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We are using blockchain in our product for verification of text edits. No one has tracked text editing in this way, making it fully traceable, unwind-able, and

We are using blockchain in our product for verification of text edits. No one has tracked text editing in this way, making it fully traceable, unwind-able, and outside-verifiable. [0] https://nebula.mimix.io/msl/specs/ref/hash https://nebula.mimix.io/msl/specs/ref/hash [1] https://nebula.mimix.io/en/msl/intro#hashing https://nebula.mimix.io/en/msl/intro#hashing

xadhominemx 5y ago
Wikipedia does the same thing
- mimixco 5y ago
  Well then that's certainly a use case! :-)
  - xadhominemx 5y ago
    No one is saying blockchain can’t do the same thing worse than other tools
    - mimixco 5y ago
      Just replying to the OP that nobody has a found a use case. In our case, we are fundamentally changing the way text is marked up within a document to correlate it to individual changes in that text over time. This is different from Git or Wikipedia which make document-level snapshots.
      - lovegoblin 5y ago
        > we are fundamentally changing the way text is marked up within a document to correlate it to individual changes in that text over time. What does this even mean? Are you Disrupting™ the Text Editing Industry? In what substantial way is it different - and better - than existing version control?
        netizen-936824 5y ago
        Don't worry, your document's editing history is safe from hackers... Or something
        socialist_coder 5y ago
        Unless the hackers control 50%+ of the mining?
        mimixco 5y ago
        Indeed! Our use of blockchain doesn't involve tokens or mining. Just a literal chain of hashes. Each hash is the hash of one edit or change made with the MSL language. If the chain is incorrect, your version of the document has elements in it which were not in the original and the exact point where they deviate can be determined. You can perform this work without having any access to the documents or the text itself.
        mimixco 5y ago
        That's a good one! We're proposing it as an outside, second verification source that people can run independently, not as a big blockchain that we control. I know the whole area is tenuous!
        mimixco 5y ago
        That's an awesome question. At the root, we are trying to provide fact-checking and fact-correction, and this goes down to remembering the "values" of individual words and phrases that make up the document, then tracking those changes over time. Instead of a list of unrelated edits, we make it easy to do things like find all of the changes to a certain term and update all of them without changing anything else in a document. That's just one kind of transform that's possible. The blockchain aspect serves as an outside, second source of edit history that can be used to just keep hash values, not documents themselves. The hash values can be checked against the hash of any version that anyone has to see which version they have. These are just a few of the aspects of the language and the tools we've built to implement it. If anyone is interested in this stuff, there's a ton at our website! http://nebula.mimix.io http://nebula.mimix.io And I'm always open for questions and feedback.
      - brabel 5y ago
        > This is different from Git or Wikipedia which make document-level snapshots. I believe you're wrong, git commits are diffs, not snapshots.
        mimixco 5y ago
        Yes, diffs of entire documents. Our system works differently.
        Arnavion 5y ago
        https://github.blog/2020-12-17-commits-are-snapshots-not-diffs/ https://github.blog/2020-12-17-commits-are-snapshots-not-dif... (I don't necessarily agree with the article's messaging around "Haha you were only confused by git because you thought commits are diffs now that you know they're actually snapshots you have no more confusion", because, as the article itself admits, most of the commands like cherry-pick do work on dynamically-computed diffs anyway.)
        brabel 5y ago
        Interesting... a git commit is almost always represented as a diff... example: https://github.com/github/gitignore/commit/991e760c1c6d50fdda246e0178b9c58b06770b90.patch https://github.com/github/gitignore/commit/991e760c1c6d50fdd... Whether it's represeented as a diff internally seems completely irrelevant to me, even to understand the examples in the article. I would like to be able to "de-serialize" a real commit's data to see exactly what's stored, but this article doesn't seem to show how to do that... do you have a suggestion on how to do that?
      - nomel 5y ago
        I think "use case" generally implies "good use case" rather than "technically possible use case", which would be better classified as "misuse case". My favorite misuse case is using a knife to turn a screw.
- smsm42 5y ago
  Not exactly the same - you can drop edits from Wikipedia history (given appropriate access) and nobody would know.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
GitHub with GPG signed commits?
- mimixco 5y ago
  There's another use case. To paraphrase Mark Twain, "Announcements of blockchain's death have been premature."
  - mimixco 5y ago
    For somebody selling fact checking, misquoting Twain is almost unforgivable! The correct quote should have been, "Reports of my (blockchain's) death have been greatly exaggerated." My bad. Apparently, misquoting Twain is popular itself[0]. I only mentioned it in humor so I hope this wasn't taken as a slam in any way. Twain is an ancestor of mine and was famous for pithiness. [0] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/562400/reports-mark-twains-quote-about-mark-twains-death-are-greatly-exaggerated https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/562400/reports-mark-twai...
