11 ms·

Distributed Ledger without the Blockchain

134 points by jchanimal 9y ago

mamcx 9y ago
The use-case here interest (run a ledger with invoices) me but wonder if exist a way to do this on mobile? (not JS)?
- jchanimal 9y ago
  FaunaDB has drivers for Java and Swift, so this schema can easily support mobile apps.
moxious 9y ago
Blockchain seems like a brilliant solution when multiple anonymous untrustworthy parties need to get together and agree. But to the point of this article, most situations aren't like that. You have identities, contracts, and trust at least as much as can be enforced with the legal system. I have also seen a lot of over-application of blockchain to "standard" banking problems. I guess it's real value will depend on whether or not it's successful in "decentralizing all of the things". If that doesn't happen, then it may just be a very cumbersome way of doing something we already knew how to do.
- vog 9y ago
  > it may just be a very cumbersome way of doing something we already knew how to do. This is a very accurate description of many modern developments, most of which tend to attract projects that want to overuse them.
  - harwoodleon 9y ago
    You just described 50+ years of software development in one paragraph. I might just print and frame this short thread.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- Allower 9y ago
  The legal system is a trusted 3rd party, removing this is an admirable goal if you ask me - which would have positive implications for most situations, considering how much we rely upon trusted 3rd parties.
- geekpowa 9y ago
  Blockchain is a terrible solution. Firstly Proof of Work is incredibly energy inefficient, to extent that electricity consumed to append to public blockchains is comparable to electricity used by nation states. Secondly POW by its inherent design recentralises trust. When mining evolves to deploying on ASIC and deploying it where electricity is cheap you are recentralising trust to a tiny few who are willing and able to fulfil the ever higher and steadily increasing bar that POW, by design, demands. The trust model at this point has evolved from technical difficulty of fabricating & maintaining long duration forked chains to one where key block creators are too financially invested in success of the chain overall to allow fraud to happen. At this point, when your trust model is essentially too much to loose to cheat, there are scant distinguishing features between a blockchain ledger and a traditional centralised clearing house. To steal a line from a good book I read recently about blockchains: "The good bits of blockchain are not original, and the original bits of blockchain turn out to be much good." [Edit: grammar / readability]
  - zodiac 9y ago
    While your criticisms are valid, you're criticizing just one implementation of "a blockchain", namely chains secured by CPU-bound PoW. There's plenty of other implementations with different trade offs. You could design your PoW algorithm to be more ASIC-resistent, eg https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/29890/memory-hard-proof-of-work-are-they-asic-resistant https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/29890/memory-hard.... You could switch to proof of stake. You could use whatever algorithm XRP is using. Also, by saying "blockchain is a terrible solution", I assume you mean "there are other better solutions [to the problem of creating a decentralized ledger, or whatever]". What are those better solutions?
    - umanwizard 9y ago
      "blockchain is a terrible solution" doesn't imply "there exist better solutions". It can mean that it's terrible in absolute terms, not relative -- i.e., that the value of being able to create a decentralized ledger is much less than the cost of blockchain(s).
    - geekpowa 9y ago
- dozzie 9y ago
  > Blockchain seems like a brilliant solution when multiple anonymous untrustworthy parties need to get together and agree. No. What you described is the problem of Byzantine generals, for which efficient solutions are known since '80s. Think again what blockchain is, because it's not agreement protocol.
  - moxious 9y ago
    The Byzantine generals problem doesn't address malicious nodes, just failure prone ones. That's a pretty big difference
    - dozzie 9y ago
      Well, Lamport didn't know that the generals are only allowed not to vote when he was writing the original paper. I read the original publication. Have you?
placeybordeaux 9y ago
Given the amount of people that suggest blockchains in a trusted environment it seems perfectly reasonable to reiterate that you don't need a blockchain to have distributed consensus. I was hoping for something different given the title though.
- dcdanko 9y ago
  I think a benefit of blockchains is that a single(ish) protocol can support many different distributed applications. It's sort of like apps that run on Electron, performance might be bad but it's easy on the developer.
  - mrguyorama 9y ago
    Except blockchains are incredibly complicated, and as the hacks have shown, programming on the blockchain is a great way to create a bug bounty that also shuts down your company
    - dcdanko 9y ago
      Definitely, blockchains aren't secure in the way that many Ethereum apps seem to think they are. But for certain types of lower stakes applications (say a log running on a mesh network of sensors) blockchains can provide a simple way to do something that could otherwise be fairly complicated. Certain blockchain implementations (I like MultiChain) are really easy to use.
asasidh 9y ago
Consider enterprise B2B transactions - There will always be an old school legal contract in place and hence trust in the existing system. The overhead of the blockchain can be avoided in such cases.
optimuspaul 9y ago
just a sales pitch for Fauna, nothing interesting to see there.
bawana 9y ago
There is no such thing as trust anymore at our level of information and 'evil' density. Yes 'evil density' meaning the amount of unemployed outsiders working from a different mission statement than their target. Trust is a relic of small communities and shared goals. As we break down barriers, go global, increase information density - we tempt fate by assuming all new members will function honestly. Or that established members will remain honest
- ghgr 9y ago
  The dynamics of trust in large communities is indeed interesting. I found an interactive explanation about how fragile it can be. http://ncase.me/trust/ http://ncase.me/trust/
- teddyh 9y ago
  “Unemployed”?
  - pc86 9y ago
    I imagine s/unemployed/not employed by the target
- gnahckire 9y ago
  I'm included to agree but, I have no idea what you mean by "unemployed".
- specialist 9y ago
  Hmmm, interesting perspective. Having worked on election integrity, I eventually figured out that fraud and error are indistinguishable, so I should focus on mitigating errors.
- matt4077 9y ago
  It's a good thing that we've long found something better than blind trust then: the rule of law.
  - nine_k 9y ago
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
it's kind of annoying how people abuse the term "blockchain" nowadays whenever there's something remotely close to distributed systems. "Distributed Ledger without the Blockchain" is just a distributed database, which has been possible forever. Check out couchdb/pouchdb, etc. The innovation of Bitcoin's blockchain was that it introduced distributed ledger that didn't require centralized trust. If you take that way, you're just a database no matter how you try to spin it. This is like saying "We've built orange juice without the orange!" Yeah, you've built bottled water.
- wmf 9y ago
  But what if bottled water is what people actually want even though they're asking for Brawndo?
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    Most people in IT already know what distributed databases are. They don't want a distributed database. They want blockchain and nothing else. The only reason they want it is because it's something they don't understand, and they naively hope that it will help them somehow. But they already understand what a distributed db is and know they don't need it. Which means people will not suddenly start using FaunaDB just because they try to spin it as an alternative to blockchain. people may not yet have full understanding of the implications of the blockchain but they're not idiots.
- jchanimal 9y ago
  FaunaDB’s consistency model is very different than CouchDB. (Disclosure, I’m one of the early contributors to CouchDB and work at Fauna.) More about the FaunaDB consistency model here. https://fauna.com/blog/consistent-transactions-in-a-globally-distributed-database https://fauna.com/blog/consistent-transactions-in-a-globally...
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    Does it matter in the context of this comment thread? I'm sure you guys have built a damn good bottled water, but it ain't orange juice.
joelbondurant 9y ago
Summary: Fauna infomercial about ACID databases.
l8again 9y ago
I think the inclusion of blockchain is misleading. I had to wrap my brains around the straw-man first to understand what the article is trying to show-case. It should simply say FaunaDB supports distributed transaction. Separately, distributed transaction is not the primary motivation for using blockchain. For ledger/financial use cases its the verification and auditing confidence it provides.

