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This article is profoundly insightful. I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true: All

This article is profoundly insightful. I have been searching for patterns and insights in this field for 25 years. What apenwarr concludes is true: All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. The problem is, everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus), which is literally impossible (see: CAP theory, and what happens when Partition occurs). There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny. Fortunately, the entire universe and everything in it works without global consensus, just fine (for various definitions of "fine"). There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure: https://holo.host https://holo.host This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW. Just to whet your appetite, here's some high-level observations on how these breakthroughs may affect our lives, in the area of Money: https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/holochain-consistency/ https://perry.kundert.ca/range/finance/holochain-consistency...

fortuna86 5y ago
> Disintermediation is always always always a myth. It only means replacing a previous intermediary with another, supposedly more deserving one. pic.twitter.com/jTM45MNas0
thepra 5y ago
Seems nice in concept, but Rust and Node.js is a bad and limiting in execution
rektide 5y ago
Paul Frazee (of Beaker Browser) had a thread that got some good reach on distributed without consensus (but often some ability to see people break their contracts). Holo did come up. :) > Maybe it’s time to dig into the non-blockchain smart contract idea that’s been floating around for a while. Drop the PoW and transaction fees, but maintain the trustless verification and open data/code https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/1462491070244208640 https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/1462491070244208640 As for the 1000 years post being great- in general Avery Pennarum is a world treasure. Great ability to surface ideas & through & make situations legibile. Another very fine example. The "state my assumptions" lead in is divine all on it's own.
- pjkundert 5y ago
  One key observation leading to Holochain, is that the systematic breaking of the assumptions of a "Smart Contract" (the shared DNA code, in Holochain terms) is a valid form of agreement. If some group wants to lie and pick each-others pockets: well, OK, carry on. Just let me know about it, and not take part in it. It's not the end of the world.
nouveaux 5y ago
"There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny." I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible. Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical. One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another. When you live on your own 200 acre farm, you don't want someone to come in and tell you what to do with your tree. When you live in a 200 person apartment complex, you do care when your neighbors are being loud at 2am. With technology, we are living closer and closer with each other. I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus.
- ahtihn 5y ago
  I've never seen anyone else define conservative vs liberals like that. Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules. Why are conservatives against abortion, gay marriage and drug legalisation if they don't want to be told what they can do on their "own 200 acre farm". All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others.
  - nouveaux 5y ago
    This is the general perspective on conservatives and I agree with the sentiment. If you extrapolate this out, people who live happily in rural areas do not want someone (government) to tell them about new changes. Small government and less regulation is a big part of their ethos. "All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others." This seems to apply to everyone involved. Liberals want to impose their worldview on others just as much as conservatives. I think that's ok. We all want to pursue what is best.
    - toiletfuneral 5y ago
js8 5y ago
> That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. Interestingly, he also mentions that central economic planning doesn't work (although I am not so sure I completely agree with that thesis), but this sounds very similar to Cybersyn's design.
- pitaj 5y ago
  Central panning doesn't scale because of limits to economic knowledge and calculation. You can't possibly know enough about what everyone needs or wants in an economy. Even if you did, calculating resource allocation based on that is NP.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    We definitely do broad-strokes central planning in the US and every other developed country with tax system design, social support systems, and industrial policy. The Soviet Union sucked, but it lasted an extremely long time. The moral of the story is central planning kinda does work, just not very well if you do too much of it.
    - sfink 5y ago
      I think it's more that you need layers. A centrally planned layer of regulation and safety nets that provide a base level to keep things running (and people alive), but without the cost and inefficiency of trying to control everything, and then a more efficient, free market–like layer on top that relies on the lower layer to provide the "free" in "free market". I believe it would be more productive to argue about where the layer boundaries should be, rather than endlessly arguing about whether one or the other layer should even exist. (Because they'll both always exist. People will help each other out even in a free-for-all; and black markets will always come into existence in rigid, fully-planned economies.)
    - WC3w6pXxgGd 5y ago
      > The Soviet Union sucked, but it lasted an extremely long time. Less than a century is not "an extremely long time," and its citizens majorly suffered under the central planning. There was nothing successful about the Soviet Union.
cmurf 5y ago
