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It’s not clear that it doesn’t need a central authority. There is a rich history of blockchain consensus failure needing a central authority to tell everyone wh

by hudon 9y ago

It’s not clear that it doesn’t need a central authority. There is a rich history of blockchain consensus failure needing a central authority to tell everyone which chain is the right one. Satoshi did it in 2010, the Bitcoin developers did it in 2013, Vitalik did it with Ethereum in 2016. When the ledgers don’t reconcile, the developers are the central authority. And proof-of-work can’t save it because that too is centralized. So if it can’t do the first thing it promises it can do, maybe it becomes more like a Rube Goldberg machine than something that is meant to be useful/practical. The fact that people are praising CryptoKitties as a “practical application” seems to support the Rube Goldberg machine/toy theory.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kerkeslager 9y ago
> It’s not clear that it doesn’t need a central authority. There is a rich history of blockchain consensus failure needing a central authority to tell everyone which chain is the right one. Satoshi did it in 2010, the Bitcoin developers did it in 2013, Vitalik did it with Ethereum in 2016. When the ledgers don’t reconcile, the developers are the central authority. And proof-of-work can’t save it because that too is centralized. There's a big difference between centralized influence and centralized control. The 2010 and 2013 examples were fairly homogeneous, because the changes were fairly obvious and reasonable, the thought leaders were widely trusted, and almost all the users followed them. But a large number of people didn't follow when Ethereum split (hence Ethereum Classic) or when Bitcoin split in 2017 (hence Bitcoin Cash). Thought leaders like Satoshi and Vitalik can influence most of the community of their respective coins, but they can't force anyone to accept their blocks. > So if it can’t do the first thing it promises it can do, maybe it becomes more like a Rube Goldberg machine than something that is meant to be useful/practical. The fact that people are praising CryptoKitties as a “practical application” seems to support the Rube Goldberg machine/toy theory. The problem I think is that decentralized control is really the only thing that blockchains offer over existing data stores. If you don't care about decentralized control, existing distributed logs such as Datomic are superior to blockchain in every way. I would go so far as to say that the vast majority of blockchain users fall into two categories: 1. People who don't understand decentralization. 2. People who don't care about decentralization but are riding the hype (whether they understand decentralization or not). This is why so many "blockchain applications" look like Rube Goldberg machines: 1. People who don't understand decentralization use it to implement things that would be much better served by an existing distributed datastore such as Datomic. 2. People who are just riding hype don't need to implement anything serious to fool people. They can implement a Rube Goldberg machine and there will always be suckers who take it seriously as long as it ticks the "blockchain" hype tickbox. Very few people actually understand decentralization AND care about it, and even fewer of those have the technical chops to implement them. So I think it will take time for more complex blockchain killer apps to emerge. It's worth noting that the first simple blockchain application, cryptocurrency, has already had pretty immense effects on our society, from darknet markets to crypto exchanges. You can argue whether the uses people use cryptocurrency for are good, but you can't argue it isn't useful--it's just not complex (from a logical standpoint--it's just a ledger--obvously it's technically and socially complex).
- hudon 9y ago
  Satoshi told everyone his fork was Bitcoin and Vitalik told everyone his fork was Ethereum. The fact that more people disagreed with Vitalik than people that disagreed with Satoshi doesn't change the fact that the same thing happened in both cases: a central authority told everyone which fork was the right one. At the end of the day, when consensus breaks in unforeseen circumstances-- whether through a bug or an attack (the difference is purely syntactic)--people turn to the developers to tell them which consensus ruleset to follow. If you disagree with the developers, your chain gets called something else, as we've seen with Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic. With the 2013 Bitcoin fork, there were 2 ledgers and the network could not find consensus until the developers realized this and told everyone what to do 4 hours later. That's the developers controlling the system. And who controls the developers? Their big bad State.
  - shanusmagnus 9y ago
    While there's a lot that could be written about what decentralization even means, or how to measure it, no reasonable definition would require a decentralized system to be entirely outside of the influence of everyone all the time. For instance, Satoshi told people something that all participants considered reasonable, and so the participants reacted accordingly. Systemic reasonable behavior is not inconsistent with the principle of decentralization, it's a consequence of it. The origin of systemically-reasonable policy is orthogonal to the idea of decentralization, unless that origin is structurally mandated.
    - hudon 9y ago
      In 2013 literally the system could not find consensus until the central party told people what to do. If you're still calling that "decentralized" then I'm afraid the word has lost any useful meaning... But I'm with you man, if we as a decentralized group come up with a reasonable hierarchy of trust supported by free speech and democracy, then we can create a systemically-reasonable Money that we can all agree is good.
      - 9y ago

