10 ms·

The blockchain is a threat to the distributed future of the Internet

124 points by xrorre 10y ago

natrius 10y ago
This just isn't true. Yes, running your own blockchain node is infeasible, but a blockchain-based service with hosted nodes is better than a federated service. Proof-of-work creates an illusion of dependence on blockchain miners. Proof-of-stake makes it clear that blockchains are run by a corporation that wants to maximize transaction fee revenue. Transaction validators have to do the best job of maintaining a unified historical record of all transactions for people to keep giving them business. Otherwise, users will choose different validators and carry on without them. Blockchains are fancy spools of receipt paper. If the printer gets jammed, tear off the stuff you care about and staple it to a new spool. The printer doesn't control the people. The people employ the printer. With that said, it's still unclear whether blockchains are the right choice for publishing. A decentralized Twitter doesn't need consensus on a historical record. An IPFS-based Twitter is probably a better way to start, then anchor the parts that need consensus on a blockchain, like usernames and timestamps.
- api 10y ago
  Your last point is important-- I think too many people in the distributed systems / decentralization community rush to block chain as the one hammer to pound every nail. It's not. It's a solution to a very specific set of consensus problems but outside that it's not the best thing.
- goldbrick 10y ago
  What part isn't true, specifically? We are dependent on blockchain miners, because without them our transactions don't get accepted. Moreover we have a couple established big players that control the market and no clear way for them to get disrupted, save abandoning Bitcoin entirely. Blockchains are much more than receipt paper. Receipt paper is a superfluous byproduct. The blockchain is the system of record.
  - natrius 10y ago
    This is untrue: "Because blockchain is consensual, after a certain point of centralization, the rules of the system depend on very few users." If a blockchain has rules that don't meet my needs, I can choose a different blockchain. If I adopt a blockchain that changes its rules to be undesirable, I can take the history I care about and move it to another blockchain. This argument depends on proof-of-stake. Some people think proof-of-work blockchains are the only useful ones, but I disagree. It's also a boring debate to have, so I won't be doing that here.
    - drdaeman 10y ago
      > If a blockchain has rules that don't meet my needs, I can choose a different blockchain. Had this happened with Bitcoin? I think I heard there are some quite major disagreements (something about block sizes and stuff) and there are a lot of users that aren't happy. I don't remember hearing them just "well, whatever" and forking off.
      - natrius 10y ago
        Bitcoin is a special case because it's only really intended to be used as a ledger for bitcoins. Currencies are a collective delusion: they're valuable because other people think they are valuable. Any dispute over what the source of truth is for a currency's ledger strains that delusion, possibly to the breaking point. The value of the currency would suffer, which would defeat the purpose of a fork. Ethereum is a general purpose blockchain. Forking it could hurt the value of ether, but for many applications, the value of ether doesn't matter. Moving a blockchain-based Twitter from one fork to another is relatively easy and consequence-free.
        drdaeman 10y ago
        > Moving a blockchain-based Twitter from one fork to another is relatively easy and consequence-free. I'm not sure it's really consequence-free. It's essentially a netsplit, where the forking party lose connectivity with everyone who's left. Consider the case where Twitter (the centralized one) is suddenly falling apart over some issue into two distinct non-interoperating services. Technically - sure - it's a no-brainer, but socially it feels quite complicated to me. (I guess, this would work if the app would be designed to use multiple blockchains. I need to give it some thought.)
- schmichael 10y ago
  > Proof-of-work creates an illusion of dependence on blockchain miners. How is proof-of-work's dependence on miners an illusion? Seems like a fundamental property of proof-of-work that it depends solely on the consensus of miners.
  - natrius 10y ago
    Miners only mine to gain more bitcoins. The market determines what bitcoins are. The market can decide to treat a different historical record with different rules as the ledger for bitcoins. This is much easier in proof-of-stake systems. You can't destroy a bad miner's mining equipment, but you can destroy a bad validator's deposit, which removes them from the system.
    - falcolas 10y ago
      > you can destroy a bad validator's deposit And how does this happen? By a consensus of miners? If I, as an individual, were to find reason to distrust a entity who makes up the majority of mining transactions, how likely is it that I will be able to use the main blockchain ever again?
