10 ms·

Blockstack: A New Decentralized Internet [pdf]

96 points by ahiknsr 9y ago

rufusroflpunch 9y ago
Thanks to the power of middle-out compression.
- asragab 9y ago
  Indeed, that and the delta in mean device efficiency thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones.
isubkhankulov 9y ago
can someone explain why anyone would need this? just like bitcoin, the time you really need it is to avoid government oversight or censorship. if successful, wouldnt we all see the black market thrive while all regular use cases for the internet would continue on the regular distributed internet?
- su 9y ago
  You are confusing Bitcoin with Blockchain. We need this because internet is currently centralized and an authority in power can control the flow of information. Blockstack aims to provide decentralized internet using blockchain and that is a good thing as it makes the internet stronger.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    Any new tech "using blockchain" is a non-starter for general use; they are constraining themselves automatically by adopting "blockchain" technology. People assume that "blockchain" is inherently good due to the buzz created by rampant speculation among Bitcoin traders, but the blockchain itself is an experimental platform that is dubiously fitted even to the narrow constraints of bitcoin, let alone forming the foundation of a "new internet".
    - BatFastard 9y ago
      My feeling on "using blockchain" is that any tech based on it is inherently not scalable.
- acover 9y ago
  Imagine if Facebook was decentralized. You could own your data. There would be competition to provide the best ui. The best experience. Anti-features wouldn't exist. One company wouldn't control how a billion people communicate with each other.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    This is a political and legal problem, not a technical one. The internet already has the ability to make Facebook "decentralized". People have tried it to varying extents, and they've either languished outside of the walled garden or gotten crushed by Facebook's lawyers when they've tried to make runs to the inside for data (cf. Facebook v. Power Ventures). Our choice to analogize requests to a public HTTP server as trespass to physical property has deeply constrained the growth of the internet as a free platform that benefits its users. The EU has new data portability restrictions going in next year, and these may help some, but they aren't quite strong enough to resolve the issue.
  - WJW 9y ago
    Imagine if Facebook was decentralized: Your grandmother would have to run her own node! Your bandwidth at home would determine if your profile was reachable. If something you post goes viral, just imagine the fun your family will have as their available bandwidth slows to almost nothing! There might be competition on providing a nice "experience" but you would either pay for it, have it be ad-supported or it'd turn in to a Linux-desktop shitshow. Imagine how much more fun spam filtering could be if it didn't have a dedicated team but it would just be you (or your grandmother) going up against the legions of determined spammers.
    - jpalomaki 9y ago
      Email is decentralized, yet I don't need to run my own SMTP server (but if I wanted I could do that).
      - WJW 9y ago
        Indeed, and so can I. However, there is a huge crowd outside of HN that is neither capable of running their own servers, nor are they remotely interested in learning to do so. Also, I would argue that in practice email is very much centralized, with a few large providers that manage all the complexity for their users (such as spam blocking and maintaining servers).
- muneeb 9y ago
  I want to cross-link a recent Reddit discussion where people are asking similar questions and there is a good relevant discussion with answers: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/6j6ub1/new_blockchainbased_decentralized_internet_being/?ref=share&ref_source=link https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/6j6ub1/new_bloc...
jpalomaki 9y ago
Bitcoin network hashrate is currently around 550.000TH/s[1]. An asic miner with 4.73TH/s claimed capacity can be bought for $500 [2]. With a budget of less than $100M you could have similar capacity as current bitcoin network. One thing that bothers me a bit is that it is hard to tell how decentralized these technologies really are. Especially when you go into direction where commodity hardware becomes useless and you need specialty equipment to do meaningful mining, there's a risk that the power falls into few hands. This is probably not an issue for bitcoin, where the incentive to cheat would be to just gain monetary profits. In some other blockchains, serving different purposes things might be different. Governments with their deep pockets might be interested in building up capacity to be able to perform covert ops. [1] https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty [2] https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware/ https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware/
- nugget 9y ago
  Run the math for Ethereum and it's even crazier. Something like $15m in cloud computing resources and you can control the eth network valued at >$30 billion. For this reason I can't imagine "shorting" these cryptocurrencies will be possible any time soon as the incentives for attack would be too great. The price asymmetry could resolve in a number of different ways and it will be interesting to watch how it unfolds.
  - merkaloid 9y ago
    It would be valued as something closer to 0 if you did take it over.
    - IamCarbonMan 9y ago
      If you take over the entire thing yes. But the DAO hack demonstrates how easy it can be for an attacker to make off with a whole lot of ETH.
      - mquander 9y ago
tudorconstantin 9y ago
To address a couple of concerns: - "running your own blockchain based messaging/mai server would be a nightmare because of spam". I think spam can actually be solved by using blockchains: given the low conversion rates in spamming, putting a small cost for sending a message can discourage spammers. Take this even further: put a variable cost to it - a higher cost for the first messages which would drop exponentially when the recipient engages in the discussion, taking it toward 0. I've never heard of this before, maybe I'll make an ICO to implement this. If you're doing it before me, I'll gladly accept some of your issued coins (my non blockchain email is in my profile) - "blockchain apps are not scalable". Indeed, given the current algorithms they're not scalable. But it's about web scale scalable. How many apps need to be web scale level scalable and what about the rest 99% of the others? Also when we'll have a functional implementation of lightning network this might be a solved problem.
- runeks 9y ago
  > Also when we'll have a functional implementation of lightning network this might be a solved problem. This is unrealistic. With 1MB blocks, around 2 million people can deposit/withdraw into payment channels once per week. Even using the best-performing/most-insecure layer 2 protocol ("deposit your bitcoins with me and I'll send them anywhere"), no more than 2M users would be able to join/leave the payment network per week. The Lightning Network is much more restrictive than this, since they aim for trustlessness, which further decreases performance (particularly for merchants, who want to receive large sums from a lot of people). Unless LN aims to create a separate cryptocurrency (where you can deposit into the network but not withdraw), there's no way their trustless model can perform better than a trustful one. And if they aim to create an altcurrency, then it's not a Bitcoin payment network, and there's little reason to do it on top of a blockchain in the first place. In that case it will be like a Bitcoin side-chain that you can't withdraw from, so you're basically converting your bitcoins into this other coin, without being able to go back. Fundamentally, the Lightning Network doesn't scale because it models global payments as anyone-to-anyone (like Bitcoin), when in fact payments flow from billions of consumers to millions of retail merchants to tens of millions of producers who pay out wages to their employees (consumers), after which the cycle repeats. Any payment network on top of Bitcoin needs to take this into account, in order to scale, since Bitcoin's throughput is so limited to begin with. As an example, imagine you're a merchant with a $100k monthly turnover. Using the Lightning Network you, as the merchant, would need to deposit $100k into a payment channel at the beginning of the month, in order to be able to receive this amount, and this is only if the LN is highly centralized (one hop between you and the payer). For every additional node between you and the payer, an additional $100k would need to be deposited, sitting in a payment channel ready to send. This just doesn't scale. LN is a decentralized network whose performance decreases for every node that joins it. For every additional hop your payment crosses, someone needs to deposit bitcoins into a payment channel, which both costs capital and increases the risk that this channel is exhausted and you need to touch the blockchain (expensive). A 10M-node LN would be able to send around a total of 2.1 bitcoins (remember, all nodes need to deposit bitcoins into a payment channel, and there will only ever be 21M bitcoins), and crossing 10 hops would require, on average, touching the blockchain every time 0.21 bitcoins are sent.