What is the pattern in common among all industries politics governments and culture? The article proposes these things are all interrelated but doesn't make the connections among them. Also for going to identify the pattern we need to have a common frame of reference. The facts have to be indisputable. >Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves Everyone? This sort of hyperbole makes it difficult to identify patterns. We have more examples today of public benefit corporations than 10 50 or 100 years ago. Maybe it's subjective or arbitrary, but let's say at 1 billion dollar valuation a corporation must by law become a public benefit corporation. Do we always need to have regulatory regimes compel corporations to comply with civil or social good? We know about regulatory capture. So we know a regulatory regime doesn't always work. Sure, it works better than outright feudalism. Is there such a thing as the proper range for wealth inequality? I don't know that we even know the answer to that question of let alone what that range would be or how to maintain that range in a civil way. The innovation of the United States of America at its founding, was its distribution of power. Forming a polyarchy instead of a monarchy. Of course, it's a biased distribution. Not everyone gets power. But the idea is that centralized power leads to corruption. And creating a competitive environment for ambition, reduces the chances not for corruption, but totalitarianism. But I wonder if democracies have optimized as far as they can.
- deltarholamda 5y ago
  >But I wonder if democracies have optimized as far as they can. If you dig your powdered wig out of the closet and look back at the founding of the united States of America, their big idea is still pretty good. The article makes this point, obliquely: >All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. Having the Big Nationwide Things happen at the federal level, and the Not Quite As Big Local Things happen at the State level was a fine idea. You can't get Tennessee and North Carolina to agree on BBQ; do you really think they're going to have the same ideas on social issues, or how to handle them? It's all well and good to have nationwide building codes, but even that falls apart rather quickly. You don't build the same way in California as you would on the Gulf Coast. Cramming everything into the federal purview wheelhouse is great if you're in NYC or LA, and you can't stand that some people in Nebraska or Alabama disagree with you.
davidw 5y ago
> Tyranny No. What he's saying is that there are 'distributed' aspects like two people deciding on a price for something. Not everyone has to agree on that price and that's fine! That's how markets work. But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... that I have some recourse. Everyone needs to roughly agree to those rules.
- beambot 5y ago
  > But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... That would be "larceny", and there are lots of rules prohibiting it & court systems to recoup damages. Credit card companies (for example) are just a more-rapid arbitration mechanism.
  - davidw 5y ago
    That's part of the point of the article. Those rules are not some kind of distributed system. They are centralized.
    - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      that's half true. every actor in the system has its own ledger and they reconcile transactions at a given point in time. you don't need to know what others are doing or who they are. your bank authorize your transactions and then some other bank receives the order to deposit the money on another account they control. in this sense banking is more decentralized than "one true ledger to rule them all"
      - davidw 5y ago
        I was referring to 'larceny' in my comment as being a centralized rule.
    - meheleventyone 5y ago
      Although in reality enforcement can be selective and vary by jurisdiction so it’s also decentralised in implementation.
fabianhjr 5y ago
> everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus) Not really, Secure Scuttlebutt is highly subjective and has been in use for a while. ( https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ ) Some spinoffs adopt that explicit subjectivity of each user.
sva_ 5y ago
> https://holo.host https://holo.host > HoloToken (HOT) is an ERC-20 token I'm not sure a hierarchy in which the Ethereum Foundation, who gave themselves the absolute majority of Ether currency, is at the top, is the answer to the struggles/issues postulated in the essay.
- pjkundert 5y ago
  Nope, Holo / Holochain has nothing to do with Ethereum; HOT is just the place-holder token (issued during the ICO used to fund the project, initially, a couple of years ago). When the project goes live, it will be exchangeable for the initial HoloFuel cryptocurrency.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure anything running on the mainnet these days will be 10x more expensive than a classic centralized option just with gas fees and is as such completely useless.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Also: - Economy of scale means this won't be "AirBnB for hosting". I can't negotiate power costs or get as much efficiency out of my operations as someone with a real datacenter. Not even close. [EDIT: see also, Bitcoin mining, which started out "anyone can do it!" but wasn't anymore as soon as real money got involved. Just buy an expensive rack of ASICs that aren't good for anything else, and find some place to arbitrage power costs. Yeah, real accessible to the masses, that is.] - All these "decentralize everything down to the end user" efforts neglect that most personal computing devices run on battery and sleep most of the time, these days, and that trend does not seem likely to reverse. See also: IPFS. Most folks don't have an always-on desktop- or server-class computer for this sort of thing, at all, and would have to buy one to participate. That's not super appealing. Also, decentralization tends to come at costs for routing and lookup, which often end up eating cycles (so, power, so, battery) on the end user's machine, compared with centralized options. See again: IPFS. So they end up adding centralized access points that are what most users actually interact with (see, yet again...) or their entire audience is computer nerds. If they have any real, viable use case, it ends up being as part of a centralized system, to help make it more resilient or cheaper to operate.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wyager 5y ago
The fact that holo introduces a shitcoin when any payment channel (lightning, some USD service, etc) would work means I'm not going to take it seriously.
- pjkundert 5y ago
  A cryptocurrency that will continue to work reliably and without a bound on aggregate transaction rate in the face of network Partitioning is … a “shitcoin”?
