that the next best way to ensure child rapists are caught would be to illegalise possession of the drawings.
Therefore, many countries use the strong probability of second-order effects to illegalise both drawings and photos/videos.
In my view, criminalizing the imagination (any imagination) is a severe misstep in itself, if not morally, then on the basis of most Western societies - the harm principle. Real child porn is not a product of the imagination, it is a documentation of real abuse to victims.
Except that obviously some countries take it too far and people have been convicted for production of child pornography for having a picture of themselves on their own phone(say an 18 year old who took a picture of themselves when they were underage). That's not purely theoretical "this could happen, but probably won't because people apply common sense". That does actually happen in real world. And there is no abuse involved, maybe except for the abuse of he justice system. This wouldn't happen if just simply having a picture wasn't criminal in itself.
>>the justification would argue that the next best way to ensure child rapists are caught would be to illegalise possession of the drawings.
Would it? Because I feel that if any one of us came across child porn accidentally the right solution is to burn the machine down and never ever tell anyone about it, since mere fact of having looked at it(downloaded it to your browser) is a jail sentence in most civilized nations. If it was legal I would have absolutely no problem reporting it the police, which I am sure would help actually catching rapists. Which actually brings me to my next point - as far as I know, as long as minors are not involved, posession of pictures of pretty much any illegal act is not in itself illegal. You can go and google a video of couple guys killing another with a screwdriver - perfectly legal to watch. You can probably go on some snuff websites and watch videos of actual rape - not illegal to watch as far as I know. What's the difference? Because someone might masturbate to one of these but not the others? Now I don't believe that for a second, and it's not like the demand argument doesn't apply here either.
Nonsense, if that data is national secrets, if it's child abuse photographs, if it's people's stolen credit card numbers, or any number of other types of data, mere possession is a problem.
> Just like you wouldn't send someone to prison how having a book
I would if it was a book full of child abuse photos.
I'm sorry, what is idiotic for you is common sense in most of the western world, you'll have to do more than call the idea stupid to argue a case like that.
Apparently I also don't take this shit lightly, because immediately reported that shit. All of this to say, prior to this experience I was under the impression that people should be allowed to study / research datasets of questionable morality / ethics but was completely naive and idealistic around researchers being completely benevolent.
I respect much more the ethical hoops required to study/research this type of material and I think other researchers ought to also respect them.
https://torrentfreak.com/openpgp-keyservers-now-store-irremo...
In my experience so far, this seems to be a fairly regular thing when the word "blockchain" crops up in a conversation.
Just like with any nascent, hyped-up field, you will have people who are in it purely for the money. The fact that cryptocurrency makes it trivial to operate and participate in Ponzis exacerbates the issue, but if you went to a random ML/AI conference a few years ago you'd also have been pitched dozens of Ponzis (in the form of nonsensical startups) by opportunists who understand nothing about the technology.
> ML was solving real problems from day one
No, machine learning developped slowly over decades before it could be fit into practical applications.
Bitcoin's launch was more than the launch of a product, it was the first time the ideas in its paper were actually put together. If we put cryptocurrency on the ML R&D timeline, we'd be in 1970 right now.
Of course, in the present day it solves more niche problems than ML which everybody uses through Google, but the fact that it's already used by real people at all is remarkable.
Note that the ML comparison was specific to the last decade mentioned by the person I replied to, not a history of the field. It’s possible that in the future we’ll look back at this period similarly to the first AI winter but I think even that would be disappointing to most participants because whatever succeeds won’t make them rich the way everyone in the space is hoping.
"What exactly are proposing?"
"That you go away and learn more about blockchain"
Also that person chiming in calling Jimmy anti-capitalist cracked me up.
Oh an OT: WTF is a cashtag? I'm not using Twitter, the linkified $BSV in the very first message was new to me, and on hover the URL reveals it's a cashtag. I'm feeling old.
I can imagine a general ledger audit to be 'bullet proof'. Of course there are other issues in a DB's user access management. But we can achieve the same results right here, right now, without having to invest $m to change our software/infrastructure/SIEM, etc. in order to achieve in 5 years, what we are already doing now.
Change will come (as always), but in the right time. Where "right" in this case is benefit largely outweigh costs (build/maintain/support/train/etc.)