134 points by jchanimal 9y ago

mamcx 9y ago

The use-case here interest (run a ledger with invoices) me but wonder if exist a way to do this on mobile? (not JS)?

jchanimal 9y ago
FaunaDB has drivers for Java and Swift, so this schema can easily support mobile apps.

moxious 9y ago

Blockchain seems like a brilliant solution when multiple anonymous untrustworthy parties need to get together and agree. But to the point of this article, most situations aren't like that. You have identities, contracts, and trust at least as much as can be enforced with the legal system. I have also seen a lot of over-application of blockchain to "standard" banking problems. I guess it's real value will depend on whether or not it's successful in "decentralizing all of the things". If that doesn't happen, then it may just be a very cumbersome way of doing something we already knew how to do.

vog 9y ago
> it may just be a very cumbersome way of doing something we already knew how to do. This is a very accurate description of many modern developments, most of which tend to attract projects that want to overuse them.
- harwoodleon 9y ago
  You just described 50+ years of software development in one paragraph. I might just print and frame this short thread.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
Allower 9y ago
The legal system is a trusted 3rd party, removing this is an admirable goal if you ask me - which would have positive implications for most situations, considering how much we rely upon trusted 3rd parties.
geekpowa 9y ago
Blockchain is a terrible solution. Firstly Proof of Work is incredibly energy inefficient, to extent that electricity consumed to append to public blockchains is comparable to electricity used by nation states. Secondly POW by its inherent design recentralises trust. When mining evolves to deploying on ASIC and deploying it where electricity is cheap you are recentralising trust to a tiny few who are willing and able to fulfil the ever higher and steadily increasing bar that POW, by design, demands. The trust model at this point has evolved from technical difficulty of fabricating & maintaining long duration forked chains to one where key block creators are too financially invested in success of the chain overall to allow fraud to happen. At this point, when your trust model is essentially too much to loose to cheat, there are scant distinguishing features between a blockchain ledger and a traditional centralised clearing house. To steal a line from a good book I read recently about blockchains: "The good bits of blockchain are not original, and the original bits of blockchain turn out to be much good." [Edit: grammar / readability]
- zodiac 9y ago
  While your criticisms are valid, you're criticizing just one implementation of "a blockchain", namely chains secured by CPU-bound PoW. There's plenty of other implementations with different trade offs. You could design your PoW algorithm to be more ASIC-resistent, eg https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/29890/memory-hard-proof-of-work-are-they-asic-resistant https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/29890/memory-hard.... You could switch to proof of stake. You could use whatever algorithm XRP is using. Also, by saying "blockchain is a terrible solution", I assume you mean "there are other better solutions [to the problem of creating a decentralized ledger, or whatever]". What are those better solutions?
  - umanwizard 9y ago
    "blockchain is a terrible solution" doesn't imply "there exist better solutions". It can mean that it's terrible in absolute terms, not relative -- i.e., that the value of being able to create a decentralized ledger is much less than the cost of blockchain(s).
  - geekpowa 9y ago
dozzie 9y ago
> Blockchain seems like a brilliant solution when multiple anonymous untrustworthy parties need to get together and agree. No. What you described is the problem of Byzantine generals, for which efficient solutions are known since '80s. Think again what blockchain is, because it's not agreement protocol.
- moxious 9y ago
  The Byzantine generals problem doesn't address malicious nodes, just failure prone ones. That's a pretty big difference
  - dozzie 9y ago
    Well, Lamport didn't know that the generals are only allowed not to vote when he was writing the original paper. I read the original publication. Have you?