96 points by ahiknsr 9y ago

rufusroflpunch 9y ago

Thanks to the power of middle-out compression.

asragab 9y ago
Indeed, that and the delta in mean device efficiency thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones.

isubkhankulov 9y ago

can someone explain why anyone would need this? just like bitcoin, the time you really need it is to avoid government oversight or censorship. if successful, wouldnt we all see the black market thrive while all regular use cases for the internet would continue on the regular distributed internet?

su 9y ago
You are confusing Bitcoin with Blockchain. We need this because internet is currently centralized and an authority in power can control the flow of information. Blockstack aims to provide decentralized internet using blockchain and that is a good thing as it makes the internet stronger.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Any new tech "using blockchain" is a non-starter for general use; they are constraining themselves automatically by adopting "blockchain" technology. People assume that "blockchain" is inherently good due to the buzz created by rampant speculation among Bitcoin traders, but the blockchain itself is an experimental platform that is dubiously fitted even to the narrow constraints of bitcoin, let alone forming the foundation of a "new internet".
  - BatFastard 9y ago
    My feeling on "using blockchain" is that any tech based on it is inherently not scalable.
acover 9y ago
Imagine if Facebook was decentralized. You could own your data. There would be competition to provide the best ui. The best experience. Anti-features wouldn't exist. One company wouldn't control how a billion people communicate with each other.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  This is a political and legal problem, not a technical one. The internet already has the ability to make Facebook "decentralized". People have tried it to varying extents, and they've either languished outside of the walled garden or gotten crushed by Facebook's lawyers when they've tried to make runs to the inside for data (cf. Facebook v. Power Ventures). Our choice to analogize requests to a public HTTP server as trespass to physical property has deeply constrained the growth of the internet as a free platform that benefits its users. The EU has new data portability restrictions going in next year, and these may help some, but they aren't quite strong enough to resolve the issue.
- WJW 9y ago
  Imagine if Facebook was decentralized: Your grandmother would have to run her own node! Your bandwidth at home would determine if your profile was reachable. If something you post goes viral, just imagine the fun your family will have as their available bandwidth slows to almost nothing! There might be competition on providing a nice "experience" but you would either pay for it, have it be ad-supported or it'd turn in to a Linux-desktop shitshow. Imagine how much more fun spam filtering could be if it didn't have a dedicated team but it would just be you (or your grandmother) going up against the legions of determined spammers.
  - jpalomaki 9y ago
    Email is decentralized, yet I don't need to run my own SMTP server (but if I wanted I could do that).
    - WJW 9y ago
      Indeed, and so can I. However, there is a huge crowd outside of HN that is neither capable of running their own servers, nor are they remotely interested in learning to do so. Also, I would argue that in practice email is very much centralized, with a few large providers that manage all the complexity for their users (such as spam blocking and maintaining servers).
muneeb 9y ago
I want to cross-link a recent Reddit discussion where people are asking similar questions and there is a good relevant discussion with answers: https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/6j6ub1/new_blockchainbased_decentralized_internet_being/?ref=share&ref_source=link https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/6j6ub1/new_bloc...