      - natrius 10y ago
        Yes, by a consensus of miners, or by users choosing a new set of miners. The "main blockchain" is not a decision of the miners. It's a decision of the people. If everyone agrees that current miners are behaving badly in a proof-of-stake system, they can just choose new miners.
        toss1 10y ago
        OK, I'll bite, with a serious, practical question -- how would I do that this week? Please assume that I have 100 BTC at a particular address or small set of addresses, and I don't like the Chinese mining consortia. How do I actually move my value to a new chain that 1) excludes those mining consortia, 2) preserves my stored value, and 3) preserves my ability to transact with any other valid BTC address? How can I get this done by next week?
- athenot 10y ago
  > but a blockchain-based service with hosted nodes is better than a federated service ...and a federated service is better than a handful of silos controlling the network. So if the blockchain is supported by the mining of many small miners, it's a decentralized dream. But if there are a handful of miners validating the majority of transactions, then it ends up smelling a lot like the handful of silos situation. Not exactly the same but very similar.
  - natrius 10y ago
    Miners cannot control your eyes. You can choose any record as your source of truth. If miners produce a good one, look at that one. If they produce a bad one, look somewhere else.
    - t1amat 10y ago
      This sounds great but it is a dramatic misunderstanding of the real problem. Sure, you can personally decide you don't like a particular fork. However, the value of your position is not determined by you, it is determined by the community and their overall choice. Bitcoin forking is dangerous. If it goes bad and the community becomes overly fragmented then everyone loses. The strength of a position in Bitcoin is a combination of many factors, but the most important ones are related to the size of the community, its relative stability as a crypto coin, and the relative ubiquity of it.
- RyJones 10y ago
  Intel recently unveiled PoET - proof of elapsed time - in Sawtooth Lake. https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html
- mr_sturd 10y ago
  > An IPFS-based Twitter is probably a better way to start Did you see the AKASHA discussion, last week? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11678810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11678810
- wslh 10y ago
  > Proof-of-work creates an illusion of dependence on blockchain miners. PoW depends on blockchain miners by definition and the Bitcoin experience shows that at the end you have a concentration of power. > With that said, it's still unclear whether blockchains are the right choice for publishing. It is very clear that blockchains ARE NOT the right choice for publishing, its limitations for that purpose are based on strong computer science principles on distributed systems, consensus and network speed.
  - natrius 10y ago
    Technological frontiers are no place for dogma. Sure, blockchains probably aren't a good choice for publishing, but a culture that constrains people's technology choices is incompatible with progress.
    - wslh 10y ago
      This is not dogma but computer science research, you need to find the right tools for the right problem. BTW one of my companies is focused in blockchain, cryptocurrencies, etc and I can't believe the level of hype experienced there. For example, I read about the DAO Ethereum crowdsale but we experience serious technical issues with Ethereum that clash with that hype.
psiconaut 10y ago
i'm not a fan of "blockchain for everything", but stating that a distributed system is a danger for distribution, and favoring a decentralized, federated approach instead sounds like plainly wrong.
pyrale 10y ago
"The" blockchain = one subset of potential uses of Ethereum ? Did someone take some time to tell author that internet is not www, and that www is not maintaining datacenters ? I'm surprised that some people find this article informative.
Animats 10y ago
"The alternative on which we can build a great new Internet era is projects like GNU social, Friendica, Hubzilla, Diaspora, and efforts to design common protocols like ActivityPub, not on the blockchain." All the new federated social systems have failed, replaced by commercial, centralized systems. (IRC and email live on. Google thinks it owns Usenet, rebranded as "Google Groups", and a big chunk of email never passes through SMTP.) Why? We had a good discussion of this recently by the creator of WhatsApp(?). Centralized systems can be upgraded and enhanced. Federated systems require massive cooperation to change. And federated systems don't generate much revenue.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Presumably you are talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11668912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11668912 The author helped WhatsApp move to an end to end encrypted protocol.
