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> Ethereum makes the mistake in assuming every site needs to operate like a bank, but people hardly use banking websites compared to YouTube or Reddit. Strawma

by leppr 8y ago

> Ethereum makes the mistake in assuming every site needs to operate like a bank, but people hardly use banking websites compared to YouTube or Reddit. Strawman. There is a time and place for strong security guarantees, nobody said social networks and media hosting should be done on the same network you use to transact money with. Maybe you'd be interested in EOS, Stellar and other transparent blockchain platforms? They make the same observation you do, not everyone needs to have complete control over everything they do online if that means every action has a cost, sometimes only having auditability is fine.

tialaramex 8y ago
> nobody said social networks and media hosting should be done on the same network you use to transact money with It's a strong consequence of the 0,1,N rule. The correct number of networks is clearly not "zero", and Metcalfe's Law ensures N networks are worse than N-1 networks with the same nodes in, so you get one network at the limit. Once upon a time I'd have called it "the Internet" but that's really redundant at this point, just call it "the Network" and have done with it. One network, for everything, for everyone, for ever. This isn't even a new idea, the Bell company couldn't build a single telephone network across the continental US until a better electrical repeater technology existed (today we barely even think of this problem because the transistor is so ubiquitous its original purpose becomes invisible) but they insisted it was a single network anyway, because that's very obviously what you actually want even if you still haven't invented the technology to do it.
- mathnmusic 8y ago
  Metcalfe's law is only one of the forces applicable. People also care about sovereignty, which is why N > 1 is most likely.
  - zrm 8y ago
    This is also why federation is a thing. You can have a single "network" with arbitrarily many "services" and not have smaller services destroyed by Metcalfe's law because they're part of the same network.
- leppr 8y ago
  The great thing about all this smart-contract stuff is that we're not limited to simplistic abstractions anymore. Rather than a linear approach, I think what's going to succeed is a "tree" of networks, with weaker ones committing hashes at regular checkpoints to stronger, more expensive chains (sort of a sparse Merkle tree[1]). This is already the approach taken by scaling solutions such as Thunderella[2] or sharding proposals[3]. This allows a more organic hierarchy between secure and fast networks. e.g.: Imagine a fast but slightly centralized Twitter chain (only 21 validators let's say), committing hashes of every day of tweets to a decentralized public blockchain. I'm not 100% sure whether that tweet posted by my friend 5 minutes ago is legitimate, but I don't need to be 100% certain to answer them and carry on the casual conservation. I can verify though, that the Trump tweet bordering on declaration of war posted 24h ago is indeed real, because the hash of the whole day of tweets was committed to a strong blockchain, and the author of the tweet didn't post any subsequent objection to it. I can proceed to hide in my bunker, confident in my choice. [1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_documentation#Merkle_Trees https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_documentation#Merkle_Tre... [2]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/913.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/913.pdf [3]: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQs#what-might-a-basic-design-of-a-sharded-blockchain-look-like https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQs#what-mig...

by leppr 8y ago

tialaramex 8y ago

> nobody said social networks and media hosting should be done on the same network you use to transact money with It's a strong consequence of the 0,1,N rule. The correct number of networks is clearly not "zero", and Metcalfe's Law ensures N networks are worse than N-1 networks with the same nodes in, so you get one network at the limit. Once upon a time I'd have called it "the Internet" but that's really redundant at this point, just call it "the Network" and have done with it. One network, for everything, for everyone, for ever. This isn't even a new idea, the Bell company couldn't build a single telephone network across the continental US until a better electrical repeater technology existed (today we barely even think of this problem because the transistor is so ubiquitous its original purpose becomes invisible) but they insisted it was a single network anyway, because that's very obviously what you actually want even if you still haven't invented the technology to do it.

mathnmusic 8y ago
Metcalfe's law is only one of the forces applicable. People also care about sovereignty, which is why N > 1 is most likely.
- zrm 8y ago
  This is also why federation is a thing. You can have a single "network" with arbitrarily many "services" and not have smaller services destroyed by Metcalfe's law because they're part of the same network.
leppr 8y ago
The great thing about all this smart-contract stuff is that we're not limited to simplistic abstractions anymore. Rather than a linear approach, I think what's going to succeed is a "tree" of networks, with weaker ones committing hashes at regular checkpoints to stronger, more expensive chains (sort of a sparse Merkle tree[1]). This is already the approach taken by scaling solutions such as Thunderella[2] or sharding proposals[3]. This allows a more organic hierarchy between secure and fast networks. e.g.: Imagine a fast but slightly centralized Twitter chain (only 21 validators let's say), committing hashes of every day of tweets to a decentralized public blockchain. I'm not 100% sure whether that tweet posted by my friend 5 minutes ago is legitimate, but I don't need to be 100% certain to answer them and carry on the casual conservation. I can verify though, that the Trump tweet bordering on declaration of war posted 24h ago is indeed real, because the hash of the whole day of tweets was committed to a strong blockchain, and the author of the tweet didn't post any subsequent objection to it. I can proceed to hide in my bunker, confident in my choice. [1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_documentation#Merkle_Trees https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_documentation#Merkle_Tre... [2]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/913.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/913.pdf [3]: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQs#what-might-a-basic-design-of-a-sharded-blockchain-look-like https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQs#what-mig...