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    Point is if you solved a problem, you can sell the solution for USD Attaching a solution to a cryptocurrency comes off as just wanting to sell tokens, not sell the solution.
    - beckman466 5y ago
      > Attaching a solution to a cryptocurrency comes off as just wanting to sell tokens, not sell the solution. well yeah it's not ideal, yet the holochain foundation does all their work in the open and have to fund their development somehow (https://github.com/holochain/holochain https://github.com/holochain/holochain). better doing an ethical ico-like crowdsourcing (based on a unit of computing power, like Airbnb but for processing power) than strapping into the chains of Venture Capital. most important though is that the main framework created by the Holochain team is fully open source (linked above). so using the Holo host system is optional. it is meant as a way to enable easy onboarding of new users for new Holochain apps. Holo's distributed web of nodes help non-technical users use Holochain apps without being technically literate enough. so Holo users like my mom will be comfortable using Holochain apps that look like client-server apps, until we as a society transition to fully p2p apps, and the ecosystem as a whole matures to a point where we no longer need this 'bridge'. also cool is that, inspired by LETS and similar systems, the holochain framework allows easy deployment of mutual credit currencies [1]. imo the most exciting implementation of this is the Resources Events Agents (REA) accounting by http://mikorizal.org http://mikorizal.org led by, amongst others, two retired software engineers. you can check out their project http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws. there is another project not building on Holochain, but using the Valueflo.ws ontology/vocabulary called bonfire: https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire_valueflows https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire_valueflows (main website: https://bonfirenetworks.org/ https://bonfirenetworks.org/) anyways, before dismissing this project because of preconceived notions about the cryptocurrencies (which i agree are 99.999999% shitcoins), please read through their awesome developer docs: https://developer.holochain.org/ https://developer.holochain.org/ think of Holochain like a Ruby on Rails framework, but for distributed applications instead of client-server: https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati... [1] https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalable-cryptocurrencies-1eb7aebac6ae https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalab...
ggm 5y ago
> This article is profoundly insightful. How about adding a "not" to that and trying it on for size? Is it really profound? > There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure: https://holo.host https://holo.host -This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW. Umm.. do we? Is this .. OK, forgive me, I've been penalty boxed for the first time in the last week, and should word this carefully, but.. my skeptical meter is on stun. Is this 'shilling' which is regrettably common in cryptocurrency conversations?
- pjkundert 5y ago
  Well, if "excited" and "shilling" are synonyms, then maybe! ;) But seriously, I spent significant effort over 25 years trying to solve some of the cooperation and communications problems in distributed systems. I'd deployed a cryptocurrency before Bitcoin came out in 2009; foolishly, I downloaded the system and found it hadn't solved these problems, so didn't run it (:/) So, when I ran into Holochain a few years back, and began to understand what they had accomplished (in theory, at the time), I dropped everything I was doing and went full time on the project. Built the first 2 prototypes of HoloFuel. Building planetary-scale (or even inter-planetary) distributed systems that can maintain consistency in the face of partitioning or massive latency while maintaining aggregate transaction rates almost linear with node count is now possible. So, ya -- I think these insights and their successful implementation is "profound". Like, never been done before, and everyone thought it was impossible "profound". You may have a much higher level of expectation. To me, that would be a lot like watching Free Solo while sucking on a soda, and saying "ya, that's not that impressive".
  - ggm 5y ago
    Enthusiasm is good. CAP isn't going away.
ntr-- 5y ago
Incredible. > There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets. My reading was the author was referring here to cryptocurrencies and you read the article, claim it's profound, and then spruik an ERC-20 token.
- pjkundert 5y ago
  The project was funded through an ICO a couple years ago; these will be exchangeable for the in-system HoloFuel cryptocurrency, when the project goes live. Of course, the project isn’t associated with Ethereum in any way.
  - not_really 5y ago
    Look, I'm a fan of this, and thanks for sharing - hadn't heard of this project until today. However claiming it's not associated with ethereum in any way, really? There's mention of an erc-20 token on the home page. Come on, man.
    - pjkundert 5y ago
      You know how ICOs are used to fund non-Ethereum projects, right?
- nadahalli 5y ago
  I was like "This cannot be the top comment on HN". It is. Sigh.
  - pjkundert 5y ago
    I usually agree with you, regarding top posts on HN. Usually I wonder how it is that uninteresting first-order effects dominate. This is a chance for us all to consider something perhaps more profound.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
Enforced uniformity is the law. You cannot have discordance in law. You can choose to either institute law via centralized delegates, and make it mandatory, which is tyranny imposed by central authorities, or through a decentralized protocol that achieves uniformity through opt-in global consensus. apenwarr prefers the status quo, and ridicules the new cryptoeconomic systems which make the latter possible.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
> This article is profoundly insightful. Insightful? No discussion of environmental, ecological, social, and economic collapse if we continue on the way we're going, yet, somehow, it was "insightful?" Sorry, I do not buy it. Modern civilization doesn't have 100 years on our current course.
blep-arsh 5y ago
You can't just assign random semantics to "consistency", "availability" and "partition tolerance" if you want to apply the CAP theorem.