- fallenshell 10y ago
  Besides, there's the convenience and ease of use aspect. Most of these federated services are not easy to use for the average newcomer or tech-illiterate user demographic, for example. And sometimes they're inconvenient.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    Couldn't a federated system that looks like a centralized system work? What if something like Diaspora just installed itself on an AWS EC2 instance for you, and you only had to enter a credit card?
    - Animats 10y ago
      An EC2 instance is probably too much for one user. The model here is Wordpress, which is easy to install and widely used, even in its distributed form. Of course, what's happened is that more and more Wordpress sites run on centralized Wordpress. Compare: "wordpress.com" (hosted): "Create your new website for free. WordPress.com is the best place for your personal blog or business site. Create Website (button)" "wordpress.org" (download): "The latest stable release of WordPress (Version 4.5.2) is available in two formats from the links to your right. If you have no idea what to do with this download, we recommend signing up with one of our web hosting partners that offers a one-click install of WordPress or getting a free account on WordPress.com." Open source just doesn't get user-friendly onboarding.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Imagine if BitTorrent, or Freenet/IPFS/GNUNet/etc. used a blockchain. They'd be completely infeasible for anyone except Google: you'd need petabytes of storage on your computer just to download a single movie (or a Linux ISO, or whatever). But they don't do that. These systems are actually distributed, and that's why they work.
- ultramancool 10y ago
  You're missing the point of what a blockchain is good at vs what it's not. Blockchains are good for assigning ownership. For networks which don't need to track ownership, of course you shouldn't use a blockchain. Bittorrent, Freenet, etc do not track ownership as infinite copies of something is not a problem, but a feature. But for networks which do, you may want to. For example, only one person may control this name, this domain, this tradeable asset, etc. Blockchains are an addon to distributed models because they allow a distributed way to prove ownership of something. Say I want to look someone up by name instead of by cryptographic hash, how do I do it? You can't register a name in a Freenet or Bittorrent model.
  - natrius 10y ago
    Beyond ownership, an important class of use cases is promises. Without blockchains, it's hard to determine how well a potential trade partner follows through on their promises without a third party that maintains a reputation history. With blockchains, people can provide cryptographically signed promises that give their trade partner the ability to publish their satisfaction or lack thereof. You can retrieve a complete reputation history without a middleman, which is a brand new thing. People are using blockchains for too many things, but that's healthy. It's the only way we can find all the things they're useful for.
- brighton36 10y ago
  'Blockchain' is a meaningless buzzword at this point. The innovation of Bitcoin was proof of work and/or the calibrations involved in securing Bitcoin with energy. When bitcoin became an unfundable space, the VC's and such moved into "Blockchain", which was marketed as the good parts of bitcoin, without the bad. Unfortunately, the space has seemingly gone on to only emulate the worst parts of bitcoin. Scams, ignorance, and get rich quick schemes. Currently, "blockchain" appears to be targeting centralized, decentralized, mutable, immutable applications. The blockchain movement is meaningless, and appears to be merely the exhaust gas from the bitcoin funding hype.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
xseven 10y ago
Is the writer trolling or what?
- peterwwillis 10y ago
  Sort of. They're conflating The Internet with a blogging platform. I guess to some people that's what The Internet is.
em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
Threat is poor word choice. If blockchains don't provide good distributed service, then they simply won't be used, in which case they aren't much a threat. Maybe author should have use the thesis that blockchains aren't the end-all-be-all of the distributed internet.
- dilemma 10y ago
  No, what the post is saying is that power will be consolidated among a very small number of very large players. The system won't be distributed but relatively centralized.
  - em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
    In which case it is not very effective. So it is not a threat.
    - dilemma 10y ago
      What won't be effective and why?
known 10y ago
TCP/IP is resilient;
PhaseMage 10y ago
The TCP/IP Internet is also an engine of centralization. By limiting hop counts, and distributing addresses hierarchically, we end up with just a few giant players in each industry.

