18 ms·

“We already store data. In a database. It works well”

847 points by susam 7y ago

kgraves 7y ago
A stable battle tested database isn’t cool anymore, this is 2020, Jim. /s Jokes aside, I would rather see a working proof of concept 'Blockchain Wikipedia' being made from this crowd rather than have them shout suggestive buzzwords at Jimmy Wales. That being said, I wonder if Linus is open to making Git commits work on the bitcoin blockchain, might have to ask him someday.
- mrb 7y ago
  Actually, Git is technically a blockchain. Commit hashes are a hash of the previous commit hash + new data. The structure (history) is replicated in a decentralized way on every user's node. The only missing thing is a proof-of-work, but that is optional in the definition of a blockchain.
  - benaadams 7y ago
    Well the commits are proof-of-work; though the validation is done by human (assuming the user doesn't have commit access on the main branch) However its more of a Merkle tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree; which blockchain is also.
  - jakear 7y ago
    Proof of work is just some mechanism for a 3rd party to verify you actually invested “value” into the chain. That’s a PR. Are there any traditional block chains where the proof of work is actually an investment into the chain? Such that the structure of the chain represents something of actual value (not a series of rare hashes), and additions to the chain add to that value? A la git. One potential example would be neural networks on a chain, where the work is training the network, and the value is intrinsic in the well-fitted resultant model.
    - trevelyan 7y ago
      Saito (saito.tech) pays for routing work rather than hashing work. Requires solution to 50 percent attack but means that all fees pay for the work of running the network rather than unrelated activities like hashing or staking.
    - PinguTS 7y ago
      There is one in industrial protocols for functional safety. It is called Ethercat Safety.
  - ptx 7y ago
    Although Git also uses a chain of hashes, just like a blockchain, I'm not sure using this definition of blockchain (i.e. optional consensus protocol) is very useful, because then we need another word for the kind of thing that Bitcoin is. (On the other hand, perhaps the uselessness of the definition suits the uselessness of the concept itself.) If Git is like using a hammer to hammer nails, blockchain (with consensus protocol) enables you to write without a pen by using the hammer to hit your thumb until it bleeds. And Wikipedia already has a pen that works.
    - neilalexander 7y ago
      > I'm not sure using this definition of blockchain (i.e. optional consensus protocol) is very useful Honestly, "blockchain" as a word feels ill-defined and badly understood at the best of times. You could argue that "blockchain" deconstructs to nothing more than a "chain" of "blocks". What "blocks" actually are is up to the imagination, proof-of-work or other algorithms aside. I get frustrated when people hail "blockchains" as the solution to everything because the term is so vague in everyday use that it's effectively meaningless.
      - icebraining 7y ago
        I always thought it was clear: it was the combination of Merkle chains with a proof of investment (work, stake, etc), since that combination was the real novelty, worthy of a new name. It was quite confusing to see people calling "blockchain" to one of the pre-existing concepts. It's like calling any wheel a "bicycle".
    - dboreham 7y ago
      Hashlinked, content-addressed, etc.
  - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
    > Actually, Git is technically a blockchain. No. You can say that git reduces to a Merkle tree. And blockchains use Merkle trees. But you can't say that git is a blockchain. https://gist.github.com/joepie91/e49d2bdc9dfec4adc9da8a8434fd029b https://gist.github.com/joepie91/e49d2bdc9dfec4adc9da8a8434f... https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-question-need-for-blockchain-technology https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-q...
    - bob1029 7y ago
      I would argue the Merkle tree (or any other recursive signature algorithm) is the most important quality of a blockchain. To say that git is technically a blockchain is not entirely inaccurate IMO. I think you are looking for the other qualities that typically apply to a blockchain such as the implicit need to "mine" its resources. Git simply produces these resources incidentally. I think this is the only major difference.
      - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
        > I would argue the Merkle tree (or any other recursive signature algorithm) A Merkle tree is not a recursive signature algorithm, because a hash function is not a signature algorithm. https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/08/you-wouldnt-base64-a-password-cryptography-decoded https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/08/you-wouldnt-base64-a-pass... (Yes, you can build signature algorithms out of hash functions, but definitions matter.)
      - meowface 7y ago
        It's still missing important pieces. They both fall under the superset of "hash chain" / Merkle tree, but cryptocurrency blockchains are designed to deal with the possibility of bad actors. Git can't ensure trust, unless you PGP sign commits. Git + PGP + some computationally expensive mechanism to broadcast verified PGP key attributions + a consensus algorithm might be a little bit like a blockchain, but I can't think of a good use case for that. Git repos generally aren't intended to be pushed to by the whole world.
        7y ago
  - phire 7y ago
    There are no blocks, just bare commits. There is no chain, it's a DAG.
  - runeks 7y ago
    No, it’s not. The two technologies solve two different problems. A blockchain is basically a single, global Git repository, where each commit is a “block” and the data inside that block/“commit” are transactions. The defining difference between Git and a blockchain is that blockchains define which branch (commit history) is the correct one — the branch that you should put your commit on top of. Blockchain provides a means to arrive at a consensus on which commit history (branch) is correct, while Git does not.
- neilalexander 7y ago
  > making Git commits work on the bitcoin blockchain What does this even mean?
  - mamon 7y ago
    That every Git commit would take few hours and cost you transaction fee in Bitcoins.
    - joshschreuder 7y ago
      At least you have a good excuse to abandon your pet open source projects
    - hallihax 7y ago
      On the plus side, the whole world gets to reject your terrible commits?
  - tclancy 7y ago
    The lights would go out in a few weeks.
- ghoshbishakh 7y ago
  I think we should read about blockchains and understand it first. Then only we can actually decide whether it can actually be helpful for a particular problem. A general rule of thumb is: Don't use blockchain if a database maintained by a single organization (person / company / government ) is sufficient. If multiple people interact, or multiple organizations interact and together want to maintain some data where they all collaborate and take decisions on how the data is changed then only we need blockchain. So when I think about it, wiki can definitely be helped by blockchains.
  - Tomte 7y ago
    No. "Multiple entities interact" may be a necessary condition for using a blockchain, but it's certainly far from a sufficient condition.
    - ghoshbishakh 7y ago
      Agreed. The sufficient condition is you cannot blindly trust all those entities.
      - Tomte 7y ago
        That's still far from sufficient. Existing businesses have coped with that for hundreds of years. You can have joint-ventures, where all participants send emissaries to, you can negotiate rights to view the books or other ways to create transparency. You can have contracts, backed by a legal system and state courts. You can do many things. Blockchains are only one of those possibilities. Most important question when somebody tries to sell you a blockchain: "What's the traditional way to do it?" Correct answer: "People usually do X, but our blockchain proposal has advantages Y and Z." Incorrect answer: "Nobody has ever solved that problem before!"
    - twrx3 7y ago
      Yes, only when they cannot trust each other.
  - sweeneyrod 7y ago
- somesortofsystm 7y ago
  > 'Blockchain Wikipedia' I mean, isn't this basically just Hugo and IPFS behind a Brand?
  - dsr_ 7y ago
    Yes, but much slower and more expensive.