The Brave browser suffers from this as well since they went with their own cryptocurrency BAT crap. Every "use brave" you see in the wild had a good chance of the 14-year-old hoping to get rich from their $2 investment. Yet they have all the time in the world to argue with people on the internet. There's no difference between the posts of someone who is excited about the Brave platform vs someone who holds $5 of BAT on Coinbase and thinks it will one day buy them a lambo if they put in the e-time.
It instantly makes your product reek.
Anyway even before checking that sort of view in generic ironically fits both the anti-capitalist and the speculator "Gordon Gecko" types.
It's software. A blockchain can be programmed to accommodate your use case. It can also accommodate preventing bias all powerful editors from destroying or manipulating information without the approval of the community, which wikipedia does not.
When it comes time to remove the offending data, the software that verifies the blockchain would accept in lieu of the actual data, a set of signatures of the elected editors. All nodes would replace the block with banned data with the replaced one.
It really isn't that hard.
I suppose limiting blockchain updates to one month intervals could help solve the energy problem...
Fine, make it instant. People can compare the old data with the new, and notice, and vote out an editor who is abusing their power.
The concept is bad because you don't want that property; you want a mutable data store with privileged and unprivileged access.
There are different categories of data. Data which refers to the the chain itself must be immutable, I agree. But data that represents the content of articles posted there does not.
> The concept is bad because you don't want that property; you want a mutable data store with privileged and unprivileged access.
You do want that property for some categories of data. You don't want unaccountability in who can update articles and what changes they can make, but you do want the articles to be changeable.
What this provides is to prevent an organization from being corruptable. A government or powerful corporate entity could pressure wikipedia into changing an article to suit their purposes, and wikipedia could stone wall and refuse to comment on any changes they made for that purpose.
If it was on a blockchain, and an editor was pressured into making such a change, the community would be able to directly vote that editor out and get the original content restored.
What you're really talking about here is a change of governance model to allow editors to be removed more easily.
Pretty much the goal of all these fact checking systems that keep getting offered up. We need protecting, facts need protecting, provided it is all approved facts and people and a means to track down those who are not approved or have ideas that are not approved
If you can talk up BTC/blockchain in some public place such that someone notable agrees it's useful - Wales qualifies - the crypto press would go nuts. "Wikipedia founder looking into blockchain!!" - anything to get it back in the press/public consciousness. If you can get it up just 10%, that's on paper $100k.
For thousands of people, this is their motivation. Talking up bitcoin is literally their full time job.
And that's why short-selling is so important.
Orthodox economics is severely underrated.
Oh, and bitcoin got a decent short-selling facility with the futures trading a while back.
(No clue why you are getting downvoted.)
When you buy (e.g.) real estate you can get value out of it without thinking about selling it for a profit later. Especially if it's your primary residence.
Same with most vehicles: they depreciate over time, but there is utilitarian value in the asset. Unless it's Steve McQueen's Mustang or something.
Not every "asset" is about ROI.
Real estate, and the various loans and derivatives, all eventually end up at real, productive assets that you might want to own.
Stocks and the various index funds and derivatives, all eventually end up with ownership of a company. A company which, if profitable, can pay dividends back to the owners.
I'd argue that it's a much rarer class of investment vehicle which is purely speculative.
Suppose a company makes $100,000 per year and this is expected to continue. How much would you pay for it?
Now, suppose it makes $100,000 per year, but for some reason once you have it, no one will buy it off you. How much would you pay for it?
You'd pay less in the second case, but not that much less. The company has a value which it gives to you for having ownership of it.
Meanwhile, bitcoin produces....$0 per year for owning it. The only value is in sale at a higher price. You have to bet on appreciation.
This is something fundamental people often misunderstand about, say, stocks. The price is set by supply and demand for the stock, but the value is determined by the cashflows. Usually price and value move at least somewhat in sync. But if stock markets went insane and valued everything at $0 for some reason, you'd still want to own companies.
A thought experiment to show the difference between price and value. Bitcoin currently has a price. No actual intrinsic value other than the hope of value in the future.
I don't think that whether it has this property (and value) is in question - the question is how much of BTC's price is fueled by that value.
Unless the income-producing aspect of the business is dependent on you, there's always someone willing to buy something that produces money.
In such a world, the $100,000/yr business still has value to you. That was the point.
At the moment I rather see people buying stuff that they think other people might deem valuable in the future, e.g. motivation behind buying TSLA is similar to buying BTC.