fortuna86 5y ago

> Disintermediation is always always always a myth. It only means replacing a previous intermediary with another, supposedly more deserving one. pic.twitter.com/jTM45MNas0

thepra 5y ago

Seems nice in concept, but Rust and Node.js is a bad and limiting in execution

rektide 5y ago

Paul Frazee (of Beaker Browser) had a thread that got some good reach on distributed without consensus (but often some ability to see people break their contracts). Holo did come up. :) > Maybe it’s time to dig into the non-blockchain smart contract idea that’s been floating around for a while. Drop the PoW and transaction fees, but maintain the trustless verification and open data/code https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/1462491070244208640 https://twitter.com/pfrazee/status/1462491070244208640 As for the 1000 years post being great- in general Avery Pennarum is a world treasure. Great ability to surface ideas & through & make situations legibile. Another very fine example. The "state my assumptions" lead in is divine all on it's own.

pjkundert 5y ago
One key observation leading to Holochain, is that the systematic breaking of the assumptions of a "Smart Contract" (the shared DNA code, in Holochain terms) is a valid form of agreement. If some group wants to lie and pick each-others pockets: well, OK, carry on. Just let me know about it, and not take part in it. It's not the end of the world.

nouveaux 5y ago

"There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny." I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible. Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical. One of the best observations about why people in urban areas are more liberal, and rural areas are more conservative, has to do with the idea that when you are around more people, you need more rules to guide how to interact with one another. When you live on your own 200 acre farm, you don't want someone to come in and tell you what to do with your tree. When you live in a 200 person apartment complex, you do care when your neighbors are being loud at 2am. With technology, we are living closer and closer with each other. I don't know how you are going to be productive without consensus.

ahtihn 5y ago
I've never seen anyone else define conservative vs liberals like that. Conservatives aren't against rules, they are against changing rules. Why are conservatives against abortion, gay marriage and drug legalisation if they don't want to be told what they can do on their "own 200 acre farm". All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others.
- nouveaux 5y ago
  This is the general perspective on conservatives and I agree with the sentiment. If you extrapolate this out, people who live happily in rural areas do not want someone (government) to tell them about new changes. Small government and less regulation is a big part of their ethos. "All those issues are about enforcing a worldview on others." This seems to apply to everyone involved. Liberals want to impose their worldview on others just as much as conservatives. I think that's ok. We all want to pursue what is best.
  - toiletfuneral 5y ago

js8 5y ago

> That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. Interestingly, he also mentions that central economic planning doesn't work (although I am not so sure I completely agree with that thesis), but this sounds very similar to Cybersyn's design.