jpalomaki 9y ago

Bitcoin network hashrate is currently around 550.000TH/s[1]. An asic miner with 4.73TH/s claimed capacity can be bought for $500 [2]. With a budget of less than $100M you could have similar capacity as current bitcoin network. One thing that bothers me a bit is that it is hard to tell how decentralized these technologies really are. Especially when you go into direction where commodity hardware becomes useless and you need specialty equipment to do meaningful mining, there's a risk that the power falls into few hands. This is probably not an issue for bitcoin, where the incentive to cheat would be to just gain monetary profits. In some other blockchains, serving different purposes things might be different. Governments with their deep pockets might be interested in building up capacity to be able to perform covert ops. [1] https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty [2] https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware/ https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware/

nugget 9y ago
Run the math for Ethereum and it's even crazier. Something like $15m in cloud computing resources and you can control the eth network valued at >$30 billion. For this reason I can't imagine "shorting" these cryptocurrencies will be possible any time soon as the incentives for attack would be too great. The price asymmetry could resolve in a number of different ways and it will be interesting to watch how it unfolds.
- merkaloid 9y ago
  It would be valued as something closer to 0 if you did take it over.
  - IamCarbonMan 9y ago
    If you take over the entire thing yes. But the DAO hack demonstrates how easy it can be for an attacker to make off with a whole lot of ETH.
    - mquander 9y ago

tudorconstantin 9y ago

To address a couple of concerns: - "running your own blockchain based messaging/mai server would be a nightmare because of spam". I think spam can actually be solved by using blockchains: given the low conversion rates in spamming, putting a small cost for sending a message can discourage spammers. Take this even further: put a variable cost to it - a higher cost for the first messages which would drop exponentially when the recipient engages in the discussion, taking it toward 0. I've never heard of this before, maybe I'll make an ICO to implement this. If you're doing it before me, I'll gladly accept some of your issued coins (my non blockchain email is in my profile) - "blockchain apps are not scalable". Indeed, given the current algorithms they're not scalable. But it's about web scale scalable. How many apps need to be web scale level scalable and what about the rest 99% of the others? Also when we'll have a functional implementation of lightning network this might be a solved problem.

runeks 9y ago
> Also when we'll have a functional implementation of lightning network this might be a solved problem. This is unrealistic. With 1MB blocks, around 2 million people can deposit/withdraw into payment channels once per week. Even using the best-performing/most-insecure layer 2 protocol ("deposit your bitcoins with me and I'll send them anywhere"), no more than 2M users would be able to join/leave the payment network per week. The Lightning Network is much more restrictive than this, since they aim for trustlessness, which further decreases performance (particularly for merchants, who want to receive large sums from a lot of people). Unless LN aims to create a separate cryptocurrency (where you can deposit into the network but not withdraw), there's no way their trustless model can perform better than a trustful one. And if they aim to create an altcurrency, then it's not a Bitcoin payment network, and there's little reason to do it on top of a blockchain in the first place. In that case it will be like a Bitcoin side-chain that you can't withdraw from, so you're basically converting your bitcoins into this other coin, without being able to go back. Fundamentally, the Lightning Network doesn't scale because it models global payments as anyone-to-anyone (like Bitcoin), when in fact payments flow from billions of consumers to millions of retail merchants to tens of millions of producers who pay out wages to their employees (consumers), after which the cycle repeats. Any payment network on top of Bitcoin needs to take this into account, in order to scale, since Bitcoin's throughput is so limited to begin with. As an example, imagine you're a merchant with a $100k monthly turnover. Using the Lightning Network you, as the merchant, would need to deposit $100k into a payment channel at the beginning of the month, in order to be able to receive this amount, and this is only if the LN is highly centralized (one hop between you and the payer). For every additional node between you and the payer, an additional $100k would need to be deposited, sitting in a payment channel ready to send. This just doesn't scale. LN is a decentralized network whose performance decreases for every node that joins it. For every additional hop your payment crosses, someone needs to deposit bitcoins into a payment channel, which both costs capital and increases the risk that this channel is exhausted and you need to touch the blockchain (expensive). A 10M-node LN would be able to send around a total of 2.1 bitcoins (remember, all nodes need to deposit bitcoins into a payment channel, and there will only ever be 21M bitcoins), and crossing 10 hops would require, on average, touching the blockchain every time 0.21 bitcoins are sent.