    - tclancy 7y ago
      You forgot environmentally damaging.
- raghavtoshniwal 7y ago
  Off topic but it is considered difficult for NLP models to do sarcasm detection (because it’s a really hard problem, no widely available datasets, some context awareness is required, etc.) For better or worse, in the last few years we have been generating a dataset on social forums by using “/s” at the end of sarcastic statements. I’ll try and mine the “/s” statements on HN at least and see if I get somewhere.
  - duckmysick 7y ago
    Humans have problems detecting written sarcasm. Not surprising that NLP models struggle with it too. It's difficult because even if you have the context, the original poster can change classification after being called out by replying "oh, I was just kidding/I was being sarcastic". The same comment may and may not be sarcastic at the same time, Schrödinger's cat style. That being said, it's an interesting problem. Hope you find something good.
  - tveita 7y ago
    There is some prior art for this https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05579 https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05579
  - skrebbel 7y ago
    That's going to be a great data set! Most people who use "/s" are great at sarcasm.
- rwiggum 7y ago
  "Blockchain Wikipedia" exists and the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, was involved for a while. It's called Everipedia and it uses the EOS blockchain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everipedia
m-i-l 7y ago
If you really need WORM, e.g. for compliance with SEC Rule 17a-4, it is sufficient to copy your data to non-eraseable media, not master your data on non-eraseable media. And you don't need blockchain.
willvarfar 7y ago
Its hard to tell if this user is a troll, or if they just don't get tech, but surely Jimmy would be better off not replying? Surely he gets bombarded with rewrite suggestions and pointless distractions all the time, and he is pretty practiced at just ignoring them?
- tpetry 7y ago
  Yeah i dont get it too. Using a blockchain to defend wikpedia from uploading child pornography. Defending it by uploading it to an immutable undeletable „datastore“? I think someone now saw the blockchain hype and want to propose it without understanding, like a few years ago when it was really a new hype.
  - mar77i 7y ago
    The blockchain idea is well-intended, I believe. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/06/how-i-became-leonardo-da-vinci-on-the-blockchain/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/06/how-i-became-leonardo-da-vi...
- gerikson 7y ago
  Wales was invited to speak at the Coingeek conference, an event funded by Calvin Ayres who is one of the main movers behind the Bitcoin SV ("Satoshi's Vision") fork. After some dismay from people opposed to this (both people who are "anti-Bitcoin", and the Bitcoin proponents who are anti-SV), he stated that he intends to speak his mind and tell the conference that BSV won't help Wikipedia in any way. Wales is no stranger to social media or publicity. The fact that this thread has been posted to HN shows that.
  - ortusdux 7y ago
    Something tells me that this twitter interaction will make it into his presentation.
    - gerikson 7y ago
      I really hope it will be available online after the conference.
henryackerman 7y ago
Which colour do you want that blockchain?
- lsb 7y ago
  I think mauve has the most RAM
- thrower123 7y ago
  I'm thinking more of a cornflower blue. Can you make it in cornflower blue?
zozbot234 7y ago
Some people would take issue with the "It works well" part. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2020-February/013793.html https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2020-February... Turns out that scaling up a general-purpose triple store beyond 10B triples is really, really hard, and that few or no people in the FLOSS community (important due to Wiki's reproducibility and freedom-to-fork requirements) are paying attention to the problem.
- thom 7y ago
  This is a shame, because I genuinely find SPARQL over Wikidata one of the most insanely magical things on the internet. It is literally like being able to just query the universe directly and there's almost no end of fun that can be had formulating new questions you can answer and then finding out it's actually possible. Of course I now feel bad for occasionally hitting it with my frivolous queries, and would be very sad to see it limited.
- ansible 7y ago
  MediaWiki (the actual Wikipedia website) runs on top of a traditional SQL database (originally just MySQL, but others are now supported too): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_guide https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_guide There have been various forays into Semantic Web technologies. Previously people have done things like parse the infoboxes on Wikipedia pages and then import that into a triple store. It seems that now the Wikimedia Foundation is finally interested in moving in this direction. But the software isn't there yet, certainly not at the scale Wikipedia needs.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    The website you link to states that the support for non-MySQL-derived db's (PostgreSQL and SQLite) is buggy and that not many people are working on it. It seems that legacy constraints are essentially forcing them to stay with their old flaky PHP codebase and MariaDB database. So much for that blockchain thing!
    - 7y ago
adim86 7y ago
What I find fascinating is that the person pushing Jimmy to use crypto for Wikipedia does not seem to fully grasp the technology they are pitching. 1. He pitches it is great to track people posting illicit content on Wikipedia, then argues that crypto is pseudonymous, So why would you use that when web trackers we have today already know what I had for breakfast 2. Why would anyone want people to post illegal material on a blockchain when it is immutable? Let's assume the culprit goes to jail, but then you have billions of people now able to access illegal content, that can never be removed because it is on a blockchain What a sales pitch.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  I'm kinda surprised nobody has posted illegal pornography onto the bitcoin block chain, and then issued legal proceedings against anyone they can identify running a node. Would be a good way to shut down a competing coin.
  - phaser 7y ago
    Already done. https://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2019/02/someone-uploaded-child-pornography-to-a-blockchain-ledger-and-its-almost-impossible-to-delete/ https://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2019/02/someone-uploaded-child-por...
    - Nursie 7y ago
      What I found interesting, though predictable, was that we saw the same wave of "Oh but it's just a set of bits, it's only illegal data if you go looking for the decoder to compile the pieces together". Which could be said about a lot of data formats. I remember seeing these same justifications 15+ years ago when laws were being tightened up around possession and distribution of child abuse imagery, that it's just a stream of bits, you can't criminalise that... You can, and you should. (The extent to which it can be pursued, and to which those who are simply running cryptocurrency nodes should have any culpability for propagating said data is very much open to legal argument, of course.)
jstewartmobile 7y ago
This reminds me to take a Wikipedia snapshot. It seems like it has become more of an ideological battleground lately, and I'm not sure how long their editors will be able to hold the line against various manifestations of astroturfer. Lots of libertarian/anarchist types putting all their bets on blockchain without really knowing much about it. Jimmy's response was gentle considering the circumstances.
nothrabannosir 7y ago
Big fan of the follow up tweet: >> Why are you anti-capitalist? > I’m not anti-capitalist, are you on drugs? https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1226873569508044808 https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1226873569508044808 Ahh, Twitter.
- m_fayer 7y ago
  Seriously. I think this was my "peak twitter" moment for the month.
- 52-6F-62 7y ago
  Amazing. That whole thread is surreal. It made me like Wales more.
Annatar 7y ago
Guys you are all going down some block chain tangent. The point is that a relational database is designed for storing data, and that works well. The moral of Jimmy's response was if you need to store and retrieve data a relational database is the tool to do that.