woodruffw 5y ago
> No one has tracked text editing in this way, making it fully traceable, unwind-able, and outside-verifiable. I know it's trite on HN, but: isn't this literally just version control? Particular integrity choices aside, Git has all of the properties you state above.
- mimixco 5y ago
  Those are properties of Git, indeed. The difference is in the "in this way" part of the sentence. I've written a lot about what we are doing and why and the proof is in the puddin', MSL is available to download and run in our Nebula product. Here's the website with full documentation and downloads. http://nebula.mimix.io http://nebula.mimix.io
  - basch 5y ago
    Admittedly having only given the whitepaper a brief scan, I have two questions. Is it distributed, or are you hosting the whole instance yourself? Does it use any other academic component of the bitcoin suite besides linked logs? https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3136559 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3136559 I ask because a hashed merkle tree probably isnt what comes to everyone's mind when they hear blockchain, even if it is the literal definition. The author of the article is using it to be a distributed ledger between untrusted parties. If your product isnt that, its sort of an apples to oranges comparison to say you have a use case for something different than what he is dismissing.
    - mimixco 5y ago
      Thank you for those excellent questions! The entire tech is open source and can be used on-premise, in the cloud, or in any kind of hybrid. Today, we are offering Nebula which is an integrated engine and viewer with no outside dependencies, but everything is there for anyone to deploy it on a server and separate the parts. It's designed for that. Coming very shortly are MSL Notebook and MSL.js which are UI components and a Typescript library for working with MSL and adding it to your own apps, wherever they live. We also have a "headless" MSL engine that lives in the cloud which will soon be public so you can play with it through MSL Notebook or use it to test and develop your own apps. We are not using Bitcoin or any component of it. Our idea is based on the old skool meaning of "blockchain" in that it is a chain of records whose order can be proved by hashing. That is the only component of the blockchain concept that applies here. We use it to hash individual edits within a document, as opposed to hashing entire documents.
arcticbull 5y ago
You should check out github.com ;)
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post shallow dismissals or be a jerk in HN comments. We're trying for a different sort of internet here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - t0mbstone 5y ago
    I didn't interpret it as a shallow dismissal. I interpreted it as a genuine inquiry and a challenge, as in, "Uh... you say your product is the first product to solve these problems, but git version control ALSO solves those problems, so why and how is your product different?"
    - dang 5y ago
      That's a fair defense! But once a one-liner like that gets added to the ecosystem it tends to bring snark to the fore.
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        Hey, thanks for calling that out. I didn't intend it to be snarky - tone doesn't always carry well on the internet - and will make that more clear moving forward. Thanks for keeping this a decent place :)
ARandumGuy 5y ago
I looked through the website you linked, and I was greeted with pages and pages of stuff. Technical specifications, diagrams, and an introduction that has two sections going over microfilm. Yet I couldn't find the answer to the one question I actually had: "Why?" What is the use case for this system? How will this actually benefit me? What problem is this solving?
- mimixco 5y ago
  Sure! Thanks for saying that. It's very hard to know how to approach such a large topic with different audiences. We have a lot of materials out there with different aims. The TL;DR is documents are wrong and often out of date. People rely on incorrect information and that screws up the work and the workflow. We are fixing this with a language designed to track and correct text as facts change. Here's our new pitch deck with the 10,000 ft overview: http://invest.mimix.io http://invest.mimix.io
  - t0mbstone 5y ago
    The pitch deck is shiny and all, but you still haven't explained what blockchain has to do with any of it?
    - mimixco 5y ago
      Thank you. Since it's not a primary function of the app, we don't dwell on it online. The biggest stuff is in the language doc. In a simple scenario, every edit you make to a document is recorded individually and hashed with the hash of the previous edit. This forms the chain. The chain itself can be stored anywhere. It's useless if you don't have the document. But if you do have the document or any fragment, you can instantly tell what version you have and if it has any differences from the original -- without seeing the original.
      - CarelessExpert 5y ago
        > TIn a simple scenario, every edit you make to a document is recorded individually and hashed with the hash of the previous edit. This forms the chain. You've just described a degenerate Merkle tree. > The chain itself can be stored anywhere. Then it's not a blockchain. A blockchain involves combining a Merkle tree with a distributed, trustless consensus algorithm. Otherwise Git would be described as a blockchain and I don't think anyone refers to it that way. At least, not with a straight face.