124 points by xrorre 10y ago

This just isn't true. Yes, running your own blockchain node is infeasible, but a blockchain-based service with hosted nodes is better than a federated service. Proof-of-work creates an illusion of dependence on blockchain miners. Proof-of-stake makes it clear that blockchains are run by a corporation that wants to maximize transaction fee revenue. Transaction validators have to do the best job of maintaining a unified historical record of all transactions for people to keep giving them business. Otherwise, users will choose different validators and carry on without them. Blockchains are fancy spools of receipt paper. If the printer gets jammed, tear off the stuff you care about and staple it to a new spool. The printer doesn't control the people. The people employ the printer. With that said, it's still unclear whether blockchains are the right choice for publishing. A decentralized Twitter doesn't need consensus on a historical record. An IPFS-based Twitter is probably a better way to start, then anchor the parts that need consensus on a blockchain, like usernames and timestamps.

api 10y ago
Your last point is important-- I think too many people in the distributed systems / decentralization community rush to block chain as the one hammer to pound every nail. It's not. It's a solution to a very specific set of consensus problems but outside that it's not the best thing.
goldbrick 10y ago
What part isn't true, specifically? We are dependent on blockchain miners, because without them our transactions don't get accepted. Moreover we have a couple established big players that control the market and no clear way for them to get disrupted, save abandoning Bitcoin entirely. Blockchains are much more than receipt paper. Receipt paper is a superfluous byproduct. The blockchain is the system of record.
- natrius 10y ago
  This is untrue: "Because blockchain is consensual, after a certain point of centralization, the rules of the system depend on very few users." If a blockchain has rules that don't meet my needs, I can choose a different blockchain. If I adopt a blockchain that changes its rules to be undesirable, I can take the history I care about and move it to another blockchain. This argument depends on proof-of-stake. Some people think proof-of-work blockchains are the only useful ones, but I disagree. It's also a boring debate to have, so I won't be doing that here.
  - drdaeman 10y ago
    > If a blockchain has rules that don't meet my needs, I can choose a different blockchain. Had this happened with Bitcoin? I think I heard there are some quite major disagreements (something about block sizes and stuff) and there are a lot of users that aren't happy. I don't remember hearing them just "well, whatever" and forking off.
    - natrius 10y ago
      Bitcoin is a special case because it's only really intended to be used as a ledger for bitcoins. Currencies are a collective delusion: they're valuable because other people think they are valuable. Any dispute over what the source of truth is for a currency's ledger strains that delusion, possibly to the breaking point. The value of the currency would suffer, which would defeat the purpose of a fork. Ethereum is a general purpose blockchain. Forking it could hurt the value of ether, but for many applications, the value of ether doesn't matter. Moving a blockchain-based Twitter from one fork to another is relatively easy and consequence-free.
      - drdaeman 10y ago
        > Moving a blockchain-based Twitter from one fork to another is relatively easy and consequence-free. I'm not sure it's really consequence-free. It's essentially a netsplit, where the forking party lose connectivity with everyone who's left. Consider the case where Twitter (the centralized one) is suddenly falling apart over some issue into two distinct non-interoperating services. Technically - sure - it's a no-brainer, but socially it feels quite complicated to me. (I guess, this would work if the app would be designed to use multiple blockchains. I need to give it some thought.)
schmichael 10y ago
> Proof-of-work creates an illusion of dependence on blockchain miners. How is proof-of-work's dependence on miners an illusion? Seems like a fundamental property of proof-of-work that it depends solely on the consensus of miners.