smitty1e 7y ago
Wales is a Hayek fan? That is not something I would have guessed.
lasky 7y ago
“Please use this technology I find interesting, because I want it to be useful”
- duskwuff 7y ago
  Not cynical enough. Try: "Please use this technology I'm financially invested in, because I want its value to rise."
ultim8k 7y ago
And needs thousands of donations to run...
- kevingadd 7y ago
  Who's gonna run the frontends to make the contents of the wikipedia blockchain accessible to billions of people on commodity web browsers? Does a blockchain make that free somehow? The cost of the database servers is the only thing you're potentially optimizing out here, except unless every frontend stores the entire wikipedia blockchain locally you will need database servers still anyway, they'll just be blockchain "frontends" instead of database frontends.
- yreg 7y ago
  Still cheaper than a blockchain
- duskwuff 7y ago
  It's almost as though running one of the most popular web sites in the world [1] costs money. Funny, that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites -- top 10 worldwide, top 5 outside China
Ragnarork 7y ago
I can't help but feel the person pushing for the idea has something to gain personally from one of the most well-known website out there actually using blockchain for... "something", whatever that something is. And that makes the whole exchange pretty surreal.
Traster 7y ago
I can't help but think the next response is "Do you use MongoDB? MongoDB is webscale". This is just trolling. No thought has gone into whether Wikipedia has a problem to solve, nor whether blockchain has the capabilities to solve any problem. It's just memes. >Bitcoin can help any system to become more Byzantine fault tolerant
- rsynnott 7y ago
  > Bitcoin can help any system to become more Byzantine fault tolerant Bitcoin, the only tech fad which can prevent you from having weird mad emperors or being invaded by the Turks.
  - dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
    What I kept thinking.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  I like the addition of the word "more", while Byzantine fault tolerance is really a binary property (albeit with variable thresholds).
- terminaljunkid 7y ago
  There was a Reddit user u/passwordissame whose nodejs mongodb webscale copypasta was very funny to read. Is that you?
  - meowface 7y ago
    I miss them. Some of the funniest reddit posts ever. The best part is the number of people who took the bait.
  - no_one_ever 7y ago
    There is a famous youtube video the above poster is referencing. Search 'MongoDB is web scale' or something along those lines.
- 7y ago
ronenlh 7y ago
People new to blockchain and tech in general seem to think that blockchain invented the database and public key cryptography. All the ideas they propose are solved by them.
- acdha 7y ago
  It comes back to money: a pure fiat currency like Bitcoin is only worth what its users believe it to be worth — otherwise you’ve just paid a lot for some random bits. That means that everyone who has spent real money in that space has a vested interest in getting other people to buy in. They’re not going to benefit from your use of a database or PKI and thus won’t consider those as possible solutions. This works as well as any other system designed by the sales team.
PedroBatista 7y ago
Are these crypto nuts or just kids who found a ‘new thing’? Either way it’s a solution looking for a problem and the solution it’s always these people being the ones in charge.
rubyfan 7y ago
Blockchain is overdone. It’s good for crypto currency but really doesn’t solve the myriad of things its being pushed on. There are a dozen consultants trying to sell corporations on what blockchain can do. While it’s true that if you spend money modernizing some legacy way of doing things it’ll probably be better but doing it on blockchain is not the secret sauce. It’s buzzword market and a buzzword solution that isn’t worth the complexity.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- acdha 7y ago
  It’s still unproven that it’s good for a currency, too: a decade in, the only significant uses are speculation and money laundering. There are a few users trying to do normal daily life purchases but that volume is a tiny rounding error in the global financial system, which is why backers have lately been trying to retcon it into some sort of reserve currency store of value after having failed at the primary purpose.
  - qertoip 7y ago
    Sovereign store of value is the primary use case.
    - acdha 7y ago
      No. Just because that’s the community’s preferred PR answer after failing to become a useful currency doesn’t mean the rest of us forgot the previous decade of breathless claims that Bitcoin would replace the USD and Visa, PayPal, etc. in daily usage. People used to write these glowing stories about routinely buying coffee and paying for Ubers with it.
  - broodje 7y ago
    There's a very quickly growing use case of decentralised finance, abbreviated to DeFi. Within the Ethereum chain alone, close to $1b has been locked up in different DeFi projects.
jmartrican 7y ago
One potential use for blockchain (or chain of hashes) might be for authorizing video by putting each of the frames in a blockchain. That way the raw video can be authorized to not have been tampered with.
- CerebralCerb 7y ago
  You could just hash the video file.
  - kiallmacinnes 7y ago
    Yes, and in the process 1) not spend CPU cycles extracting frames... 2) not have a permanent+widely distributed copy of `$illegal` thing someone tried to upload. 3) have a technology that works regardless of content type! amazing! It supports new video codecs right out of the box ;)
- PeterisP 7y ago
  That doesn't seem to follow, what would prevent someone from doing exactly what you describe after creating a tampered video?
M-R-X 7y ago
Why is that even a discussion? Ain't it obvious that this is a good idea?
major505 7y ago
I used to have a small black board in my table with the phrase "we don`t need blockchain!" Every time a boss would came and propose that we use blockchain tech, I would just wave it.
- aflag 7y ago
  Where did you work? What was your job title? Who were all these bosses preaching blockchains to you? So many questions!
  - major505 7y ago
    I used to work in a small startup. We buid .a system that collects sound of water passing in public water distribution network, to identify water leaks. The company had a few owners, and most of them non computer science people (administration, markting, eletronic engineering backgrounds), and would always sugest the use of blockchains, to store the sound samples, and metadata, just because was the cool term at the time. Since it would not add anything to our business model, and would come full of techical hurdles, I would always opose, wath lead to the creation of the sign.
    - 52-6F-62 7y ago
      I've been in businesses like this, too. Though the keyword was AI or Machine Learning. The mission was always "how can we implement a machine learning solution?" not "what are our needs and how can we most effectively meet them?" Someone is looking to pad the resume. "Oversaw implementation of $TRENDY_TECH solution that $MEANINGLESS_METRICS"
exdsq 7y ago
HN is very anti-blockchain which is surprising. I’m not agreeing with the twitter user saying Wiki should be on a blockchain but projects like Visa B2B Connect, which wants to use a DTL for interbank transactions, or multi-party supply chains are valid use cases. They’re also technically interesting. They have specific use cases sure, and some people who made a load of money in 2017 do chat a lot of rubbish, but it has become a bit of a meme topic around here which is a shame. I don’t feel I could post a genuinely interesting paper on decentralised consensus without it being downvoted because blockchains won’t work as the data store of some web app.
- exdsq 7y ago
  First downvote after just 1 minute as expected :)
  - acdha 7y ago
    What did you expect from a substance-free rant? Try posting a thoughtful comment or that hypothetical paper, talking about a real solution to a problem. I guarantee you’ll get a better discussion than complaining about downvotes.
    - exdsq 7y ago
      It was commentary on the fact a tweet about someone (probably) uneducated in that area of tech suggesting someone else should use it and being told no had reached front page.
      - acdha 7y ago