by hudon 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

kerkeslager 9y ago

> It’s not clear that it doesn’t need a central authority. There is a rich history of blockchain consensus failure needing a central authority to tell everyone which chain is the right one. Satoshi did it in 2010, the Bitcoin developers did it in 2013, Vitalik did it with Ethereum in 2016. When the ledgers don’t reconcile, the developers are the central authority. And proof-of-work can’t save it because that too is centralized. There's a big difference between centralized influence and centralized control. The 2010 and 2013 examples were fairly homogeneous, because the changes were fairly obvious and reasonable, the thought leaders were widely trusted, and almost all the users followed them. But a large number of people didn't follow when Ethereum split (hence Ethereum Classic) or when Bitcoin split in 2017 (hence Bitcoin Cash). Thought leaders like Satoshi and Vitalik can influence most of the community of their respective coins, but they can't force anyone to accept their blocks. > So if it can’t do the first thing it promises it can do, maybe it becomes more like a Rube Goldberg machine than something that is meant to be useful/practical. The fact that people are praising CryptoKitties as a “practical application” seems to support the Rube Goldberg machine/toy theory. The problem I think is that decentralized control is really the only thing that blockchains offer over existing data stores. If you don't care about decentralized control, existing distributed logs such as Datomic are superior to blockchain in every way. I would go so far as to say that the vast majority of blockchain users fall into two categories: 1. People who don't understand decentralization. 2. People who don't care about decentralization but are riding the hype (whether they understand decentralization or not). This is why so many "blockchain applications" look like Rube Goldberg machines: 1. People who don't understand decentralization use it to implement things that would be much better served by an existing distributed datastore such as Datomic. 2. People who are just riding hype don't need to implement anything serious to fool people. They can implement a Rube Goldberg machine and there will always be suckers who take it seriously as long as it ticks the "blockchain" hype tickbox. Very few people actually understand decentralization AND care about it, and even fewer of those have the technical chops to implement them. So I think it will take time for more complex blockchain killer apps to emerge. It's worth noting that the first simple blockchain application, cryptocurrency, has already had pretty immense effects on our society, from darknet markets to crypto exchanges. You can argue whether the uses people use cryptocurrency for are good, but you can't argue it isn't useful--it's just not complex (from a logical standpoint--it's just a ledger--obvously it's technically and socially complex).

hudon 9y ago
Satoshi told everyone his fork was Bitcoin and Vitalik told everyone his fork was Ethereum. The fact that more people disagreed with Vitalik than people that disagreed with Satoshi doesn't change the fact that the same thing happened in both cases: a central authority told everyone which fork was the right one. At the end of the day, when consensus breaks in unforeseen circumstances-- whether through a bug or an attack (the difference is purely syntactic)--people turn to the developers to tell them which consensus ruleset to follow. If you disagree with the developers, your chain gets called something else, as we've seen with Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic. With the 2013 Bitcoin fork, there were 2 ledgers and the network could not find consensus until the developers realized this and told everyone what to do 4 hours later. That's the developers controlling the system. And who controls the developers? Their big bad State.
- shanusmagnus 9y ago
  While there's a lot that could be written about what decentralization even means, or how to measure it, no reasonable definition would require a decentralized system to be entirely outside of the influence of everyone all the time. For instance, Satoshi told people something that all participants considered reasonable, and so the participants reacted accordingly. Systemic reasonable behavior is not inconsistent with the principle of decentralization, it's a consequence of it. The origin of systemically-reasonable policy is orthogonal to the idea of decentralization, unless that origin is structurally mandated.
  - hudon 9y ago
    In 2013 literally the system could not find consensus until the central party told people what to do. If you're still calling that "decentralized" then I'm afraid the word has lost any useful meaning... But I'm with you man, if we as a decentralized group come up with a reasonable hierarchy of trust supported by free speech and democracy, then we can create a systemically-reasonable Money that we can all agree is good.
    - 9y ago