xadhominemx 5y ago

Wikipedia does the same thing

mimixco 5y ago
Well then that's certainly a use case! :-)
- xadhominemx 5y ago
  No one is saying blockchain can’t do the same thing worse than other tools
  - mimixco 5y ago
    Just replying to the OP that nobody has a found a use case. In our case, we are fundamentally changing the way text is marked up within a document to correlate it to individual changes in that text over time. This is different from Git or Wikipedia which make document-level snapshots.
    - lovegoblin 5y ago
      > we are fundamentally changing the way text is marked up within a document to correlate it to individual changes in that text over time. What does this even mean? Are you Disrupting™ the Text Editing Industry? In what substantial way is it different - and better - than existing version control?
      - netizen-936824 5y ago
        Don't worry, your document's editing history is safe from hackers... Or something
        socialist_coder 5y ago
        Unless the hackers control 50%+ of the mining?
        mimixco 5y ago
        Indeed! Our use of blockchain doesn't involve tokens or mining. Just a literal chain of hashes. Each hash is the hash of one edit or change made with the MSL language. If the chain is incorrect, your version of the document has elements in it which were not in the original and the exact point where they deviate can be determined. You can perform this work without having any access to the documents or the text itself.
        mimixco 5y ago
        That's a good one! We're proposing it as an outside, second verification source that people can run independently, not as a big blockchain that we control. I know the whole area is tenuous!
      - mimixco 5y ago
        That's an awesome question. At the root, we are trying to provide fact-checking and fact-correction, and this goes down to remembering the "values" of individual words and phrases that make up the document, then tracking those changes over time. Instead of a list of unrelated edits, we make it easy to do things like find all of the changes to a certain term and update all of them without changing anything else in a document. That's just one kind of transform that's possible. The blockchain aspect serves as an outside, second source of edit history that can be used to just keep hash values, not documents themselves. The hash values can be checked against the hash of any version that anyone has to see which version they have. These are just a few of the aspects of the language and the tools we've built to implement it. If anyone is interested in this stuff, there's a ton at our website! http://nebula.mimix.io http://nebula.mimix.io And I'm always open for questions and feedback.
    - brabel 5y ago
      > This is different from Git or Wikipedia which make document-level snapshots. I believe you're wrong, git commits are diffs, not snapshots.
      - mimixco 5y ago
        Yes, diffs of entire documents. Our system works differently.
      - Arnavion 5y ago
        https://github.blog/2020-12-17-commits-are-snapshots-not-diffs/ https://github.blog/2020-12-17-commits-are-snapshots-not-dif... (I don't necessarily agree with the article's messaging around "Haha you were only confused by git because you thought commits are diffs now that you know they're actually snapshots you have no more confusion", because, as the article itself admits, most of the commands like cherry-pick do work on dynamically-computed diffs anyway.)
        brabel 5y ago
        Interesting... a git commit is almost always represented as a diff... example: https://github.com/github/gitignore/commit/991e760c1c6d50fdda246e0178b9c58b06770b90.patch https://github.com/github/gitignore/commit/991e760c1c6d50fdd... Whether it's represeented as a diff internally seems completely irrelevant to me, even to understand the examples in the article. I would like to be able to "de-serialize" a real commit's data to see exactly what's stored, but this article doesn't seem to show how to do that... do you have a suggestion on how to do that?
    - nomel 5y ago
      I think "use case" generally implies "good use case" rather than "technically possible use case", which would be better classified as "misuse case". My favorite misuse case is using a knife to turn a screw.
smsm42 5y ago
Not exactly the same - you can drop edits from Wikipedia history (given appropriate access) and nobody would know.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

GitHub with GPG signed commits?

mimixco 5y ago
There's another use case. To paraphrase Mark Twain, "Announcements of blockchain's death have been premature."
- mimixco 5y ago
  For somebody selling fact checking, misquoting Twain is almost unforgivable! The correct quote should have been, "Reports of my (blockchain's) death have been greatly exaggerated." My bad. Apparently, misquoting Twain is popular itself[0]. I only mentioned it in humor so I hope this wasn't taken as a slam in any way. Twain is an ancestor of mine and was famous for pithiness. [0] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/562400/reports-mark-twains-quote-about-mark-twains-death-are-greatly-exaggerated https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/562400/reports-mark-twai...