        You should really read the thread again and note how singularly incapable the blockchain salesguys were of explaining any tangible benefits from adoption. When proponents can’t support it, it’s not the target’s job to do their homework - and it’s pretty obvious that Wales understands it better than they do.
- notyourday 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
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Carpetsmoker 7y ago
This follow-up thread is hilarious: https://twitter.com/DanielKrawisz/status/1226904340029460480 https://twitter.com/DanielKrawisz/status/1226904340029460480
- rsynnott 7y ago
  > He has all the world's knowledge in his system yet it doesn't tell him why Bitcoin is useful. That should perhaps be a sign.
- gcatalfamo 7y ago
  it's like a gathering of flat-earthers
- ViViDboarder 7y ago
  Yikes. It’s full of people doing the same thing. Claiming that it would solve “problems” and confusion as to why others “can’t see that” but making no effort to actually explaining the problem or how a blockchain would solve it.
- dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
  Why worship Jesus when you can worship Craig? https://mobile.twitter.com/ivmidable/status/1226908612343271424 https://mobile.twitter.com/ivmidable/status/1226908612343271...
- ortusdux 7y ago
  My favorite reply: > Please consider the very real possibility that it is you, not him, who is missing something.
- justsid 7y ago
  Why does every high level tweet of the guy have a gif in it? Is that a new trend? I’d unfollow him for that alone
forgotpwd16 7y ago
Is BSV supposedly the new cool altcoin? Edit: Searching it seems to be a Bitcoin fork made by a fraud claiming to be Satoshi.
deleted 7y ago
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abraxas 7y ago
As always the shitty communication medium that is twitter prevents one from discerning any context within which the post was made.
- varjag 7y ago
  You scroll up for context.
gowld 7y ago
TT;DR: a random nobody made a nonsense comment, and Jimmy Wales made a boring reply, and gawkers and gossips are wasting everyone's time.
rsynnott 7y ago
I feel like, after a few years decline, there's been a _sharp_ rise in incidence of "have you heard the good news about our lord and savior magical internet money" lately. Not sure what's driving this.
- broodje 7y ago
  I'd wager the start of a new multi year bullrun, fuelled by developments in different technologies.
  - tehlike 7y ago
    I'd wager it's tether, and the market manipulation that comes with it.
nottorp 7y ago
A solution looking for a problem is resorting to 'think of the children' marketing. Neeeext!
deleted 7y ago
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known 7y ago
BlockChain = AuditTrail + PKI
known 7y ago
"If the only tool you have is a hammer, treat everything as if it were a nail" --Maslow
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
macspoofing 7y ago
This is the problem with the blockchain. Any non-currency use-case for blockchain can be done faster and more efficiently by a central server.
boublepop 7y ago
“ Blockbuster: “We already have a DVD rental service, and it has worked for many years. No issues. We do not need to move to online streaming services.” Netflix...” I absolutely love this sentiment. I hope this user launches a blockchain based Wikipedia competitor, and announces it on Show HN, so I can have monthly updates on the technobabble fulled madness of a platform built by people who don’t understand the technology or the space they are trying to solve, but think it will all be ok as long as they can issue an ICO of their wiki-coin before the feds shut them down. I’m thinking it will pan out like a breaking bad/Silicon Valley cross over.
sub7 7y ago
I can't wait until there's a run on the exchanges and they all go insolvent/cease trading. This house of cards has created the most undeserving kings ever.
rjmunro 7y ago
https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects says there have been 44 million edits and 21 million user edits on Wikimedia sites, so 24 edits / second. That's about the fastest bitcoin could possibly go.
hedora 7y ago
Wikipedia is almost already a blockchain. All they need to do to become one is to add a cryptographic hash of the previous database backup to a page included in the backups. (This is what git does when it inserts the parent hash(es) into the commit metadata, and it is a generalization of block chains —it’s “chain” is actually a set of directed acyclic graphs) Anyway, wikimedia posts backup copies of the database at dumps.wikimedia.com, and those pages include sha and md5 hashes. I even found a page of magnet links for english wikipedia on the meta wikipedia. Magnet links contain the hash of the target, but it’s unclear if meta.m.wikipedia is included in the english language dump file, or if it includes magnet links pointing to itself. I’d love to find the missing links. I’m sure Jimmy Wales would love credit for accidentally reinventing the blockchain before the term was coined.
sergiotapia 7y ago
> furry > bitcoin > blockchain > proposing /g/ memetech without even understanding it yeah the memes write themselves.
egypturnash 7y ago
Welcome to the future, where a blue cartoon deer can attempt to convince a balding man who runs an encyclopedia that he should change his encyclopedia to run on top of a complicated substrate of unnecessary cryptography, so that the deer's stake in said unnecessary cryptography will become worth more.
- lordleft 7y ago
  I didn't really expect our cyberpunk future to look quite like this
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    seriously how do I get out of this parody of a Bruce Sterling novel
    - pavel_lishin 7y ago
      Feels more Strossian to me.
leothekim 7y ago
> But what specifically are you proposing? > That you think more deeply about why Bitcoin is a good idea. This pretty much sums up every conversation I have had with a blockchain proponent.
dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
Any time I come across these scene I am reminded of this story: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/tomi-masters-down-the-rabbit-hole-i-go https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/tomi-ma.... HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087505
vermontdevil 7y ago
Another crypto post here: Wikipedia has grown to the point where it's really so important that the database is going to need to be WORM compliant so records can't be changed and editors can be encouraged to be more responsible. This would make inserting false info more expensive & increase trust. Jimmy replied: It is really important that records can be changed. Removing that feature would be bad.
- amckenna 7y ago
  This is where I diverge from Jimmy, as he is misinterpreting what the commenter is saying. The commenter is talking about _audit logs_ of changes to Wikipedia being kept in WORM compliant record, which is a good idea - audit logs should be immutable. Jimmy seems to be interpreting the comment as saying the pages of Wikipedia should be immutable, which obviously should not be the case.
kerng 7y ago
I find it interesting that Jimmy is even engaging in the discussion, because the other party clearly does not understand Blockchain or Cryptocurrency.
gfodor 7y ago
In finance, this is called "talking your book." The prevalence of this in the crypto space should be embarrassing.
thesausageking 7y ago
Better Tweet from Jimmy in that thread: "That isn't how blockchain works. That suggestion - to force people to strongly identify and pay for the privilege of editing Wikipedia - is a bad idea independently. And [it] would be easy and cheap to implement without blockchain." This is the key problem with most DLT applications. Any blockchain that's used for audit and verification needs some way to connect what happens in the real world (the person uploading content) to the digital one. Putting the digital side onto a blockchain doesn't help if you can fake the data you're putting in. Garbage in, garbage out.
chadlavi 7y ago
An incredibly sick burn
GaryNumanVevo 7y ago
One Commenter put it best: _Bitcoins are to be owned for 35 min while you place the order for drugs and that is all._
jjordan 7y ago
Why did this drop completely from the front page?
wesl3y 7y ago
The other person in the debate is trolling, have a look at their youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC43D9FHfQc4uj7HZAhX97Rg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC43D9FHfQc4uj7HZAhX97Rg Hackernews fell for it hook, line and sinker. We've got to stop taking life so seriously!

