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> immutable, trustless databases It's a ledger, not a database. The author is critiqueing blockchain, and broadly I agree with the critique. But it's pretty
by denton-scratch 5y ago
> immutable, trustless databases
It's a ledger, not a database.
The author is critiqueing blockchain, and broadly I agree with the critique. But it's pretty shallow. It just regurgitates what we already know. Perhaps the salient observation is that Web3 is just blockchain hype with a new name; but the author doesn't actually make a case for that at all.
- tommica 5y ago> It just regurgitates what we already know. What about people that do not know much about the topic?
- denton-scratch 5y agoWell, I guess they're not HN readers. And I don't suppose they're the ones reading the article.
- tomrod 5y ago\o HN reader here. Blockchain jargon gets passed around without clear definitions, a lot. Reminding of fundamentals is helpful for clear communication.
- jvanderbot 5y agoWell ... most people would (usually) get access to an article without HN. It's here exclusively for HN readers. So, downvote as bad HN submission, but don't critique article for not catering to HN readers. I guess?
- solveit 5y agoI would not mind a culture of people dunking on the submitter rather than the article. (Of course, it would be best if we didn't dunk at all, but that doesn't seem to be happening...)
- denton-scratch 5y agoI don't have power to downvote an article submission. But anyway, I'm disinclined to downvote anything here; it feels nasty. And I think if you're going to downvote, you should also comment. I prefer to upvote things that I think are good, and should be uplist. I just thought it was a shallow article.
- rullelito 5y agoA ledger is a database.
- denton-scratch 5y agoA ledger can be implemented using a database. A database is much more than a ledger.
- notpachet 5y agoOr much less. With a ledger, you begin with an implied schema.
- denton-scratch 5y agoWell, that's an interesting observation. The idea that the blockchain is something that can be used as a database seems to be one of the big Web3 claims. Clearly, it's a thing in which arbitrary data can be stored; but that's not it's primary purpose, and it seems to be an astonishingly-inefficient way to store data. If someone were to help me understand why it makes sense to use blockchain as a database (or as a webserver), maybe the scales would fall from my eyes, and I'd begin to grok "Web3". But as far as I can see, the only relationship between records in the blockchain is that each record has all earlier records as its parent. You can't establish any other relationship between two records, other than that each one contains a hash of all its parents. Yes, a ledger has an implied schema. But it's a single table, so it's not much of a big deal, as schemas go. And everyone who wants to use the blockchain as a database is obliged to use the same implied schema. A flat text-file would be more versatile.
- notpachet 5y agoHeh, agreed. I'm a crypto skeptic on pretty much all fronts, so I'm not going to be the one to pry away the scales. I also feel like the move to shove all and everything onto distributed ledgers is misguided (and, as you say, massively ineffecient). I've been around long enough to see other similar storage fads come and go. Everything is relational! Everything is a document! Everything is a message in a queue! And so on.