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I mean, if you don't know what byzantine fault tolerance [1] is, then that's fine. It's not gibberish to people who are into distributed systems. And I'm not cl

I mean, if you don't know what byzantine fault tolerance [1] is, then that's fine. It's not gibberish to people who are into distributed systems. And I'm not claiming it's a silver bullet or trying to persuade anyone either. BFT is overkill for most use cases, but sometimes it's useful. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault

vanusa 5y ago
The commenter above was certainly familiar with BFT. It wasn't the term as such that was gibberish. But rather, the implication you were attempting to make that this is a "critical innovation" that provides value.
- scyclow 5y ago
  What's gibberish about the implication? That's all a blockchain is. It takes cryptographic signatures (or more specifically, transactions that are cryptographically signed), and puts them in order. As pointed out, the cryptography existed well before blockchain. My only point was that the fancy decentralized way it orders the transactions is the real innovation. (edit: grammer)
  - vanusa 5y ago
    It's gibberish because you don't justify why this innovation provides value. Instead you just slather more fancy technical lingo on top.
    - scyclow 5y ago
      It provides value to people who want to compute things on a public network that no single party controls. We can argue about whether or not that's a worthwhile thing for people to value until the cows come home, but I think it's beyond the scope of this conversation. But point taken. I'll avoid using fancy technical lingo like "BFT" or "cryptographic" on hacker news any more.
      - vanusa 5y ago
        Yeah, this "cryptographic" stuff is just way over our heads.
rhinoceraptor 5y ago
The blockchain and even the EVM are not distributed systems. They merely run the same (mostly pointless) computation, on every single node participating in the system. To me, distributed systems means parallel computation. The blockchain by definition, cannot be parallelized (except when someone manages to pull off such a large theft that the developers are forced to fork the blockchain). They are decentralized systems, which achieve their decentralization by being as inefficient as possible. Sure, it's a bit clever, but it's also incredibly stupid.

vanusa 5y ago

The commenter above was certainly familiar with BFT. It wasn't the term as such that was gibberish. But rather, the implication you were attempting to make that this is a "critical innovation" that provides value.

scyclow 5y ago
What's gibberish about the implication? That's all a blockchain is. It takes cryptographic signatures (or more specifically, transactions that are cryptographically signed), and puts them in order. As pointed out, the cryptography existed well before blockchain. My only point was that the fancy decentralized way it orders the transactions is the real innovation. (edit: grammer)
- vanusa 5y ago
  It's gibberish because you don't justify why this innovation provides value. Instead you just slather more fancy technical lingo on top.
  - scyclow 5y ago
    It provides value to people who want to compute things on a public network that no single party controls. We can argue about whether or not that's a worthwhile thing for people to value until the cows come home, but I think it's beyond the scope of this conversation. But point taken. I'll avoid using fancy technical lingo like "BFT" or "cryptographic" on hacker news any more.
    - vanusa 5y ago
      Yeah, this "cryptographic" stuff is just way over our heads.

rhinoceraptor 5y ago

The blockchain and even the EVM are not distributed systems. They merely run the same (mostly pointless) computation, on every single node participating in the system. To me, distributed systems means parallel computation. The blockchain by definition, cannot be parallelized (except when someone manages to pull off such a large theft that the developers are forced to fork the blockchain). They are decentralized systems, which achieve their decentralization by being as inefficient as possible. Sure, it's a bit clever, but it's also incredibly stupid.