847 points by susam 7y ago

A stable battle tested database isn’t cool anymore, this is 2020, Jim. /s Jokes aside, I would rather see a working proof of concept 'Blockchain Wikipedia' being made from this crowd rather than have them shout suggestive buzzwords at Jimmy Wales. That being said, I wonder if Linus is open to making Git commits work on the bitcoin blockchain, might have to ask him someday.

mrb 7y ago
Actually, Git is technically a blockchain. Commit hashes are a hash of the previous commit hash + new data. The structure (history) is replicated in a decentralized way on every user's node. The only missing thing is a proof-of-work, but that is optional in the definition of a blockchain.
- benaadams 7y ago
  Well the commits are proof-of-work; though the validation is done by human (assuming the user doesn't have commit access on the main branch) However its more of a Merkle tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree; which blockchain is also.
- jakear 7y ago
  Proof of work is just some mechanism for a 3rd party to verify you actually invested “value” into the chain. That’s a PR. Are there any traditional block chains where the proof of work is actually an investment into the chain? Such that the structure of the chain represents something of actual value (not a series of rare hashes), and additions to the chain add to that value? A la git. One potential example would be neural networks on a chain, where the work is training the network, and the value is intrinsic in the well-fitted resultant model.
  - trevelyan 7y ago
    Saito (saito.tech) pays for routing work rather than hashing work. Requires solution to 50 percent attack but means that all fees pay for the work of running the network rather than unrelated activities like hashing or staking.
  - PinguTS 7y ago
    There is one in industrial protocols for functional safety. It is called Ethercat Safety.
- ptx 7y ago
  Although Git also uses a chain of hashes, just like a blockchain, I'm not sure using this definition of blockchain (i.e. optional consensus protocol) is very useful, because then we need another word for the kind of thing that Bitcoin is. (On the other hand, perhaps the uselessness of the definition suits the uselessness of the concept itself.) If Git is like using a hammer to hammer nails, blockchain (with consensus protocol) enables you to write without a pen by using the hammer to hit your thumb until it bleeds. And Wikipedia already has a pen that works.
  - neilalexander 7y ago
    > I'm not sure using this definition of blockchain (i.e. optional consensus protocol) is very useful Honestly, "blockchain" as a word feels ill-defined and badly understood at the best of times. You could argue that "blockchain" deconstructs to nothing more than a "chain" of "blocks". What "blocks" actually are is up to the imagination, proof-of-work or other algorithms aside. I get frustrated when people hail "blockchains" as the solution to everything because the term is so vague in everyday use that it's effectively meaningless.
    - icebraining 7y ago
      I always thought it was clear: it was the combination of Merkle chains with a proof of investment (work, stake, etc), since that combination was the real novelty, worthy of a new name. It was quite confusing to see people calling "blockchain" to one of the pre-existing concepts. It's like calling any wheel a "bicycle".
  - dboreham 7y ago
    Hashlinked, content-addressed, etc.
- CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
  > Actually, Git is technically a blockchain. No. You can say that git reduces to a Merkle tree. And blockchains use Merkle trees. But you can't say that git is a blockchain. https://gist.github.com/joepie91/e49d2bdc9dfec4adc9da8a8434fd029b https://gist.github.com/joepie91/e49d2bdc9dfec4adc9da8a8434f... https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-question-need-for-blockchain-technology https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-q...
  - bob1029 7y ago
    I would argue the Merkle tree (or any other recursive signature algorithm) is the most important quality of a blockchain. To say that git is technically a blockchain is not entirely inaccurate IMO. I think you are looking for the other qualities that typically apply to a blockchain such as the implicit need to "mine" its resources. Git simply produces these resources incidentally. I think this is the only major difference.
    - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
      > I would argue the Merkle tree (or any other recursive signature algorithm) A Merkle tree is not a recursive signature algorithm, because a hash function is not a signature algorithm. https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/08/you-wouldnt-base64-a-password-cryptography-decoded https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/08/you-wouldnt-base64-a-pass... (Yes, you can build signature algorithms out of hash functions, but definitions matter.)
    - meowface 7y ago
      It's still missing important pieces. They both fall under the superset of "hash chain" / Merkle tree, but cryptocurrency blockchains are designed to deal with the possibility of bad actors. Git can't ensure trust, unless you PGP sign commits. Git + PGP + some computationally expensive mechanism to broadcast verified PGP key attributions + a consensus algorithm might be a little bit like a blockchain, but I can't think of a good use case for that. Git repos generally aren't intended to be pushed to by the whole world.
      - 7y ago
- phire 7y ago
  There are no blocks, just bare commits. There is no chain, it's a DAG.
- runeks 7y ago
  No, it’s not. The two technologies solve two different problems. A blockchain is basically a single, global Git repository, where each commit is a “block” and the data inside that block/“commit” are transactions. The defining difference between Git and a blockchain is that blockchains define which branch (commit history) is the correct one — the branch that you should put your commit on top of. Blockchain provides a means to arrive at a consensus on which commit history (branch) is correct, while Git does not.
neilalexander 7y ago
> making Git commits work on the bitcoin blockchain What does this even mean?
- mamon 7y ago
  That every Git commit would take few hours and cost you transaction fee in Bitcoins.
  - joshschreuder 7y ago
    At least you have a good excuse to abandon your pet open source projects
  - hallihax 7y ago
    On the plus side, the whole world gets to reject your terrible commits?
- tclancy 7y ago
  The lights would go out in a few weeks.
ghoshbishakh 7y ago
I think we should read about blockchains and understand it first. Then only we can actually decide whether it can actually be helpful for a particular problem. A general rule of thumb is: Don't use blockchain if a database maintained by a single organization (person / company / government ) is sufficient. If multiple people interact, or multiple organizations interact and together want to maintain some data where they all collaborate and take decisions on how the data is changed then only we need blockchain. So when I think about it, wiki can definitely be helped by blockchains.
- Tomte 7y ago
  No. "Multiple entities interact" may be a necessary condition for using a blockchain, but it's certainly far from a sufficient condition.
  - ghoshbishakh 7y ago
    Agreed. The sufficient condition is you cannot blindly trust all those entities.
    - Tomte 7y ago
      That's still far from sufficient. Existing businesses have coped with that for hundreds of years. You can have joint-ventures, where all participants send emissaries to, you can negotiate rights to view the books or other ways to create transparency. You can have contracts, backed by a legal system and state courts. You can do many things. Blockchains are only one of those possibilities. Most important question when somebody tries to sell you a blockchain: "What's the traditional way to do it?" Correct answer: "People usually do X, but our blockchain proposal has advantages Y and Z." Incorrect answer: "Nobody has ever solved that problem before!"
  - twrx3 7y ago
    Yes, only when they cannot trust each other.
- sweeneyrod 7y ago
somesortofsystm 7y ago
> 'Blockchain Wikipedia' I mean, isn't this basically just Hugo and IPFS behind a Brand?
- dsr_ 7y ago
  Yes, but much slower and more expensive.
  - tclancy 7y ago
    You forgot environmentally damaging.
raghavtoshniwal 7y ago
Off topic but it is considered difficult for NLP models to do sarcasm detection (because it’s a really hard problem, no widely available datasets, some context awareness is required, etc.) For better or worse, in the last few years we have been generating a dataset on social forums by using “/s” at the end of sarcastic statements. I’ll try and mine the “/s” statements on HN at least and see if I get somewhere.
- duckmysick 7y ago
  Humans have problems detecting written sarcasm. Not surprising that NLP models struggle with it too. It's difficult because even if you have the context, the original poster can change classification after being called out by replying "oh, I was just kidding/I was being sarcastic". The same comment may and may not be sarcastic at the same time, Schrödinger's cat style. That being said, it's an interesting problem. Hope you find something good.
- tveita 7y ago
  There is some prior art for this https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05579 https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05579
- skrebbel 7y ago
  That's going to be a great data set! Most people who use "/s" are great at sarcasm.
rwiggum 7y ago
"Blockchain Wikipedia" exists and the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, was involved for a while. It's called Everipedia and it uses the EOS blockchain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everipedia