Given the huge amounts of money that investors will invest in companies that make negative money every year, I think this is (perhaps unfortunately) not at all true in the real world.
Even if this company owns the whole world at the end, is it worth even $1?
If I get non-voting shares that do not pay dividends, then these aren't shares, they're just useless scraps of paper. If the only utility I can get from them is being able to point out that I "technically" own the entire world, it is indeed useless.
Maybe I'm willing to pay a dollar for it but certainly not two.
*In the tech hysteria, it's easy to forget that this is where the fundamental value comes from.
Some people use BTC to pay for VPNs, drugs, or simply to get cash out of their country. There was a lot of speculation that the big spike in BTC a few years back was the Saudi royalty trying to move cash out before MBS cracked down on them.
Buying a stock/bond/asset comes with the intrinsic belief the value will increase. Being more specific, purchasing any speculative asset comes with the belief that the thing I am buying will increase in value relative to the thing I'm buying it.
The reverse is also true for selling a speculative asset.
Now that that is out of the way. Let's continue cherry picking as you've done and consider traders that specialize in short selling companies they deem as bad market actors. What do high profile short sellers do? They go on all sorts of media rants warning about companies/assets ect TO WARN PEOPLE AND INFORM THEM (legitimate or otherwise) for their own gain.
Cherry picking these ideas with respect to crypto is totally naive.
Ie. Can "on paper" millionaires realise that wealth if they choose to?
You can easily offload 10M USD worth over 10-20 minutes without having a big effect on the overall market.
It has been years since I looked but that wasn’t available when I did. It would be a positive sign for the maturity of the market.
Crypto is an unregulated wild west, so these OTC desks typically don't have BD licenses, might do prop trading and be the counterparty to your transaction and take your position on their books (and then try to unload it themselves at a profit), or might match trades with their own customer lists. It's typically a pretty low-tech operation running on chat rooms.
I've worked with a few of those firms.
Snapshot of live book depth at time of posting: https://imgur.com/a/rhi7ZKL
Taken from here, look for "view exchange": https://pro.coinbase.com/trade/BTC-USD
Speaking as someone who watched a buddy go through this process it took him ~2 days to get his limit increased to the millions for a wire transfer.
CMC reports around $37B in global BTC volume right now, but the real figure is probably $2.5 - 3B, and of that it's fragmented in different fiat currencies with different restrictions on where those exchanges are able to send money. So while it's certainly not nothing and it's better than years ago, it's like a quarter of the average daily volume of shares in a single company like Apple.
If you could somehow unload massive amounts of BTC without affecting the market it would be arbitraged away almost instantly.
People who suggest that it is possible to unload BTC without impacting the market don’t understand finance at all. Not understanding finance, economics, math, computer science, politics and monetary theory is par for course for most BTC supporters.
If you have a lot more BTC to sell than could comfortably move on exchanges, auctions are the way to go. Sometimes the feds seize large amounts of BTC and auction them off in large blocks, and they not only sell but they go for above then-current exchange rates.
There many small fish trading with a small ($500k-$1m) capital on a 3-5x leverage. They can do some days 5-10m of volume in usd.
Agreed.
But sometimes true believers don't need a lot of motivation. What motivates Rust or Arch Linux people to talk up their favorite technology 24/7?
This is why it's a scam.
Cryptocurrency enjoys a much, much higher mindshare among humans than cryptography. I guess because it's money. And also because it's been this weird but actual bubble, not to mention countless ponzi schemes and debased ICOs and Floyd Mayweather in a private jet and whatever.
I've resigned myself to saying all the syllables and typing all the characters of "cryptography" when I discuss it because I don't think you and I are going to win this one.
You can always think of it, every time you see it, as meaning "cryptosporidium"
What I mean is: I agree with you, but I think the crypto ship has sailed.
For what it's worth I started backpacking in the 1990s and back then "crypto" to me meant cryptosporidium, the 2nd biggest concern about drinking backcountry water (after giardia).
Crypto is ALREADY short for cryptography, as in, cryptographic-currency => crypto-currency.
But to your point, there are hangers-on in the technology space advocating every day for the use of things they don’t understand. It becomes wearisome trying to deal with them. They can never truly explain, beyond market-speak, what they propose. It’s really only troublesome when they’ve sold their snake oil to someone with clout in your company ...