pitaj 5y ago
Central panning doesn't scale because of limits to economic knowledge and calculation. You can't possibly know enough about what everyone needs or wants in an economy. Even if you did, calculating resource allocation based on that is NP.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  We definitely do broad-strokes central planning in the US and every other developed country with tax system design, social support systems, and industrial policy. The Soviet Union sucked, but it lasted an extremely long time. The moral of the story is central planning kinda does work, just not very well if you do too much of it.
  - sfink 5y ago
    I think it's more that you need layers. A centrally planned layer of regulation and safety nets that provide a base level to keep things running (and people alive), but without the cost and inefficiency of trying to control everything, and then a more efficient, free market–like layer on top that relies on the lower layer to provide the "free" in "free market". I believe it would be more productive to argue about where the layer boundaries should be, rather than endlessly arguing about whether one or the other layer should even exist. (Because they'll both always exist. People will help each other out even in a free-for-all; and black markets will always come into existence in rigid, fully-planned economies.)
  - WC3w6pXxgGd 5y ago
    > The Soviet Union sucked, but it lasted an extremely long time. Less than a century is not "an extremely long time," and its citizens majorly suffered under the central planning. There was nothing successful about the Soviet Union.

cmurf 5y ago

What is the pattern in common among all industries politics governments and culture? The article proposes these things are all interrelated but doesn't make the connections among them. Also for going to identify the pattern we need to have a common frame of reference. The facts have to be indisputable. >Everyone seems to increasingly be in it for themselves Everyone? This sort of hyperbole makes it difficult to identify patterns. We have more examples today of public benefit corporations than 10 50 or 100 years ago. Maybe it's subjective or arbitrary, but let's say at 1 billion dollar valuation a corporation must by law become a public benefit corporation. Do we always need to have regulatory regimes compel corporations to comply with civil or social good? We know about regulatory capture. So we know a regulatory regime doesn't always work. Sure, it works better than outright feudalism. Is there such a thing as the proper range for wealth inequality? I don't know that we even know the answer to that question of let alone what that range would be or how to maintain that range in a civil way. The innovation of the United States of America at its founding, was its distribution of power. Forming a polyarchy instead of a monarchy. Of course, it's a biased distribution. Not everyone gets power. But the idea is that centralized power leads to corruption. And creating a competitive environment for ambition, reduces the chances not for corruption, but totalitarianism. But I wonder if democracies have optimized as far as they can.

deltarholamda 5y ago
>But I wonder if democracies have optimized as far as they can. If you dig your powdered wig out of the closet and look back at the founding of the united States of America, their big idea is still pretty good. The article makes this point, obliquely: >All we need is to build distributed systems that work. That means decentralized bulk activity, hierarchical regulation. Having the Big Nationwide Things happen at the federal level, and the Not Quite As Big Local Things happen at the State level was a fine idea. You can't get Tennessee and North Carolina to agree on BBQ; do you really think they're going to have the same ideas on social issues, or how to handle them? It's all well and good to have nationwide building codes, but even that falls apart rather quickly. You don't build the same way in California as you would on the Gulf Coast. Cramming everything into the federal purview wheelhouse is great if you're in NYC or LA, and you can't stand that some people in Nebraska or Alabama disagree with you.

davidw 5y ago

> Tyranny No. What he's saying is that there are 'distributed' aspects like two people deciding on a price for something. Not everyone has to agree on that price and that's fine! That's how markets work. But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... that I have some recourse. Everyone needs to roughly agree to those rules.