m-i-l 7y ago

If you really need WORM, e.g. for compliance with SEC Rule 17a-4, it is sufficient to copy your data to non-eraseable media, not master your data on non-eraseable media. And you don't need blockchain.

willvarfar 7y ago

Its hard to tell if this user is a troll, or if they just don't get tech, but surely Jimmy would be better off not replying? Surely he gets bombarded with rewrite suggestions and pointless distractions all the time, and he is pretty practiced at just ignoring them?

tpetry 7y ago
Yeah i dont get it too. Using a blockchain to defend wikpedia from uploading child pornography. Defending it by uploading it to an immutable undeletable „datastore“? I think someone now saw the blockchain hype and want to propose it without understanding, like a few years ago when it was really a new hype.
- mar77i 7y ago
  The blockchain idea is well-intended, I believe. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/06/how-i-became-leonardo-da-vinci-on-the-blockchain/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/06/how-i-became-leonardo-da-vi...
gerikson 7y ago
Wales was invited to speak at the Coingeek conference, an event funded by Calvin Ayres who is one of the main movers behind the Bitcoin SV ("Satoshi's Vision") fork. After some dismay from people opposed to this (both people who are "anti-Bitcoin", and the Bitcoin proponents who are anti-SV), he stated that he intends to speak his mind and tell the conference that BSV won't help Wikipedia in any way. Wales is no stranger to social media or publicity. The fact that this thread has been posted to HN shows that.
- ortusdux 7y ago
  Something tells me that this twitter interaction will make it into his presentation.
  - gerikson 7y ago
    I really hope it will be available online after the conference.

henryackerman 7y ago

Which colour do you want that blockchain?

lsb 7y ago
I think mauve has the most RAM
thrower123 7y ago
I'm thinking more of a cornflower blue. Can you make it in cornflower blue?

zozbot234 7y ago

Some people would take issue with the "It works well" part. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2020-February/013793.html https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2020-February... Turns out that scaling up a general-purpose triple store beyond 10B triples is really, really hard, and that few or no people in the FLOSS community (important due to Wiki's reproducibility and freedom-to-fork requirements) are paying attention to the problem.

thom 7y ago
This is a shame, because I genuinely find SPARQL over Wikidata one of the most insanely magical things on the internet. It is literally like being able to just query the universe directly and there's almost no end of fun that can be had formulating new questions you can answer and then finding out it's actually possible. Of course I now feel bad for occasionally hitting it with my frivolous queries, and would be very sad to see it limited.
ansible 7y ago
MediaWiki (the actual Wikipedia website) runs on top of a traditional SQL database (originally just MySQL, but others are now supported too): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_guide https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_guide There have been various forays into Semantic Web technologies. Previously people have done things like parse the infoboxes on Wikipedia pages and then import that into a triple store. It seems that now the Wikimedia Foundation is finally interested in moving in this direction. But the software isn't there yet, certainly not at the scale Wikipedia needs.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  The website you link to states that the support for non-MySQL-derived db's (PostgreSQL and SQLite) is buggy and that not many people are working on it. It seems that legacy constraints are essentially forcing them to stay with their old flaky PHP codebase and MariaDB database. So much for that blockchain thing!
  - 7y ago

adim86 7y ago

What I find fascinating is that the person pushing Jimmy to use crypto for Wikipedia does not seem to fully grasp the technology they are pitching. 1. He pitches it is great to track people posting illicit content on Wikipedia, then argues that crypto is pseudonymous, So why would you use that when web trackers we have today already know what I had for breakfast 2. Why would anyone want people to post illegal material on a blockchain when it is immutable? Let's assume the culprit goes to jail, but then you have billions of people now able to access illegal content, that can never be removed because it is on a blockchain What a sales pitch.

londons_explore 7y ago
I'm kinda surprised nobody has posted illegal pornography onto the bitcoin block chain, and then issued legal proceedings against anyone they can identify running a node. Would be a good way to shut down a competing coin.
- phaser 7y ago
  Already done. https://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2019/02/someone-uploaded-child-pornography-to-a-blockchain-ledger-and-its-almost-impossible-to-delete/ https://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2019/02/someone-uploaded-child-por...
  - Nursie 7y ago
    What I found interesting, though predictable, was that we saw the same wave of "Oh but it's just a set of bits, it's only illegal data if you go looking for the decoder to compile the pieces together". Which could be said about a lot of data formats. I remember seeing these same justifications 15+ years ago when laws were being tightened up around possession and distribution of child abuse imagery, that it's just a stream of bits, you can't criminalise that... You can, and you should. (The extent to which it can be pursued, and to which those who are simply running cryptocurrency nodes should have any culpability for propagating said data is very much open to legal argument, of course.)

jstewartmobile 7y ago

This reminds me to take a Wikipedia snapshot. It seems like it has become more of an ideological battleground lately, and I'm not sure how long their editors will be able to hold the line against various manifestations of astroturfer. Lots of libertarian/anarchist types putting all their bets on blockchain without really knowing much about it. Jimmy's response was gentle considering the circumstances.

nothrabannosir 7y ago

Big fan of the follow up tweet: >> Why are you anti-capitalist? > I’m not anti-capitalist, are you on drugs? https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1226873569508044808 https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1226873569508044808 Ahh, Twitter.

m_fayer 7y ago
Seriously. I think this was my "peak twitter" moment for the month.
52-6F-62 7y ago
Amazing. That whole thread is surreal. It made me like Wales more.

