10 ms·

"mostly" being the key word :) If you're self-hosting, then your server is a weak point. It goes down, your app goes down. The additional cost and risk that com

by v64 5y ago

"mostly" being the key word :) If you're self-hosting, then your server is a weak point. It goes down, your app goes down. The additional cost and risk that comes with using blockchains provides a platform for your app to run on that you don't have to manage and is highly resistant to being shut down. Likewise, there always exists the possibility that your server can be compromised and the code can be altered. The immutability of the blockchain guarantees that your code cannot be changed, with or without your knowledge.

jjnoakes 5y ago
There are easy mitigations for those things though. My self hosted apps run on immutable infrastructure and are replicated and load balanced. Still stupid cheap and easy.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- selestify 5y ago
  > My self hosted apps run on immutable infrastructure and are replicated and load balanced What? Assuming you live in the US, the government can swoop in at any time (provided they have a legal reason to do so) and demand that AWS or whoever's hosting your servers shuts them down. If you're hosting them yourself, they can raid the physical locations where you host them. If you're not in the US, I'm sure your country has equivalent security forces that would be more than capable of doing the same should the government find a reason to. Good luck raiding every single Ethereum node in the world to take down a smart contract. Also, you didn't address code immutability guarantees. You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser. The darknet markets, once compromised by federal agents, did exactly this, and stopped actually encrypting user messages with PGP while continuing to pretend to do so. A smart contract, unless it has upgradeability built in, offers just this sort of guarantee to its users. Oh, and if your app deals with finance, and the US government (or your own) wants you to stop letting John Doe use your app because they just placed new sanctions on Mr. Doe? You'd better code that compliance feature up real quick or see yourself getting heavily fined or even imprisoned. Tough luck doing that sort of censorship on the blockchain -- as long as a single miner is willing to include that user's transaction, they're basically in.
  - jjnoakes 5y ago
    > You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser. I'm my only user, that's why I'm discussing self-hosted apps here...
    - selestify 5y ago
      Ah, natural language. I'd interpreted you as meaning that you host the apps yourself rather than let someone do it for you (hence "self-hosting"), and you host these apps for others to use. I mean, yes, but if your use case is only yourself as the sole user, that's quite different from the majority of businesses out there who need to service many users. This is truly like comparing apples and oranges.
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    > Good luck raiding every single Ethereum node I’m just waiting for the day when governments decide that all this crypto is hurting the environment more than necessary for no real gain and forces ISPs to block this traffic. Similar to how many ISPs block serving DNS or SMTP from residential IPs.
    - selestify 5y ago
      Then that'll be the day proof of stake cryptos rise to the occasion. Also, just use a friggin VPN.
      - withinboredom 5y ago
        IMHO, VPNs scare me more than ISPs spying on me. I ran a small ISP (<100 subscribers) and the sheer amount of data you could collect on a single person was mind boggling. This was pre-https-all-the-things, so I’m sure it’s better these days. Still, do I really want my traffic to go through some unregulated entity? Not really…
        selestify 5y ago
lumost 5y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a dapp dependent on sufficient mining/distributed compute being in the network?. Of the network becomes small can someone attack it and change past transactions/hijack apps?
- v64 5y ago
  Yes, these are the failure scenarios I had in mind when I wrote "the ability to shutdown these apps would rely on somehow breaking the blockchain itself". It's possible that bugs in the blockchain software can cause blocks to no longer be produced, essentially halting the network until the problem is resolved. So-called 51% attacks are also a failure possibility.
  - lumost 5y ago
    I'd suspect that the longevity of a cloud provider or self hosted environment would be higher than the time miners are willing to support a new block chain (I'm not paying a btc transaction fee everytime I update an app). How will miners be paid to host apps? Given that app usage concentrates into winner take all groupings wouldn't we except the web 3 winners to be paying for the vast majority of any web 3 mining?
    - landemva 5y ago
      Miners don't host the front ends. Miners run whatever contract code is called by anyone who sends a signed transaction.
      - lumost 5y ago
        Wouldn't actions like add to cart, etc all require contract code execution?
    - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
      You're getting to a fundamental issue that separates Bitcoin from other chains which strive to push and hold more data on chain: there is no efficient pricing mechanism to host data. What this means is that putting any data on chain at all is either expensive, or limited by hard code. The issue is that the data stays on chain forever yet without any 'rent' associated to it, therefore space is limited or cost is poorly estimated up front (or compromises on decentralization like sharding occur). Bitcoin doesn't technically solve this either, its just that its data growth rate is small enough to be trivial in comparison to storage costs. Ethereum and other classical distributed ledger systems cannot fulfill the true vision of Web3 (it can and will continue to do a fraction of that vision) because they have no affectual economic functions for data rent or data handling in general. Mining/staking is paid for and everything else is an economic after-thought. Ethereum's Infura Problem is a quick way to see the consequences of these poorly suited economic incentives. Bitcoin is about stability, but Web3 is about data, so I believe its fair to say that a distributed ledger technology built for "Web3" (which is quickly becoming a dirty word) will have its economic components focused on data. This is different from keeping the traditional Nakamoto Consensus (which judges value based on somewhat arbitrary measures) but deriving tricks to push more data - this means maintaining or exceeding the security guarantees of Nakamoto Consensus while incentivizing data routing-work and storage rather than number crunching.
vintermann 5y ago
You pay a lot for that blockchain redundancy. You can buy a lot of conventional redundancy for that money. Comparing it to a cheap self-hosted server isn't apples to apples. > The immutability of the blockchain guarantees that your code cannot be changed, with or without your knowledge. There's been a lot of examples lately why this is not a desirable feature at all for most purposes.