placeybordeaux 9y ago

Given the amount of people that suggest blockchains in a trusted environment it seems perfectly reasonable to reiterate that you don't need a blockchain to have distributed consensus. I was hoping for something different given the title though.

dcdanko 9y ago
I think a benefit of blockchains is that a single(ish) protocol can support many different distributed applications. It's sort of like apps that run on Electron, performance might be bad but it's easy on the developer.
- mrguyorama 9y ago
  Except blockchains are incredibly complicated, and as the hacks have shown, programming on the blockchain is a great way to create a bug bounty that also shuts down your company
  - dcdanko 9y ago
    Definitely, blockchains aren't secure in the way that many Ethereum apps seem to think they are. But for certain types of lower stakes applications (say a log running on a mesh network of sensors) blockchains can provide a simple way to do something that could otherwise be fairly complicated. Certain blockchain implementations (I like MultiChain) are really easy to use.

asasidh 9y ago

Consider enterprise B2B transactions - There will always be an old school legal contract in place and hence trust in the existing system. The overhead of the blockchain can be avoided in such cases.

optimuspaul 9y ago

just a sales pitch for Fauna, nothing interesting to see there.

bawana 9y ago

There is no such thing as trust anymore at our level of information and 'evil' density. Yes 'evil density' meaning the amount of unemployed outsiders working from a different mission statement than their target. Trust is a relic of small communities and shared goals. As we break down barriers, go global, increase information density - we tempt fate by assuming all new members will function honestly. Or that established members will remain honest

ghgr 9y ago
The dynamics of trust in large communities is indeed interesting. I found an interactive explanation about how fragile it can be. http://ncase.me/trust/ http://ncase.me/trust/
teddyh 9y ago
“Unemployed”?
- pc86 9y ago
  I imagine s/unemployed/not employed by the target
gnahckire 9y ago
I'm included to agree but, I have no idea what you mean by "unemployed".
specialist 9y ago
Hmmm, interesting perspective. Having worked on election integrity, I eventually figured out that fraud and error are indistinguishable, so I should focus on mitigating errors.
matt4077 9y ago
It's a good thing that we've long found something better than blind trust then: the rule of law.
- nine_k 9y ago

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

it's kind of annoying how people abuse the term "blockchain" nowadays whenever there's something remotely close to distributed systems. "Distributed Ledger without the Blockchain" is just a distributed database, which has been possible forever. Check out couchdb/pouchdb, etc. The innovation of Bitcoin's blockchain was that it introduced distributed ledger that didn't require centralized trust. If you take that way, you're just a database no matter how you try to spin it. This is like saying "We've built orange juice without the orange!" Yeah, you've built bottled water.

wmf 9y ago
But what if bottled water is what people actually want even though they're asking for Brawndo?
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  Most people in IT already know what distributed databases are. They don't want a distributed database. They want blockchain and nothing else. The only reason they want it is because it's something they don't understand, and they naively hope that it will help them somehow. But they already understand what a distributed db is and know they don't need it. Which means people will not suddenly start using FaunaDB just because they try to spin it as an alternative to blockchain. people may not yet have full understanding of the implications of the blockchain but they're not idiots.
jchanimal 9y ago
FaunaDB’s consistency model is very different than CouchDB. (Disclosure, I’m one of the early contributors to CouchDB and work at Fauna.) More about the FaunaDB consistency model here. https://fauna.com/blog/consistent-transactions-in-a-globally-distributed-database https://fauna.com/blog/consistent-transactions-in-a-globally...
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  Does it matter in the context of this comment thread? I'm sure you guys have built a damn good bottled water, but it ain't orange juice.

joelbondurant 9y ago

Summary: Fauna infomercial about ACID databases.

l8again 9y ago

I think the inclusion of blockchain is misleading. I had to wrap my brains around the straw-man first to understand what the article is trying to show-case. It should simply say FaunaDB supports distributed transaction. Separately, distributed transaction is not the primary motivation for using blockchain. For ledger/financial use cases its the verification and auditing confidence it provides.