Annatar 7y ago

Guys you are all going down some block chain tangent. The point is that a relational database is designed for storing data, and that works well. The moral of Jimmy's response was if you need to store and retrieve data a relational database is the tool to do that.

smitty1e 7y ago

Wales is a Hayek fan? That is not something I would have guessed.

lasky 7y ago

“Please use this technology I find interesting, because I want it to be useful”

duskwuff 7y ago
Not cynical enough. Try: "Please use this technology I'm financially invested in, because I want its value to rise."

ultim8k 7y ago

And needs thousands of donations to run...

kevingadd 7y ago
Who's gonna run the frontends to make the contents of the wikipedia blockchain accessible to billions of people on commodity web browsers? Does a blockchain make that free somehow? The cost of the database servers is the only thing you're potentially optimizing out here, except unless every frontend stores the entire wikipedia blockchain locally you will need database servers still anyway, they'll just be blockchain "frontends" instead of database frontends.
yreg 7y ago
Still cheaper than a blockchain
duskwuff 7y ago
It's almost as though running one of the most popular web sites in the world [1] costs money. Funny, that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites -- top 10 worldwide, top 5 outside China

Ragnarork 7y ago

I can't help but feel the person pushing for the idea has something to gain personally from one of the most well-known website out there actually using blockchain for... "something", whatever that something is. And that makes the whole exchange pretty surreal.

Traster 7y ago

I can't help but think the next response is "Do you use MongoDB? MongoDB is webscale". This is just trolling. No thought has gone into whether Wikipedia has a problem to solve, nor whether blockchain has the capabilities to solve any problem. It's just memes. >Bitcoin can help any system to become more Byzantine fault tolerant

rsynnott 7y ago
> Bitcoin can help any system to become more Byzantine fault tolerant Bitcoin, the only tech fad which can prevent you from having weird mad emperors or being invaded by the Turks.
- dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
  What I kept thinking.
H8crilA 7y ago
I like the addition of the word "more", while Byzantine fault tolerance is really a binary property (albeit with variable thresholds).
terminaljunkid 7y ago
There was a Reddit user u/passwordissame whose nodejs mongodb webscale copypasta was very funny to read. Is that you?
- meowface 7y ago
  I miss them. Some of the funniest reddit posts ever. The best part is the number of people who took the bait.
- no_one_ever 7y ago
  There is a famous youtube video the above poster is referencing. Search 'MongoDB is web scale' or something along those lines.
7y ago

ronenlh 7y ago

People new to blockchain and tech in general seem to think that blockchain invented the database and public key cryptography. All the ideas they propose are solved by them.

acdha 7y ago
It comes back to money: a pure fiat currency like Bitcoin is only worth what its users believe it to be worth — otherwise you’ve just paid a lot for some random bits. That means that everyone who has spent real money in that space has a vested interest in getting other people to buy in. They’re not going to benefit from your use of a database or PKI and thus won’t consider those as possible solutions. This works as well as any other system designed by the sales team.

PedroBatista 7y ago

Are these crypto nuts or just kids who found a ‘new thing’? Either way it’s a solution looking for a problem and the solution it’s always these people being the ones in charge.

rubyfan 7y ago

Blockchain is overdone. It’s good for crypto currency but really doesn’t solve the myriad of things its being pushed on. There are a dozen consultants trying to sell corporations on what blockchain can do. While it’s true that if you spend money modernizing some legacy way of doing things it’ll probably be better but doing it on blockchain is not the secret sauce. It’s buzzword market and a buzzword solution that isn’t worth the complexity.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
acdha 7y ago
It’s still unproven that it’s good for a currency, too: a decade in, the only significant uses are speculation and money laundering. There are a few users trying to do normal daily life purchases but that volume is a tiny rounding error in the global financial system, which is why backers have lately been trying to retcon it into some sort of reserve currency store of value after having failed at the primary purpose.
- qertoip 7y ago
  Sovereign store of value is the primary use case.
  - acdha 7y ago
    No. Just because that’s the community’s preferred PR answer after failing to become a useful currency doesn’t mean the rest of us forgot the previous decade of breathless claims that Bitcoin would replace the USD and Visa, PayPal, etc. in daily usage. People used to write these glowing stories about routinely buying coffee and paying for Ubers with it.
- broodje 7y ago
  There's a very quickly growing use case of decentralised finance, abbreviated to DeFi. Within the Ethereum chain alone, close to $1b has been locked up in different DeFi projects.

jmartrican 7y ago

One potential use for blockchain (or chain of hashes) might be for authorizing video by putting each of the frames in a blockchain. That way the raw video can be authorized to not have been tampered with.

CerebralCerb 7y ago
You could just hash the video file.
- kiallmacinnes 7y ago
  Yes, and in the process 1) not spend CPU cycles extracting frames... 2) not have a permanent+widely distributed copy of `$illegal` thing someone tried to upload. 3) have a technology that works regardless of content type! amazing! It supports new video codecs right out of the box ;)
PeterisP 7y ago
That doesn't seem to follow, what would prevent someone from doing exactly what you describe after creating a tampered video?

M-R-X 7y ago

Why is that even a discussion? Ain't it obvious that this is a good idea?

major505 7y ago

I used to have a small black board in my table with the phrase "we don`t need blockchain!" Every time a boss would came and propose that we use blockchain tech, I would just wave it.

aflag 7y ago
Where did you work? What was your job title? Who were all these bosses preaching blockchains to you? So many questions!
- major505 7y ago
  I used to work in a small startup. We buid .a system that collects sound of water passing in public water distribution network, to identify water leaks. The company had a few owners, and most of them non computer science people (administration, markting, eletronic engineering backgrounds), and would always sugest the use of blockchains, to store the sound samples, and metadata, just because was the cool term at the time. Since it would not add anything to our business model, and would come full of techical hurdles, I would always opose, wath lead to the creation of the sign.
  - 52-6F-62 7y ago
    I've been in businesses like this, too. Though the keyword was AI or Machine Learning. The mission was always "how can we implement a machine learning solution?" not "what are our needs and how can we most effectively meet them?" Someone is looking to pad the resume. "Oversaw implementation of $TRENDY_TECH solution that $MEANINGLESS_METRICS"

exdsq 7y ago

HN is very anti-blockchain which is surprising. I’m not agreeing with the twitter user saying Wiki should be on a blockchain but projects like Visa B2B Connect, which wants to use a DTL for interbank transactions, or multi-party supply chains are valid use cases. They’re also technically interesting. They have specific use cases sure, and some people who made a load of money in 2017 do chat a lot of rubbish, but it has become a bit of a meme topic around here which is a shame. I don’t feel I could post a genuinely interesting paper on decentralised consensus without it being downvoted because blockchains won’t work as the data store of some web app.

exdsq 7y ago
First downvote after just 1 minute as expected :)
- acdha 7y ago
  What did you expect from a substance-free rant? Try posting a thoughtful comment or that hypothetical paper, talking about a real solution to a problem. I guarantee you’ll get a better discussion than complaining about downvotes.
  - exdsq 7y ago
    It was commentary on the fact a tweet about someone (probably) uneducated in that area of tech suggesting someone else should use it and being told no had reached front page.
    - acdha 7y ago
      You should really read the thread again and note how singularly incapable the blockchain salesguys were of explaining any tangible benefits from adoption. When proponents can’t support it, it’s not the target’s job to do their homework - and it’s pretty obvious that Wales understands it better than they do.
notyourday 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Carpetsmoker 7y ago