woodruffw 5y ago

> No one has tracked text editing in this way, making it fully traceable, unwind-able, and outside-verifiable. I know it's trite on HN, but: isn't this literally just version control? Particular integrity choices aside, Git has all of the properties you state above.

mimixco 5y ago
Those are properties of Git, indeed. The difference is in the "in this way" part of the sentence. I've written a lot about what we are doing and why and the proof is in the puddin', MSL is available to download and run in our Nebula product. Here's the website with full documentation and downloads. http://nebula.mimix.io http://nebula.mimix.io
- basch 5y ago
  Admittedly having only given the whitepaper a brief scan, I have two questions. Is it distributed, or are you hosting the whole instance yourself? Does it use any other academic component of the bitcoin suite besides linked logs? https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3136559 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3136559 I ask because a hashed merkle tree probably isnt what comes to everyone's mind when they hear blockchain, even if it is the literal definition. The author of the article is using it to be a distributed ledger between untrusted parties. If your product isnt that, its sort of an apples to oranges comparison to say you have a use case for something different than what he is dismissing.
  - mimixco 5y ago
    Thank you for those excellent questions! The entire tech is open source and can be used on-premise, in the cloud, or in any kind of hybrid. Today, we are offering Nebula which is an integrated engine and viewer with no outside dependencies, but everything is there for anyone to deploy it on a server and separate the parts. It's designed for that. Coming very shortly are MSL Notebook and MSL.js which are UI components and a Typescript library for working with MSL and adding it to your own apps, wherever they live. We also have a "headless" MSL engine that lives in the cloud which will soon be public so you can play with it through MSL Notebook or use it to test and develop your own apps. We are not using Bitcoin or any component of it. Our idea is based on the old skool meaning of "blockchain" in that it is a chain of records whose order can be proved by hashing. That is the only component of the blockchain concept that applies here. We use it to hash individual edits within a document, as opposed to hashing entire documents.

arcticbull 5y ago

You should check out github.com ;)

dang 5y ago
Please don't post shallow dismissals or be a jerk in HN comments. We're trying for a different sort of internet here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- t0mbstone 5y ago
  I didn't interpret it as a shallow dismissal. I interpreted it as a genuine inquiry and a challenge, as in, "Uh... you say your product is the first product to solve these problems, but git version control ALSO solves those problems, so why and how is your product different?"
  - dang 5y ago
    That's a fair defense! But once a one-liner like that gets added to the ecosystem it tends to bring snark to the fore.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      Hey, thanks for calling that out. I didn't intend it to be snarky - tone doesn't always carry well on the internet - and will make that more clear moving forward. Thanks for keeping this a decent place :)

ARandumGuy 5y ago

I looked through the website you linked, and I was greeted with pages and pages of stuff. Technical specifications, diagrams, and an introduction that has two sections going over microfilm. Yet I couldn't find the answer to the one question I actually had: "Why?" What is the use case for this system? How will this actually benefit me? What problem is this solving?

mimixco 5y ago
Sure! Thanks for saying that. It's very hard to know how to approach such a large topic with different audiences. We have a lot of materials out there with different aims. The TL;DR is documents are wrong and often out of date. People rely on incorrect information and that screws up the work and the workflow. We are fixing this with a language designed to track and correct text as facts change. Here's our new pitch deck with the 10,000 ft overview: http://invest.mimix.io http://invest.mimix.io
- t0mbstone 5y ago
  The pitch deck is shiny and all, but you still haven't explained what blockchain has to do with any of it?
  - mimixco 5y ago
    Thank you. Since it's not a primary function of the app, we don't dwell on it online. The biggest stuff is in the language doc. In a simple scenario, every edit you make to a document is recorded individually and hashed with the hash of the previous edit. This forms the chain. The chain itself can be stored anywhere. It's useless if you don't have the document. But if you do have the document or any fragment, you can instantly tell what version you have and if it has any differences from the original -- without seeing the original.
    - CarelessExpert 5y ago
      > TIn a simple scenario, every edit you make to a document is recorded individually and hashed with the hash of the previous edit. This forms the chain. You've just described a degenerate Merkle tree. > The chain itself can be stored anywhere. Then it's not a blockchain. A blockchain involves combining a Merkle tree with a distributed, trustless consensus algorithm. Otherwise Git would be described as a blockchain and I don't think anyone refers to it that way. At least, not with a straight face.