Obviously he was proposing storing metadata, not the content itself. Typically this kind of system works by storing a checksum of the content, or a link to the resource in an external decentralized-but-mutable store like IPFS. The illegal files would be dropped but there would still be an undeniable record on the blockchain.
I'm not defending the nonsensical use case (decentralizing the attribution part in an otherwise centrally controlled system wouldn't benefit anyone), but you might want to look more into crypto yourself if you care to learn.
EDIT: As expected, anything that's not bashing crypto (preferably with unrelated arguments) rakes in downvotes. Aah the lovely HN hivemind.
I’m guessing you’re getting downvoted because
1) you’re assuming a lot about what this guy intended and giving him a lot of credit when he clearly didn’t understand the topic, and
2) you end with “you might want to look more into crypto yourself if you care to learn” which almost seems like trolling because it’s essentially what this guy told Wales.
> 1) you’re assuming a lot about what this guy intended and giving him a lot of credit when he clearly didn’t understand the topic
I'll quote Daniel Krawisz's tweets with added emphasis on the points which indicate he wasn't proposing storing content on a blockchain:
> It would be so cheap to record [enough information] about all @Wikipedia interactions on the $BSV blockchain [...]
Key word "enough", suggesting "not all".
> My point is just that because because Bitcoin transactions always leave records, someone who uploaded illegal content would leave you with more [contextual information] that you could track on the blockchain than you would have if there weren't payments associated with their interactions.
"contextual information" == "metadata"
> 2) you end with “you might want to look more into crypto yourself if you care to learn” which almost seems like trolling because it’s essentially what this guy told Wales.
That was more about noticing the irony in GP chastising the tweeter for their ignorance and then showing seemingly greater ignorance about the same topic.
Also, don’t use brackets for emphasis. Brackets are used editorially to replace content or leave an editorial note. Using them for emphasis makes it look like you actually changed the core of the quote. And they make it harder to read.
You weren’t starting a conversation about this perceived bias. You were just whining about downvotes.
This particular issue of the privacy of the blockchain is one of the best examples, I very commonly see discussions in CC circles where it's both argued that blockchain respects its user's privacy and at the same time that we shouldn't be worried about bad actors abusing an anonymous, unregulated system to fuel corruption or highly illegal stuff because "everything is public on the blockchain, it's completely transparent". I guess that's why many of them have this obsession about quantum resistance, there's clearly a state superposition at play in there somewhere.
An other favorite of mine is "what do you mean cryptocurrency is unpractical? I use it to pay everyday using <centrally operated credit card service provided by a centrally operated cryptocurrency exchange using an off-chain ledger that may or may not eventually be settled in bulk on the blockchain>". Sounds like Visa with extra steps to me.
NIST has a really good document, Blockchain Technology Overview (NISTIR 8202):
* https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/nistir/8202/final
Chapter 8, Application Considerations, has a good yes/no flowchart that asks a series of question before saying "maybe Blockchain"
* Do you need a shared, consistent data store?
* Does more than one entity need to contribute data?
* Data records, once written, are never updated or deleted?
* Sensitive identifiers WILL NOT be written to the data store?
* Are the entities with write access having a hard time deciding who should be in control of the data store?
* Do you want a tamperproof log of all writes to the data store?
If the answer to any of the above questions is "no", NIST suggests something else.
* https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/sp
The NISTIR series also worth perusing.
This is a big "no" for every project excluding bitcoin.
And some of them argue in what they would call good faith, for they have drunk the koolaide, want to believe, for this allows them to believe that they hold a valuable asset, were clever in getting in early, etc.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
It does a disservice to say the technology is already there, because it suggests that the current version is as good as it gets. To me, blockchain or something that incorporates its best features (decentralization, immutability) will need to process transactions for:
- Fractions of a cent - Confirm in seconds
So far that is not possible, and there is no clear way to achieve it, but with blockchain as a base there is no doubt that it will eventually be done. At that point, if you have not sacrificed decentralization or immutability, you have something truly amazing.
Too bad it is still vaporware.
LND 0.4-beta was released March 15, 2018. Today there are 11k nodes, 35k channels, $9,000,000 network capacity:
Has anybody brought up how user friendly bitcoin is?
I too enjoy having to print bitcoin private keys on archival paper, wrap them in ten ziplock bags, shove that into a watertight container and bury it under the backyard bird feeder. Otherwise somebody would get my keys and take ownership of my entire net worth, leaving me destined for the poor house.
