4 ms·

> It is difficult enough to get two people to agree. Three is harder, and four is even harder. Once a community gets to fifty or hundreds of people, getting eve

by witten 11y ago

> It is difficult enough to get two people to agree. Three is harder, and four is even harder. Once a community gets to fifty or hundreds of people, getting everyone to agree is an irrational goal. But this is ok. Mechanisms exist to resolve disagreement amongst large groups of people (like voting). Waiting for everyone to agree is the same as saying that nothing will be done. It's almost like we need some sort of mechanism or formal protocol for reaching consensus among a group of geographically distributed people. A kind of.. distributed consensus protocol.

kang 11y ago
Bitcoin does not achieve distributed consensus based on choices but distributed consensus based on randomness. Any miner can win a lottery & then everyone agrees on that state. However, this lottery is not totally random since probability of winning is not propotional to hashrate contributed by a miner(mining invariance). That flaw is already a major concern that has led to mining centralization. Bitcoin is not a voting substitute. No such protocol exists yet because sybil attack is unsolved yet without identity.
- witten 11y ago
  Depends how you want to reach consensus. For instance, if you're going for one-person-one-vote, then yeah, that's gonna be subject to Sybil attacks without identity. But if instead you settle for plutocracy, then you can just use something like proof of burn to tally votes.
  - TD-Linux 11y ago
    Someone actually created something like that using proof-of-stake (proof of controlling Bitcoins): http://bitcoinocracy.com/ http://bitcoinocracy.com/
    - nullc 11y ago
      And the interesting thing about it is that it generally comes out overwhelmingly opposed to these incompatible system rule changes: http://bitcoinocracy.com/arguments/if-non-core-hard-fork-wins-major-holders-will-sell-btc-driving-price-into-the-ground http://bitcoinocracy.com/arguments/if-non-core-hard-fork-win... (the oppose side of that was up to about 4500 BTC at peak but the party providing those coins has since moved them). It's hard to say what it means; I know a lot of people around Bitcoin Core whom won't use it because of the privacy problems with it-- in particular, people on the Bitcoin XT subreddit were previously threatening to retaliate by dishonoring the funds of people that didn't agree with them. But I do think it's quite interesting that opinions seem to swing 179 degree when you switch between very sockpuppetry vulnerable venues and ones which are not.
nzoschke 11y ago
This is fascinating to watch. The Bitcoin block chain is an explicit distributed consensus algorithm. The Bitcoin community is an implicit consensus-based human system. The two are inextricably linked because humans put hard-earned dollars into the algorithm. A lot of dollars... We're watching the two systems try to cooperate to evolve, and it looks pretty messy. When looking at it through this lens, I'm even more confident in my decision to not put money into Bitcoin. I can't think of any software systems that are successful without granting specific individuals near total authority so they don't have to rule everything by consensus. The most successful businesses follow the CEO model. Apple is Steve's vision and execution. The most successful open source software projects follow the benevolent dictator model. Linus runs Linux, Guido runs Python. Other protocols like HTTP have a pretty broad set of people that make up a standards board. But at the end of the day we have all given Google, Apple, Mozilla and Microsoft executive authority over the protocol through unanimously adopting their clients. With Bitcoin, the core development team is already starting from a weak position, since anyone else can start up nodes that speak the protocol differently. The miners are granted most of the power and authority by the algorithm, but anyone can participate in mining. Wallet software needs to cooperate. Businesses and end users that operate on Bitcoin have their own wants and needs. It's a miracle anyone bought into this system in the first place, and will be a miracle if they figure out how to cooperate to evolve.

by witten 11y ago

kang 11y ago

Bitcoin does not achieve distributed consensus based on choices but distributed consensus based on randomness. Any miner can win a lottery & then everyone agrees on that state. However, this lottery is not totally random since probability of winning is not propotional to hashrate contributed by a miner(mining invariance). That flaw is already a major concern that has led to mining centralization. Bitcoin is not a voting substitute. No such protocol exists yet because sybil attack is unsolved yet without identity.

witten 11y ago
Depends how you want to reach consensus. For instance, if you're going for one-person-one-vote, then yeah, that's gonna be subject to Sybil attacks without identity. But if instead you settle for plutocracy, then you can just use something like proof of burn to tally votes.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  Someone actually created something like that using proof-of-stake (proof of controlling Bitcoins): http://bitcoinocracy.com/ http://bitcoinocracy.com/
  - nullc 11y ago
    And the interesting thing about it is that it generally comes out overwhelmingly opposed to these incompatible system rule changes: http://bitcoinocracy.com/arguments/if-non-core-hard-fork-wins-major-holders-will-sell-btc-driving-price-into-the-ground http://bitcoinocracy.com/arguments/if-non-core-hard-fork-win... (the oppose side of that was up to about 4500 BTC at peak but the party providing those coins has since moved them). It's hard to say what it means; I know a lot of people around Bitcoin Core whom won't use it because of the privacy problems with it-- in particular, people on the Bitcoin XT subreddit were previously threatening to retaliate by dishonoring the funds of people that didn't agree with them. But I do think it's quite interesting that opinions seem to swing 179 degree when you switch between very sockpuppetry vulnerable venues and ones which are not.

nzoschke 11y ago

This is fascinating to watch. The Bitcoin block chain is an explicit distributed consensus algorithm. The Bitcoin community is an implicit consensus-based human system. The two are inextricably linked because humans put hard-earned dollars into the algorithm. A lot of dollars... We're watching the two systems try to cooperate to evolve, and it looks pretty messy. When looking at it through this lens, I'm even more confident in my decision to not put money into Bitcoin. I can't think of any software systems that are successful without granting specific individuals near total authority so they don't have to rule everything by consensus. The most successful businesses follow the CEO model. Apple is Steve's vision and execution. The most successful open source software projects follow the benevolent dictator model. Linus runs Linux, Guido runs Python. Other protocols like HTTP have a pretty broad set of people that make up a standards board. But at the end of the day we have all given Google, Apple, Mozilla and Microsoft executive authority over the protocol through unanimously adopting their clients. With Bitcoin, the core development team is already starting from a weak position, since anyone else can start up nodes that speak the protocol differently. The miners are granted most of the power and authority by the algorithm, but anyone can participate in mining. Wallet software needs to cooperate. Businesses and end users that operate on Bitcoin have their own wants and needs. It's a miracle anyone bought into this system in the first place, and will be a miracle if they figure out how to cooperate to evolve.