3 ms·

How does this work? Is it a small group of federated servers? One big server? A WAN? Seems like a good demonstration of why a distributed technology like a "r

• toomuchtodo 6y ago
  This is a demonstration that all systems have outages. It does not demonstrate a distributed ledger system would be superior. Distributed technologies have different trade offs and failure modes.
  • ilaksh 6y ago
    They usually have superior reliability, at least as far as the entire system crashing less. And some newer cryptocurrency strategies have very high transaction rates.
    • toomuchtodo 6y ago
      It's going to be quite some time before the public at large trusts crypto over a centralized finance system backed by the full faith and trust in the US government (if ever). Currencies aren't about technology, they are an expression of power and trust. Less than two hours of downtime is nothing to write home about, and the Fed is down less frequently than major cloud providers and others those in technology would be familiar with and consider critical services. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and it doesn't get much more simple than message queues and worker processes.
      • ilaksh 6y ago
        I was suggesting using cryptocurrency (such as Ethereum or PolkaDOT) to implement the centrally-controlled functions of the Federal Reserve currently being handled by simplistic queues or whatever it is. So this is a different discussion than the one your previous comment argues against. "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" is a nice-sounding catchphrase but in many contexts does not hold water. For example, systems without redundancy are objectively simpler but not more reliable. But more fundamentally, currency and money IS a technology. It's use is as you say to distribute power and express trust. But fundamentally it is a technology used for that purpose. Cryptocurrency is ultimately about putting power in the hands of the people and trust in mathematics rather than central authorities. Eventually the central banks and banking institutions as they exist now will be phased out and replaced with different paradigms that have some similar functions but more sophisticated technology.
        • vangelis 6y ago
          Which cryptocurrency lets me do a chargeback?
          • farisjarrah 6y ago
            I am not for or against cryptocurrencies, and not a cryptography expert, so take what I say with a grain of salt. You don't necessarily need to use a publicly available cryptocurrency that exists in the wild today. If an organization was motivated enough and thought it was a good idea, they could simply launch their own private blockchain on their own hardware that they control. With your own blockchain on your own hardware you could still reap the benefits of decentralized compute power, and build your own smart contracts system that can broker chargebacks. The barrier to entry for an endeavor like this is the lowest its ever been too, you can even spin up a managed blockchain on AWS these days. https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/ https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/