beambot 5y ago
> But we do need rules like if I give you money for something and then you tell me to get lost... That would be "larceny", and there are lots of rules prohibiting it & court systems to recoup damages. Credit card companies (for example) are just a more-rapid arbitration mechanism.
- davidw 5y ago
  That's part of the point of the article. Those rules are not some kind of distributed system. They are centralized.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    that's half true. every actor in the system has its own ledger and they reconcile transactions at a given point in time. you don't need to know what others are doing or who they are. your bank authorize your transactions and then some other bank receives the order to deposit the money on another account they control. in this sense banking is more decentralized than "one true ledger to rule them all"
    - davidw 5y ago
      I was referring to 'larceny' in my comment as being a centralized rule.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Although in reality enforcement can be selective and vary by jurisdiction so it’s also decentralised in implementation.

fabianhjr 5y ago

> everyone wants distributed systems that require everyone else to agree (global consensus) Not really, Secure Scuttlebutt is highly subjective and has been in use for a while. ( https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ https://ssbc.github.io/scuttlebutt-protocol-guide/ ) Some spinoffs adopt that explicit subjectivity of each user.

sva_ 5y ago

> https://holo.host https://holo.host > HoloToken (HOT) is an ERC-20 token I'm not sure a hierarchy in which the Ethereum Foundation, who gave themselves the absolute majority of Ether currency, is at the top, is the answer to the struggles/issues postulated in the essay.

pjkundert 5y ago
Nope, Holo / Holochain has nothing to do with Ethereum; HOT is just the place-holder token (issued during the ICO used to fund the project, initially, a couple of years ago). When the project goes live, it will be exchangeable for the initial HoloFuel cryptocurrency.
moffkalast 5y ago
I'm pretty sure anything running on the mainnet these days will be 10x more expensive than a classic centralized option just with gas fees and is as such completely useless.
- handrous 5y ago
  Also: - Economy of scale means this won't be "AirBnB for hosting". I can't negotiate power costs or get as much efficiency out of my operations as someone with a real datacenter. Not even close. [EDIT: see also, Bitcoin mining, which started out "anyone can do it!" but wasn't anymore as soon as real money got involved. Just buy an expensive rack of ASICs that aren't good for anything else, and find some place to arbitrage power costs. Yeah, real accessible to the masses, that is.] - All these "decentralize everything down to the end user" efforts neglect that most personal computing devices run on battery and sleep most of the time, these days, and that trend does not seem likely to reverse. See also: IPFS. Most folks don't have an always-on desktop- or server-class computer for this sort of thing, at all, and would have to buy one to participate. That's not super appealing. Also, decentralization tends to come at costs for routing and lookup, which often end up eating cycles (so, power, so, battery) on the end user's machine, compared with centralized options. See again: IPFS. So they end up adding centralized access points that are what most users actually interact with (see, yet again...) or their entire audience is computer nerds. If they have any real, viable use case, it ends up being as part of a centralized system, to help make it more resilient or cheaper to operate.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

wyager 5y ago

The fact that holo introduces a shitcoin when any payment channel (lightning, some USD service, etc) would work means I'm not going to take it seriously.

pjkundert 5y ago
A cryptocurrency that will continue to work reliably and without a bound on aggregate transaction rate in the face of network Partitioning is … a “shitcoin”?
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Point is if you solved a problem, you can sell the solution for USD Attaching a solution to a cryptocurrency comes off as just wanting to sell tokens, not sell the solution.
  - beckman466 5y ago
    > Attaching a solution to a cryptocurrency comes off as just wanting to sell tokens, not sell the solution. well yeah it's not ideal, yet the holochain foundation does all their work in the open and have to fund their development somehow (https://github.com/holochain/holochain https://github.com/holochain/holochain). better doing an ethical ico-like crowdsourcing (based on a unit of computing power, like Airbnb but for processing power) than strapping into the chains of Venture Capital. most important though is that the main framework created by the Holochain team is fully open source (linked above). so using the Holo host system is optional. it is meant as a way to enable easy onboarding of new users for new Holochain apps. Holo's distributed web of nodes help non-technical users use Holochain apps without being technically literate enough. so Holo users like my mom will be comfortable using Holochain apps that look like client-server apps, until we as a society transition to fully p2p apps, and the ecosystem as a whole matures to a point where we no longer need this 'bridge'. also cool is that, inspired by LETS and similar systems, the holochain framework allows easy deployment of mutual credit currencies [1]. imo the most exciting implementation of this is the Resources Events Agents (REA) accounting by http://mikorizal.org http://mikorizal.org led by, amongst others, two retired software engineers. you can check out their project http://valueflo.ws http://valueflo.ws. there is another project not building on Holochain, but using the Valueflo.ws ontology/vocabulary called bonfire: https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire_valueflows https://github.com/bonfire-networks/bonfire_valueflows (main website: https://bonfirenetworks.org/ https://bonfirenetworks.org/) anyways, before dismissing this project because of preconceived notions about the cryptocurrencies (which i agree are 99.999999% shitcoins), please read through their awesome developer docs: https://developer.holochain.org/ https://developer.holochain.org/ think of Holochain like a Ruby on Rails framework, but for distributed applications instead of client-server: https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applications-d2ac1e4f25ef https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati... [1] https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalable-cryptocurrencies-1eb7aebac6ae https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalab...