by v64 5y ago

jjnoakes 5y ago

There are easy mitigations for those things though. My self hosted apps run on immutable infrastructure and are replicated and load balanced. Still stupid cheap and easy.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
selestify 5y ago
> My self hosted apps run on immutable infrastructure and are replicated and load balanced What? Assuming you live in the US, the government can swoop in at any time (provided they have a legal reason to do so) and demand that AWS or whoever's hosting your servers shuts them down. If you're hosting them yourself, they can raid the physical locations where you host them. If you're not in the US, I'm sure your country has equivalent security forces that would be more than capable of doing the same should the government find a reason to. Good luck raiding every single Ethereum node in the world to take down a smart contract. Also, you didn't address code immutability guarantees. You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser. The darknet markets, once compromised by federal agents, did exactly this, and stopped actually encrypting user messages with PGP while continuing to pretend to do so. A smart contract, unless it has upgradeability built in, offers just this sort of guarantee to its users. Oh, and if your app deals with finance, and the US government (or your own) wants you to stop letting John Doe use your app because they just placed new sanctions on Mr. Doe? You'd better code that compliance feature up real quick or see yourself getting heavily fined or even imprisoned. Tough luck doing that sort of censorship on the blockchain -- as long as a single miner is willing to include that user's transaction, they're basically in.
- jjnoakes 5y ago
  > You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser. I'm my only user, that's why I'm discussing self-hosted apps here...
  - selestify 5y ago
    Ah, natural language. I'd interpreted you as meaning that you host the apps yourself rather than let someone do it for you (hence "self-hosting"), and you host these apps for others to use. I mean, yes, but if your use case is only yourself as the sole user, that's quite different from the majority of businesses out there who need to service many users. This is truly like comparing apples and oranges.
- withinboredom 5y ago
  > Good luck raiding every single Ethereum node I’m just waiting for the day when governments decide that all this crypto is hurting the environment more than necessary for no real gain and forces ISPs to block this traffic. Similar to how many ISPs block serving DNS or SMTP from residential IPs.
  - selestify 5y ago
    Then that'll be the day proof of stake cryptos rise to the occasion. Also, just use a friggin VPN.
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      IMHO, VPNs scare me more than ISPs spying on me. I ran a small ISP (<100 subscribers) and the sheer amount of data you could collect on a single person was mind boggling. This was pre-https-all-the-things, so I’m sure it’s better these days. Still, do I really want my traffic to go through some unregulated entity? Not really…
      - selestify 5y ago

lumost 5y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a dapp dependent on sufficient mining/distributed compute being in the network?. Of the network becomes small can someone attack it and change past transactions/hijack apps?

v64 5y ago
Yes, these are the failure scenarios I had in mind when I wrote "the ability to shutdown these apps would rely on somehow breaking the blockchain itself". It's possible that bugs in the blockchain software can cause blocks to no longer be produced, essentially halting the network until the problem is resolved. So-called 51% attacks are also a failure possibility.
- lumost 5y ago
  I'd suspect that the longevity of a cloud provider or self hosted environment would be higher than the time miners are willing to support a new block chain (I'm not paying a btc transaction fee everytime I update an app). How will miners be paid to host apps? Given that app usage concentrates into winner take all groupings wouldn't we except the web 3 winners to be paying for the vast majority of any web 3 mining?
  - landemva 5y ago
    Miners don't host the front ends. Miners run whatever contract code is called by anyone who sends a signed transaction.
    - lumost 5y ago
      Wouldn't actions like add to cart, etc all require contract code execution?
  - mattwilsonn888 5y ago
    You're getting to a fundamental issue that separates Bitcoin from other chains which strive to push and hold more data on chain: there is no efficient pricing mechanism to host data. What this means is that putting any data on chain at all is either expensive, or limited by hard code. The issue is that the data stays on chain forever yet without any 'rent' associated to it, therefore space is limited or cost is poorly estimated up front (or compromises on decentralization like sharding occur). Bitcoin doesn't technically solve this either, its just that its data growth rate is small enough to be trivial in comparison to storage costs. Ethereum and other classical distributed ledger systems cannot fulfill the true vision of Web3 (it can and will continue to do a fraction of that vision) because they have no affectual economic functions for data rent or data handling in general. Mining/staking is paid for and everything else is an economic after-thought. Ethereum's Infura Problem is a quick way to see the consequences of these poorly suited economic incentives. Bitcoin is about stability, but Web3 is about data, so I believe its fair to say that a distributed ledger technology built for "Web3" (which is quickly becoming a dirty word) will have its economic components focused on data. This is different from keeping the traditional Nakamoto Consensus (which judges value based on somewhat arbitrary measures) but deriving tricks to push more data - this means maintaining or exceeding the security guarantees of Nakamoto Consensus while incentivizing data routing-work and storage rather than number crunching.

vintermann 5y ago

You pay a lot for that blockchain redundancy. You can buy a lot of conventional redundancy for that money. Comparing it to a cheap self-hosted server isn't apples to apples. > The immutability of the blockchain guarantees that your code cannot be changed, with or without your knowledge. There's been a lot of examples lately why this is not a desirable feature at all for most purposes.