Because with bitcoin, whoever has the key owns the bitcoin.
Seen it pretty commonly on reddit for various topics.
Bitcoin is not remotely private. Monero is.
This is a summary of 99% of "blockchain will solve your problem" pitches. Nor they understand the existing state of the art in DBs and other information storage systems. (Technology that's been around since the 70s)
Jimmy's reply is basically "you don't understand the use case"; which the OP does not because he's trying to find a use for the cool tech he learned. What I don't understand is why Jimmy is publicly arguing with someone as green as the OP...
I guess that's the whole point of it: illegal doesn't mean it's immoral, and no content could be silenced. But then another issue is who is going to pay for storing terabytes of copies of communist manifesto in-between legitimate edits to articles.
>What a sales pitch.
Makes sense to me. It hampers government censorship by making something illegal. While I'm sure people have exceptions they think should be illegal and inaccessible, the end result with technology is you either have a technology that is resistant to censorship for everything or nothing, and I prefer everything.
It is the same thing with encryption. You can give the government a backdoor just for the super illegal stuff you really want to stop, but the backdoor will exist for all material and thus compromise encryption in general, even if the government super duper pinky promises to only use it on the original illegal stuff.
Too much of this is all or nothing and I think the powers that wish for censorship keep pushing for 'just one exception' for a specific kind of illegal material to get public support for compromising the system for just that one thing, betting on the average individual not realizing that the compromise compromises the whole systems resistance against government censorship at any level.
I don't see why it is considered such an inherently bad sales pitch. It is a sales pitch that involves taking a stand. Just because the cost benefit aren't in line with current organization goals does not make it the worst sales pitch ever. Is it any worse than trying to convince a group to run a tor node, giving all the sorts of illegal things that happen over tor?
There are social and legal ramifications, but that is also true of using tor, and if certain government officials get their way, of using encryption without the government being given a backdoor. Currently data stores that can't forget have a worse view, but I don't really see why people treat it as such a difference of kinds instead of just a difference of degrees.
I find this pretty perfectly describes the majority of crypto enthusiasts.
They're also not seeing the flip-side of paying-to-edit and tracking all editors: it's trivial for a government to then use it do identify anyone they consider a dissident.
I'd be genuinely fascinated to hear your story.
Non-Chinese person living in China. I have helped three PRC citizens buy BTC to pay for VPN service.
Arguably, this is the same category as (b) if you substitute "drugs" with the more generic "prohibited goods and/or services."
Evergreen observation
Heck, the entire pitch for bitcoin sv seems to be we will make bitcoin scale by removing all the limits that give normal bitcoin the slightest chance of scaling. It seems pretty rediculous even by bitcoin standards.
This is just trolling. No thought has gone into whether Wikipedia has a problem to solve, nor whether blockchain has the capabilities to solve any problem. It's just memes.
>Bitcoin can help any system to become more Byzantine fault tolerant
Bitcoin, the only tech fad which can prevent you from having weird mad emperors or being invaded by the Turks.
You know, I'm not quite sure how yet, but I'm almost certain we can fix this problem with blockchain.
Jokes aside, I would rather see a working proof of concept 'Blockchain Wikipedia' being made from this crowd rather than have them shout suggestive buzzwords at Jimmy Wales.
That being said, I wonder if Linus is open to making Git commits work on the bitcoin blockchain, might have to ask him someday.
Commit hashes are a hash of the previous commit hash + new data. The structure (history) is replicated in a decentralized way on every user's node. The only missing thing is a proof-of-work, but that is optional in the definition of a blockchain.
However its more of a Merkle tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree; which blockchain is also.
Are there any traditional block chains where the proof of work is actually an investment into the chain? Such that the structure of the chain represents something of actual value (not a series of rare hashes), and additions to the chain add to that value? A la git. One potential example would be neural networks on a chain, where the work is training the network, and the value is intrinsic in the well-fitted resultant model.
If Git is like using a hammer to hammer nails, blockchain (with consensus protocol) enables you to write without a pen by using the hammer to hit your thumb until it bleeds. And Wikipedia already has a pen that works.
Honestly, "blockchain" as a word feels ill-defined and badly understood at the best of times. You could argue that "blockchain" deconstructs to nothing more than a "chain" of "blocks". What "blocks" actually are is up to the imagination, proof-of-work or other algorithms aside.