- natrius 10y ago
  Miners only mine to gain more bitcoins. The market determines what bitcoins are. The market can decide to treat a different historical record with different rules as the ledger for bitcoins. This is much easier in proof-of-stake systems. You can't destroy a bad miner's mining equipment, but you can destroy a bad validator's deposit, which removes them from the system.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    > you can destroy a bad validator's deposit And how does this happen? By a consensus of miners? If I, as an individual, were to find reason to distrust a entity who makes up the majority of mining transactions, how likely is it that I will be able to use the main blockchain ever again?
    - natrius 10y ago
      Yes, by a consensus of miners, or by users choosing a new set of miners. The "main blockchain" is not a decision of the miners. It's a decision of the people. If everyone agrees that current miners are behaving badly in a proof-of-stake system, they can just choose new miners.
      - toss1 10y ago
        OK, I'll bite, with a serious, practical question -- how would I do that this week? Please assume that I have 100 BTC at a particular address or small set of addresses, and I don't like the Chinese mining consortia. How do I actually move my value to a new chain that 1) excludes those mining consortia, 2) preserves my stored value, and 3) preserves my ability to transact with any other valid BTC address? How can I get this done by next week?
athenot 10y ago
> but a blockchain-based service with hosted nodes is better than a federated service ...and a federated service is better than a handful of silos controlling the network. So if the blockchain is supported by the mining of many small miners, it's a decentralized dream. But if there are a handful of miners validating the majority of transactions, then it ends up smelling a lot like the handful of silos situation. Not exactly the same but very similar.
- natrius 10y ago
  Miners cannot control your eyes. You can choose any record as your source of truth. If miners produce a good one, look at that one. If they produce a bad one, look somewhere else.
  - t1amat 10y ago
    This sounds great but it is a dramatic misunderstanding of the real problem. Sure, you can personally decide you don't like a particular fork. However, the value of your position is not determined by you, it is determined by the community and their overall choice. Bitcoin forking is dangerous. If it goes bad and the community becomes overly fragmented then everyone loses. The strength of a position in Bitcoin is a combination of many factors, but the most important ones are related to the size of the community, its relative stability as a crypto coin, and the relative ubiquity of it.
RyJones 10y ago
Intel recently unveiled PoET - proof of elapsed time - in Sawtooth Lake. https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html
mr_sturd 10y ago
> An IPFS-based Twitter is probably a better way to start Did you see the AKASHA discussion, last week? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11678810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11678810
wslh 10y ago
> Proof-of-work creates an illusion of dependence on blockchain miners. PoW depends on blockchain miners by definition and the Bitcoin experience shows that at the end you have a concentration of power. > With that said, it's still unclear whether blockchains are the right choice for publishing. It is very clear that blockchains ARE NOT the right choice for publishing, its limitations for that purpose are based on strong computer science principles on distributed systems, consensus and network speed.
- natrius 10y ago
  Technological frontiers are no place for dogma. Sure, blockchains probably aren't a good choice for publishing, but a culture that constrains people's technology choices is incompatible with progress.
  - wslh 10y ago
    This is not dogma but computer science research, you need to find the right tools for the right problem. BTW one of my companies is focused in blockchain, cryptocurrencies, etc and I can't believe the level of hype experienced there. For example, I read about the DAO Ethereum crowdsale but we experience serious technical issues with Ethereum that clash with that hype.