This follow-up thread is hilarious: https://twitter.com/DanielKrawisz/status/1226904340029460480 https://twitter.com/DanielKrawisz/status/1226904340029460480

rsynnott 7y ago
> He has all the world's knowledge in his system yet it doesn't tell him why Bitcoin is useful. That should perhaps be a sign.
gcatalfamo 7y ago
it's like a gathering of flat-earthers
ViViDboarder 7y ago
Yikes. It’s full of people doing the same thing. Claiming that it would solve “problems” and confusion as to why others “can’t see that” but making no effort to actually explaining the problem or how a blockchain would solve it.
dmitryminkovsky 7y ago
Why worship Jesus when you can worship Craig? https://mobile.twitter.com/ivmidable/status/1226908612343271424 https://mobile.twitter.com/ivmidable/status/1226908612343271...
ortusdux 7y ago
My favorite reply: > Please consider the very real possibility that it is you, not him, who is missing something.
justsid 7y ago
Why does every high level tweet of the guy have a gif in it? Is that a new trend? I’d unfollow him for that alone

forgotpwd16 7y ago

Is BSV supposedly the new cool altcoin? Edit: Searching it seems to be a Bitcoin fork made by a fraud claiming to be Satoshi.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

abraxas 7y ago

As always the shitty communication medium that is twitter prevents one from discerning any context within which the post was made.

varjag 7y ago
You scroll up for context.

gowld 7y ago

TT;DR: a random nobody made a nonsense comment, and Jimmy Wales made a boring reply, and gawkers and gossips are wasting everyone's time.

rsynnott 7y ago

I feel like, after a few years decline, there's been a _sharp_ rise in incidence of "have you heard the good news about our lord and savior magical internet money" lately. Not sure what's driving this.

broodje 7y ago
I'd wager the start of a new multi year bullrun, fuelled by developments in different technologies.
- tehlike 7y ago
  I'd wager it's tether, and the market manipulation that comes with it.

nottorp 7y ago

A solution looking for a problem is resorting to 'think of the children' marketing. Neeeext!

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

known 7y ago

BlockChain = AuditTrail + PKI

known 7y ago

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, treat everything as if it were a nail" --Maslow

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

macspoofing 7y ago

This is the problem with the blockchain. Any non-currency use-case for blockchain can be done faster and more efficiently by a central server.

boublepop 7y ago

“ Blockbuster: “We already have a DVD rental service, and it has worked for many years. No issues. We do not need to move to online streaming services.” Netflix...” I absolutely love this sentiment. I hope this user launches a blockchain based Wikipedia competitor, and announces it on Show HN, so I can have monthly updates on the technobabble fulled madness of a platform built by people who don’t understand the technology or the space they are trying to solve, but think it will all be ok as long as they can issue an ICO of their wiki-coin before the feds shut them down. I’m thinking it will pan out like a breaking bad/Silicon Valley cross over.

sub7 7y ago

I can't wait until there's a run on the exchanges and they all go insolvent/cease trading. This house of cards has created the most undeserving kings ever.

rjmunro 7y ago

https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects says there have been 44 million edits and 21 million user edits on Wikimedia sites, so 24 edits / second. That's about the fastest bitcoin could possibly go.

hedora 7y ago

Wikipedia is almost already a blockchain. All they need to do to become one is to add a cryptographic hash of the previous database backup to a page included in the backups. (This is what git does when it inserts the parent hash(es) into the commit metadata, and it is a generalization of block chains —it’s “chain” is actually a set of directed acyclic graphs) Anyway, wikimedia posts backup copies of the database at dumps.wikimedia.com, and those pages include sha and md5 hashes. I even found a page of magnet links for english wikipedia on the meta wikipedia. Magnet links contain the hash of the target, but it’s unclear if meta.m.wikipedia is included in the english language dump file, or if it includes magnet links pointing to itself. I’d love to find the missing links. I’m sure Jimmy Wales would love credit for accidentally reinventing the blockchain before the term was coined.

sergiotapia 7y ago

> furry > bitcoin > blockchain > proposing /g/ memetech without even understanding it yeah the memes write themselves.

egypturnash 7y ago

Welcome to the future, where a blue cartoon deer can attempt to convince a balding man who runs an encyclopedia that he should change his encyclopedia to run on top of a complicated substrate of unnecessary cryptography, so that the deer's stake in said unnecessary cryptography will become worth more.

lordleft 7y ago
I didn't really expect our cyberpunk future to look quite like this
- egypturnash 7y ago
  seriously how do I get out of this parody of a Bruce Sterling novel
  - pavel_lishin 7y ago
    Feels more Strossian to me.

leothekim 7y ago

> But what specifically are you proposing? > That you think more deeply about why Bitcoin is a good idea. This pretty much sums up every conversation I have had with a blockchain proponent.

dmitryminkovsky 7y ago

Any time I come across these scene I am reminded of this story: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/tomi-masters-down-the-rabbit-hole-i-go https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/tomi-ma.... HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087505

vermontdevil 7y ago

Another crypto post here: Wikipedia has grown to the point where it's really so important that the database is going to need to be WORM compliant so records can't be changed and editors can be encouraged to be more responsible. This would make inserting false info more expensive & increase trust. Jimmy replied: It is really important that records can be changed. Removing that feature would be bad.

amckenna 7y ago
This is where I diverge from Jimmy, as he is misinterpreting what the commenter is saying. The commenter is talking about _audit logs_ of changes to Wikipedia being kept in WORM compliant record, which is a good idea - audit logs should be immutable. Jimmy seems to be interpreting the comment as saying the pages of Wikipedia should be immutable, which obviously should not be the case.

kerng 7y ago

I find it interesting that Jimmy is even engaging in the discussion, because the other party clearly does not understand Blockchain or Cryptocurrency.

gfodor 7y ago

In finance, this is called "talking your book." The prevalence of this in the crypto space should be embarrassing.

thesausageking 7y ago

Better Tweet from Jimmy in that thread: "That isn't how blockchain works. That suggestion - to force people to strongly identify and pay for the privilege of editing Wikipedia - is a bad idea independently. And [it] would be easy and cheap to implement without blockchain." This is the key problem with most DLT applications. Any blockchain that's used for audit and verification needs some way to connect what happens in the real world (the person uploading content) to the digital one. Putting the digital side onto a blockchain doesn't help if you can fake the data you're putting in. Garbage in, garbage out.

chadlavi 7y ago

An incredibly sick burn

GaryNumanVevo 7y ago

One Commenter put it best: _Bitcoins are to be owned for 35 min while you place the order for drugs and that is all._

jjordan 7y ago

Why did this drop completely from the front page?

wesl3y 7y ago

The other person in the debate is trolling, have a look at their youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC43D9FHfQc4uj7HZAhX97Rg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC43D9FHfQc4uj7HZAhX97Rg Hackernews fell for it hook, line and sinker. We've got to stop taking life so seriously!