I get frustrated when people hail "blockchains" as the solution to everything because the term is so vague in everyday use that it's effectively meaningless.
No.
You can say that git reduces to a Merkle tree. And blockchains use Merkle trees.
But you can't say that git is a blockchain.
https://gist.github.com/joepie91/e49d2bdc9dfec4adc9da8a8434f...
https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-q...
I think you are looking for the other qualities that typically apply to a blockchain such as the implicit need to "mine" its resources. Git simply produces these resources incidentally. I think this is the only major difference.
A Merkle tree is not a recursive signature algorithm, because a hash function is not a signature algorithm.
https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/08/you-wouldnt-base64-a-pass...
(Yes, you can build signature algorithms out of hash functions, but definitions matter.)
Git + PGP + some computationally expensive mechanism to broadcast verified PGP key attributions + a consensus algorithm might be a little bit like a blockchain, but I can't think of a good use case for that. Git repos generally aren't intended to be pushed to by the whole world.
In other words, the blockchain is just the data structure, the consensus sits outside of that as a distributed protocol.
Of course, parts of that data structure enable the protocol to work, which is the most interesting property of the blockchain, but that's just blocks, merkle trees, and chained signatures.
Using the hash of a parent node as input to a nodes hash alongside the nodes data creates a link, but it doesn't create a merkle tree. In a Merkle tree the parent node is the hash of the hashes of its child nodes and only leafes have data. These are entirely different definitions and also serve completely different purposes (linking to a parent node vs efficient lookup of membership of some data in a larger dataset).
Could someone clear up my confusion and explain to me where Git/Blockchain use a Merkle tree in their fundamental functionality? Or is the term Merkle tree simply misreferenced a lot?
In a merkle tree the leaves are not linked and they have a tree structure of parent hashes on top. Git and Blockchain nodes are linked and the fundamental architecture doesn't need a tree structure of hashes on top. While this tree structure on top might be useful, it would be an optimization, but not part of the fundamental architecture. Again, what am I missing?
When you say that "git and blockchain nodes are linked", I think you might be not abstracting the concepts from the form the data usually takes. For instance in git you might be thinking of a commit as a single package with all its source changes, headers, parent details and hash, but it terms of it being a merkle tree the leaf node would be non-hash parts (source code, non-hash headers etc) and the "tree on top" would be the hashes. This tree structure of hashes are absolutely part of the fundamental architecture of git/blockchain.
There is no chain, it's a DAG.
A blockchain is basically a single, global Git repository, where each commit is a “block” and the data inside that block/“commit” are transactions.
The defining difference between Git and a blockchain is that blockchains define which branch (commit history) is the correct one — the branch that you should put your commit on top of.
Blockchain provides a means to arrive at a consensus on which commit history (branch) is correct, while Git does not.
What does this even mean?
A general rule of thumb is: Don't use blockchain if a database maintained by a single organization (person / company / government ) is sufficient. If multiple people interact, or multiple organizations interact and together want to maintain some data where they all collaborate and take decisions on how the data is changed then only we need blockchain.
So when I think about it, wiki can definitely be helped by blockchains.
Existing businesses have coped with that for hundreds of years.
You can have joint-ventures, where all participants send emissaries to, you can negotiate rights to view the books or other ways to create transparency. You can have contracts, backed by a legal system and state courts.
You can do many things. Blockchains are only one of those possibilities.
Most important question when somebody tries to sell you a blockchain: "What's the traditional way to do it?"
Correct answer: "People usually do X, but our blockchain proposal has advantages Y and Z."
Incorrect answer: "Nobody has ever solved that problem before!"
I mean, isn't this basically just Hugo and IPFS behind a Brand?
For better or worse, in the last few years we have been generating a dataset on social forums by using “/s” at the end of sarcastic statements.
I’ll try and mine the “/s” statements on HN at least and see if I get somewhere.
It's difficult because even if you have the context, the original poster can change classification after being called out by replying "oh, I was just kidding/I was being sarcastic". The same comment may and may not be sarcastic at the same time, Schrödinger's cat style.
That being said, it's an interesting problem. Hope you find something good.
Surely he gets bombarded with rewrite suggestions and pointless distractions all the time, and he is pretty practiced at just ignoring them?
I think someone now saw the blockchain hype and want to propose it without understanding, like a few years ago when it was really a new hype.