ggm 5y ago

> This article is profoundly insightful. How about adding a "not" to that and trying it on for size? Is it really profound? > There is also methods for building computational distributed systems that work "fine" in the face of CAP failure: https://holo.host https://holo.host -This is a serious breakthrough. And we really, really need this, NOW. Umm.. do we? Is this .. OK, forgive me, I've been penalty boxed for the first time in the last week, and should word this carefully, but.. my skeptical meter is on stun. Is this 'shilling' which is regrettably common in cryptocurrency conversations?

pjkundert 5y ago
Well, if "excited" and "shilling" are synonyms, then maybe! ;) But seriously, I spent significant effort over 25 years trying to solve some of the cooperation and communications problems in distributed systems. I'd deployed a cryptocurrency before Bitcoin came out in 2009; foolishly, I downloaded the system and found it hadn't solved these problems, so didn't run it (:/) So, when I ran into Holochain a few years back, and began to understand what they had accomplished (in theory, at the time), I dropped everything I was doing and went full time on the project. Built the first 2 prototypes of HoloFuel. Building planetary-scale (or even inter-planetary) distributed systems that can maintain consistency in the face of partitioning or massive latency while maintaining aggregate transaction rates almost linear with node count is now possible. So, ya -- I think these insights and their successful implementation is "profound". Like, never been done before, and everyone thought it was impossible "profound". You may have a much higher level of expectation. To me, that would be a lot like watching Free Solo while sucking on a soda, and saying "ya, that's not that impressive".
- ggm 5y ago
  Enthusiasm is good. CAP isn't going away.

ntr-- 5y ago

Incredible. > There is of course the most obvious horrifically misguided recently-popular "decentralized" system, whose name shall not be spoken in this essay. Instead let's back up to something older and better understood: markets. My reading was the author was referring here to cryptocurrencies and you read the article, claim it's profound, and then spruik an ERC-20 token.

pjkundert 5y ago
The project was funded through an ICO a couple years ago; these will be exchangeable for the in-system HoloFuel cryptocurrency, when the project goes live. Of course, the project isn’t associated with Ethereum in any way.
- not_really 5y ago
  Look, I'm a fan of this, and thanks for sharing - hadn't heard of this project until today. However claiming it's not associated with ethereum in any way, really? There's mention of an erc-20 token on the home page. Come on, man.
  - pjkundert 5y ago
    You know how ICOs are used to fund non-Ethereum projects, right?
nadahalli 5y ago
I was like "This cannot be the top comment on HN". It is. Sigh.
- pjkundert 5y ago
  I usually agree with you, regarding top posts on HN. Usually I wonder how it is that uninteresting first-order effects dominate. This is a chance for us all to consider something perhaps more profound.

CryptoPunk 5y ago

Enforced uniformity is the law. You cannot have discordance in law. You can choose to either institute law via centralized delegates, and make it mandatory, which is tyranny imposed by central authorities, or through a decentralized protocol that achieves uniformity through opt-in global consensus. apenwarr prefers the status quo, and ridicules the new cryptoeconomic systems which make the latter possible.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

> This article is profoundly insightful. Insightful? No discussion of environmental, ecological, social, and economic collapse if we continue on the way we're going, yet, somehow, it was "insightful?" Sorry, I do not buy it. Modern civilization doesn't have 100 years on our current course.

blep-arsh 5y ago

You can't just assign random semantics to "consistency", "availability" and "partition tolerance" if you want to apply the CAP theorem.