6 ms·

So, it's not even that the SQL state is distributed, it's that every change to the SQL state has to be "validated" and appended to a blockchain? At a 1M DAU tra

So, it's not even that the SQL state is distributed, it's that every change to the SQL state has to be "validated" and appended to a blockchain? At a 1M DAU traffic level? How often are blocks/writes written? Who pays for all that data storage? How "decentralized" would it really be, considering the incredibly onerous requirements to run a validator at the target scale?

synctext 7y ago
Indeed, as a professor who studies these systems for a living I also had to think. Will this scale? Big step forward if we get something like this finally to 1 million people. Who owns the server infrastructure? How are these miners paid? The usual token-based incentive? Where do I buy these with real Euros or Dollars? Incentive alignment is key. We known since Bittorrent tit-for-tat that creating a micro-economy is a hard problem. I hope they get some sort of token and micro-economy going, but this is a known hard problem.
ryscheng 7y ago
Hi all! I just wanted to say thanks for the awesome questions. I can't say I have the answers to these questions, but I can lay out some of my intuition and would love to work together with anyone that also finds these questions interesting! 1. Will this scale? Blockchains vary from the order of ~10^0 tps (PoW) to ~10^4 tps (PoS). https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/2019-06-23-what-is-the-difference-between/ https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/2019-06-23-what-is-t... Wikipedia sees 50K HTTP requests/second and 80K SQL queries/second. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/uptime/data-center-providers-adjust-doing-business-remotely https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/uptime/data-center-provi... But it is also read-heavy. Let's say if 10% of the workload includes writes (probably too conservative), we barely squeak by... I'm willing to guess the number is way lower than that. They saw 10M page edits for the entire month of Dec 2018. https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseEdits.htm https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseEdits.htm My guess is, this might be doable :-D 2. Who runs this? and who pays? Great question. The blog completely skips the question about incentives which in my opinion will vary depending on the app. For creating an censorship-resistant Wikipedia, it'll be different than a communications app. Some apps might be better off permissioned (e.g. enterprise settings) Wikipedia is 43GB of text and 23TB of rich media (images and video). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia If we limit ourselves to just Wikipedia text, it might be reasonable to do this permissionless! Hoping to write a blog post about that soon after we get more built to show.
thulecitizen 7y ago
This sounds similar to Holochain [1], which uses a BitTorrent type DHT for validation. [1] http://developer.holochain.org http://developer.holochain.org

synctext 7y ago

Indeed, as a professor who studies these systems for a living I also had to think. Will this scale? Big step forward if we get something like this finally to 1 million people. Who owns the server infrastructure? How are these miners paid? The usual token-based incentive? Where do I buy these with real Euros or Dollars? Incentive alignment is key. We known since Bittorrent tit-for-tat that creating a micro-economy is a hard problem. I hope they get some sort of token and micro-economy going, but this is a known hard problem.

ryscheng 7y ago

Hi all! I just wanted to say thanks for the awesome questions. I can't say I have the answers to these questions, but I can lay out some of my intuition and would love to work together with anyone that also finds these questions interesting! 1. Will this scale? Blockchains vary from the order of ~10^0 tps (PoW) to ~10^4 tps (PoS). https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/2019-06-23-what-is-the-difference-between/ https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/2019-06-23-what-is-t... Wikipedia sees 50K HTTP requests/second and 80K SQL queries/second. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/uptime/data-center-providers-adjust-doing-business-remotely https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/uptime/data-center-provi... But it is also read-heavy. Let's say if 10% of the workload includes writes (probably too conservative), we barely squeak by... I'm willing to guess the number is way lower than that. They saw 10M page edits for the entire month of Dec 2018. https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseEdits.htm https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseEdits.htm My guess is, this might be doable :-D 2. Who runs this? and who pays? Great question. The blog completely skips the question about incentives which in my opinion will vary depending on the app. For creating an censorship-resistant Wikipedia, it'll be different than a communications app. Some apps might be better off permissioned (e.g. enterprise settings) Wikipedia is 43GB of text and 23TB of rich media (images and video). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia If we limit ourselves to just Wikipedia text, it might be reasonable to do this permissionless! Hoping to write a blog post about that soon after we get more built to show.

thulecitizen 7y ago

This sounds similar to Holochain [1], which uses a BitTorrent type DHT for validation. [1] http://developer.holochain.org http://developer.holochain.org