After some dismay from people opposed to this (both people who are "anti-Bitcoin", and the Bitcoin proponents who are anti-SV), he stated that he intends to speak his mind and tell the conference that BSV won't help Wikipedia in any way.
Wales is no stranger to social media or publicity. The fact that this thread has been posted to HN shows that.
That should perhaps be a sign.
> Please consider the very real possibility that it is you, not him, who is missing something.
Of course I now feel bad for occasionally hitting it with my frivolous queries, and would be very sad to see it limited.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_guide
There have been various forays into Semantic Web technologies. Previously people have done things like parse the infoboxes on Wikipedia pages and then import that into a triple store.
It seems that now the Wikimedia Foundation is finally interested in moving in this direction. But the software isn't there yet, certainly not at the scale Wikipedia needs.
In fact, SQLite is the first database listed on the detailed install instructions page[1]!
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installing_MediaWiki#C...
Actually, too many... I need to go and upgrade it.
And I'm really not sure if whatever blockchain solution that person on twitter wants Wikimedia to use is even able to get to that scale, yet alone perform better an it than what Wikimedia currently has.
I'm not arguing blockchain would be a good mitigation for a future incident though.
Because Wikipedia's database is centralized, and lives at a particular (range of) IP addresses, it's trivial for a state actor to censor it.
Does a sprinkling of magic blockchain solve this problem? Not really. But something more specific to the problem might; being able to torrent the full data dump is a step in the right direction.
And all this is really a red herring, both in relation to the unspecified use of blockchain and in relation to resistance to state censorship.
This is not restricted to the blockchain, of course. Something like e.g. SSB fits the bill.
It would still be just as easy to censor. If a censor goes beyond simple DNS manipulation and drops packages to specific IPs, he can just as easily add the few hundred IPs of database servers to that list as he can add the few hundred IPs of the frontend web servers.
Now, your example of SSB shows very well why this is a red herring. Even if Mediawiki put in the huge work to use SSB as a storage backend, nothing would change at all regarding censorship. What you really want is, I assume, a federated version of Wikimedia's architecture.
Feel free to develop such a system but I don't think anything but a complete rewrite of Mediawiki would allow for that, and even then, I doubt it would be much more censorship resistant, unless you also take on such features like using TOR hidden services or invite-only networks, which are both perfectly possible right now (and are in fact available right now).
And as I said, there is a multitude of options to access the data right now. For example, to build mirrors of Wikipedia for citizens of countries where Wikipedia is blocked. However, it's not necessarily trivial and it doesn't get easier simply by sprinkling some cryptography over the storage layer of all places.
The choice of database, much like the choices of the rest of the architecture, limit it in some ways. That's it. It's not a "red herring". And of course, other choices would have limited in different ways, no doubt.
By the way, the use case I was thinking of was updating pages over sneakernet, which is how information is disseminated in countries where Internet assess is not just censored, but also quite limited. TOR and other tunneling systems are no help at all with this. But like I said, I do not want Wikipedia to be changed. I just want to note that it's a limitation it has.
https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages
And also download snapshots from IPFS
https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/
I guess the issue with snapshots of large datasets is that they go out of date, and downloading the whole data set regularly is a bit painful
Wikipedia has grown to the point where it's really so important that the database is going to need to be WORM compliant so records can't be changed and editors can be encouraged to be more responsible. This would make inserting false info more expensive & increase trust.
Jimmy replied:
It is really important that records can be changed. Removing that feature would be bad.
"Please use this technology I'm financially invested in, because I want its value to rise."
And that makes the whole exchange pretty surreal.
This works as well as any other system designed by the sales team.
Either way it’s a solution looking for a problem and the solution it’s always these people being the ones in charge.
"That isn't how blockchain works. That suggestion - to force people to strongly identify and pay for the privilege of editing Wikipedia - is a bad idea independently. And [it] would be easy and cheap to implement without blockchain."
This is the key problem with most DLT applications. Any blockchain that's used for audit and verification needs some way to connect what happens in the real world (the person uploading content) to the digital one. Putting the digital side onto a blockchain doesn't help if you can fake the data you're putting in. Garbage in, garbage out.
> That you think more deeply about why Bitcoin is a good idea.
This pretty much sums up every conversation I have had with a blockchain proponent.
Anyway, wikimedia posts backup copies of the database at dumps.wikimedia.com, and those pages include sha and md5 hashes. I even found a page of magnet links for english wikipedia on the meta wikipedia.
