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"While Hyperledger is mainly an IBM and friends like project" IBM must have a lot of friends then, including direct competitors like Oracle and SAP, and lots o

"While Hyperledger is mainly an IBM and friends like project" IBM must have a lot of friends then, including direct competitors like Oracle and SAP, and lots of small startups. :) IBM is one of over 250 members in the consortium, but in the developer community (where it really counts), they are a substantial contributor - I have no idea how many FTEs but there are dozens of IBM developer names in the changelogs for Fabric, Composer, and others. But there are hundreds of other developers contributing to the 10 different project at Hyperledger, and even on Fabric, they are less than 50% of the contributor base by individual and by pull requests. The development is all done publicly (I challenge the "lot of decisions and information is kept inside" claim) and who you work for does not matter, so it's really on the other companies in this space (large and small) to increase their contribution levels, not on IBM's shoulders to decrease theirs, if this is an important metric. "in practice there is not a real alternative to proof of work" Come back when you've learned something about how blockchains work somewhere other than with cryptocurrencies. There are many other effective consensus mechanisms out there, especially when you're not trying to solve the anonymous participation goal - and much more energy efficient, and with better speed and finality to boot. "crypto economic incentive is what makes a Blockchain a blockchain" No. Perhaps this is a semantics game, as lots of people pretend to be authoritative about this, but there are plenty of intrinsic motivations to developing a common system of record amongst a population of rivalrous nodes, even amongst parties who don't trust each other. If ten banks want to maintain a shared DLT to exchange bank wires, they don't need to pay each other a token to record a transaction. They just don't - the costs of running such an infrastructure are de minimus compared to all the other costs in adoption. "The underlying philosophy of hyperledger is around federated networks" False. Hyperledger, as a project and as a community, is a place for the collaborative software development around open source blockchain technologies. There are five different frameworks, including Fabric, but including others focused on different approaches. All projects have focused on non-POW consensus mechanisms, and most are an implementation of consortium models, what's sometimes called "permissioned" blockchains - pick your metaphor, but a consortium of entities governed by a lightweight governing mechanism, or be it a referee on a football field, is a much closer conceptual model than a "federated" network, for which there are already plenty of options. Again, please do research, talk to people, if you have questions or concerns air them with the project, but please don't just spout what you've heard, or made up after you saw the announcement press release in December of 2015 and paid no further attention to.

cateye 8y ago
This is the "not too inclusive" attitude that I referenced. It is not only rude to provide your opinion about a subject with this voice of tone. It is also problematic because it doesn't make it possible to have a positive discussion and learn from each other. A lot of people on HN do exactly understand the nuanced differences between open source projects and communities. It is I guess enough to mention that Hyperledger is a IBM kind of enterprisey setting. I will not try to explain in depth why proof of work is really difficult to substitute. But in summary: you will need to create an algorithm that prevents sybil attacks + creates incentives for participants to keep the network up + mechanism for byzatine consensus. Anonymous participation goal is not a goal on itself but a prerequisite for decentralization. Otherwise someone needs to manage and control who is eligible to access the network... You are really wrong about incentive motives too. The example involving wire transfers is exactly the point. Blockchain is not about a record in a database of a money amount, it is directly the value representation. This creates a big difference. I'm sure you will understand this if you give it a more open minded thought. I did a lot of research and talked to enough people. I will not respond to more ad hominem reactions.
- brianbehlendorf 8y ago
  Where I said above that people need to do research, it wasn't necessarily directed at you. Perhaps you have, though even the above statements suggest you've not looking at this the same way many others do, so we can likely just punt with we are trying to solve different problems. And at the very least, have different definitions of decentralized.

cateye 8y ago

This is the "not too inclusive" attitude that I referenced. It is not only rude to provide your opinion about a subject with this voice of tone. It is also problematic because it doesn't make it possible to have a positive discussion and learn from each other. A lot of people on HN do exactly understand the nuanced differences between open source projects and communities. It is I guess enough to mention that Hyperledger is a IBM kind of enterprisey setting. I will not try to explain in depth why proof of work is really difficult to substitute. But in summary: you will need to create an algorithm that prevents sybil attacks + creates incentives for participants to keep the network up + mechanism for byzatine consensus. Anonymous participation goal is not a goal on itself but a prerequisite for decentralization. Otherwise someone needs to manage and control who is eligible to access the network... You are really wrong about incentive motives too. The example involving wire transfers is exactly the point. Blockchain is not about a record in a database of a money amount, it is directly the value representation. This creates a big difference. I'm sure you will understand this if you give it a more open minded thought. I did a lot of research and talked to enough people. I will not respond to more ad hominem reactions.

brianbehlendorf 8y ago
Where I said above that people need to do research, it wasn't necessarily directed at you. Perhaps you have, though even the above statements suggest you've not looking at this the same way many others do, so we can likely just punt with we are trying to solve different problems. And at the very least, have different definitions of decentralized.