psiconaut 10y ago

i'm not a fan of "blockchain for everything", but stating that a distributed system is a danger for distribution, and favoring a decentralized, federated approach instead sounds like plainly wrong.

pyrale 10y ago

"The" blockchain = one subset of potential uses of Ethereum ? Did someone take some time to tell author that internet is not www, and that www is not maintaining datacenters ? I'm surprised that some people find this article informative.

Animats 10y ago

"The alternative on which we can build a great new Internet era is projects like GNU social, Friendica, Hubzilla, Diaspora, and efforts to design common protocols like ActivityPub, not on the blockchain." All the new federated social systems have failed, replaced by commercial, centralized systems. (IRC and email live on. Google thinks it owns Usenet, rebranded as "Google Groups", and a big chunk of email never passes through SMTP.) Why? We had a good discussion of this recently by the creator of WhatsApp(?). Centralized systems can be upgraded and enhanced. Federated systems require massive cooperation to change. And federated systems don't generate much revenue.

maxerickson 10y ago
Presumably you are talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11668912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11668912 The author helped WhatsApp move to an end to end encrypted protocol.
fallenshell 10y ago
Besides, there's the convenience and ease of use aspect. Most of these federated services are not easy to use for the average newcomer or tech-illiterate user demographic, for example. And sometimes they're inconvenient.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  Couldn't a federated system that looks like a centralized system work? What if something like Diaspora just installed itself on an AWS EC2 instance for you, and you only had to enter a credit card?
  - Animats 10y ago
    An EC2 instance is probably too much for one user. The model here is Wordpress, which is easy to install and widely used, even in its distributed form. Of course, what's happened is that more and more Wordpress sites run on centralized Wordpress. Compare: "wordpress.com" (hosted): "Create your new website for free. WordPress.com is the best place for your personal blog or business site. Create Website (button)" "wordpress.org" (download): "The latest stable release of WordPress (Version 4.5.2) is available in two formats from the links to your right. If you have no idea what to do with this download, we recommend signing up with one of our web hosting partners that offers a one-click install of WordPress or getting a free account on WordPress.com." Open source just doesn't get user-friendly onboarding.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

Imagine if BitTorrent, or Freenet/IPFS/GNUNet/etc. used a blockchain. They'd be completely infeasible for anyone except Google: you'd need petabytes of storage on your computer just to download a single movie (or a Linux ISO, or whatever). But they don't do that. These systems are actually distributed, and that's why they work.

ultramancool 10y ago
You're missing the point of what a blockchain is good at vs what it's not. Blockchains are good for assigning ownership. For networks which don't need to track ownership, of course you shouldn't use a blockchain. Bittorrent, Freenet, etc do not track ownership as infinite copies of something is not a problem, but a feature. But for networks which do, you may want to. For example, only one person may control this name, this domain, this tradeable asset, etc. Blockchains are an addon to distributed models because they allow a distributed way to prove ownership of something. Say I want to look someone up by name instead of by cryptographic hash, how do I do it? You can't register a name in a Freenet or Bittorrent model.
- natrius 10y ago
  Beyond ownership, an important class of use cases is promises. Without blockchains, it's hard to determine how well a potential trade partner follows through on their promises without a third party that maintains a reputation history. With blockchains, people can provide cryptographically signed promises that give their trade partner the ability to publish their satisfaction or lack thereof. You can retrieve a complete reputation history without a middleman, which is a brand new thing. People are using blockchains for too many things, but that's healthy. It's the only way we can find all the things they're useful for.
brighton36 10y ago
'Blockchain' is a meaningless buzzword at this point. The innovation of Bitcoin was proof of work and/or the calibrations involved in securing Bitcoin with energy. When bitcoin became an unfundable space, the VC's and such moved into "Blockchain", which was marketed as the good parts of bitcoin, without the bad. Unfortunately, the space has seemingly gone on to only emulate the worst parts of bitcoin. Scams, ignorance, and get rich quick schemes. Currently, "blockchain" appears to be targeting centralized, decentralized, mutable, immutable applications. The blockchain movement is meaningless, and appears to be merely the exhaust gas from the bitcoin funding hype.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

xseven 10y ago

Is the writer trolling or what?

peterwwillis 10y ago
Sort of. They're conflating The Internet with a blogging platform. I guess to some people that's what The Internet is.

em3rgent0rdr 10y ago

Threat is poor word choice. If blockchains don't provide good distributed service, then they simply won't be used, in which case they aren't much a threat. Maybe author should have use the thesis that blockchains aren't the end-all-be-all of the distributed internet.

dilemma 10y ago
No, what the post is saying is that power will be consolidated among a very small number of very large players. The system won't be distributed but relatively centralized.
- em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
  In which case it is not very effective. So it is not a threat.
  - dilemma 10y ago
    What won't be effective and why?

known 10y ago

TCP/IP is resilient;

PhaseMage 10y ago

The TCP/IP Internet is also an engine of centralization. By limiting hop counts, and distributing addresses hierarchically, we end up with just a few giant players in each industry.