Magnet links contain the hash of the target, but it’s unclear if meta.m.wikipedia is included in the english language dump file, or if it includes magnet links pointing to itself.
I’d love to find the missing links. I’m sure Jimmy Wales would love credit for accidentally reinventing the blockchain before the term was coined.
Edit: Searching it seems to be a Bitcoin fork made by a fraud claiming to be Satoshi.
>> Why are you anti-capitalist?
> I’m not anti-capitalist, are you on drugs?
https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1226873569508044808
Ahh, Twitter.
They have specific use cases sure, and some people who made a load of money in 2017 do chat a lot of rubbish, but it has become a bit of a meme topic around here which is a shame.
I don’t feel I could post a genuinely interesting paper on decentralised consensus without it being downvoted because blockchains won’t work as the data store of some web app.
The context for the blockchain is distributed public log allowing anyone to replay and revalidate transactions from the inception at any given time with no need for approval of any other parties. As soon as any of those characteristics ( distributed, public, revalidatable) are not met ( !distributed, has access controls, not revalidatable from inception ) it became a weird ass database. Probably a rather lousy database.
Visa B2B Connect is a database, which is why Visa is needed and which is why customers need to be onboarded. Blockchain there is a marketing gimmick.
This is still a somewhat interesting place because topics that attract hordes of spammers and shills and low-effort memers are either outright banned or downvoted instantly to oblivion.
Completely disagree. Any discussion about the technical limitations or economic limitations of blockchain or cryptocurrency is immediately downvoted.
Blockchain and cryptocurrency have a high amount of hype and irrational believers who see any form of criticism as a direct attack. The technologies (and economics) are much more limited than the irrational believers realize, and they (irrational believers) shoot the messenger instead of taking the time to learn basic economics and distributed computing.
I've been hearing about these use-cases for blockchain for years now ... and still waiting for actual production use.
I'm also skeptical that a regular server-based approach wouldn't be better to solve those issues. If banks and suppliers can get together and agree to use blockchain to track their transactions, they can get together and set up a centralized server to do the same.
Blockchain is a 'technically interesting' architecture in search of a problem to solve.
Preserving the integrity of log files and other records is a very obvious and huge use case. Enterprise products have been on the market for years and have been put into use by companies like Ericsson and Lockheed Martin.
https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/2014/9/ericsson-a...
https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2017-04-27-Lockheed-Martin-C...
https://www.rsyslog.com/doc/v8-stable/configuration/modules/...
It's a direct reaction to the hype. The Twitter thread posted is a perfect example of why: people are sick of receiving pitches that are utterly irrelevant to what they do, promoting blockchain just because.
Look: if blockchain is as good as its proponents say it is then negativity on HN isn't about to stop it (remember the initial comments on Dropbox when it was posted on here?). But if blockchain can't withstand even mild scrutiny from a community of online grouches then maybe there actually is a problem?
The company had a few owners, and most of them non computer science people (administration, markting, eletronic engineering backgrounds), and would always sugest the use of blockchains, to store the sound samples, and metadata, just because was the cool term at the time.
Since it would not add anything to our business model, and would come full of techical hurdles, I would always opose, wath lead to the creation of the sign.
Though the keyword was AI or Machine Learning.
The mission was always "how can we implement a machine learning solution?" not "what are our needs and how can we most effectively meet them?"
Someone is looking to pad the resume.
"Oversaw implementation of $TRENDY_TECH solution that $MEANINGLESS_METRICS"
> bitcoin
> blockchain
> proposing /g/ memetech without even understanding it
yeah the memes write themselves.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/tomi-ma....
Hackernews fell for it hook, line and sinker. We've got to stop taking life so seriously!
Netflix...”
I absolutely love this sentiment. I hope this user launches a blockchain based Wikipedia competitor, and announces it on Show HN, so I can have monthly updates on the technobabble fulled madness of a platform built by people who don’t understand the technology or the space they are trying to solve, but think it will all be ok as long as they can issue an ICO of their wiki-coin before the feds shut them down.
I’m thinking it will pan out like a breaking bad/Silicon Valley cross over.
That is not something I would have guessed.
Lots of libertarian/anarchist types putting all their bets on blockchain without really knowing much about it. Jimmy's response was gentle considering the circumstances.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites -- top 10 worldwide, top 5 outside China
Ain't it obvious that this is a good idea?