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Email is one I keep coming back to when I try to picture a future that runs on blockchain tech. It seems like even if there are enough situations where the zer

Email is one I keep coming back to when I try to picture a future that runs on blockchain tech. It seems like even if there are enough situations where the zero-trust nature proves to make sense to users, it would be silly for them to all use the same chains. Why deal with the overhead and transaction costs? Why wouldn't there be as many chains as their are email providers, and then most of them would only have value insomuch as the things running on them have value? So more like "new way of formalizing coalitions and joint ventures and partnerships where no single partner has full control" than "investment vehicle" or "foundational infrastructure for the whole world." Email, by being a protocol vs a single implementation, has outlasted many email service providers and will probably outlast many more. Many of those service providers were killed by new entrants that could do it cheaper or better - so it seems crazy to expect otherwise-productive things to remain on these hideously expensive trendy chains of the moment.

distortedsignal 5y ago
I think the answer to why one chain is better than many chains is because it’s way harder to 51% one chain with many applications rather than having to 51% one chain with one application. I don’t know enough about blockchain tech to KNOW this is correct, but it’s something interesting that kinda falls out of the theory.
- LegionMammal978 5y ago
  I guess the natural response would be that the companies running these myriad chains simply wouldn't care about abstract cybersecurity concerns like 51% attacks, but instead selling services to users. Just consider all of the companies today which have horrible security. The main factor that they care about is whether their business will get attacked in practice, which is infrequent enough that it always makes the news.
  - lfuller 5y ago
    If a company didn't care about security or other "abstract cybersecurity concerns" and instead only cared about selling something to their users, why would they use something like blockchain which is entirely based on abstract technical and cybersecurity concepts instead of existing web technologies which are more efficient and easier to use?
    - LegionMammal978 5y ago
      In this scenario, presumably so that it can market itself as a Web3 company, which is the Future of the Internet™ and will attract investors. After all, the vast majority of NFT buyers and other crypto holders are in it to make money for free, not because they want to buy and sell real-world goods and services; as long as their money doesn't get stolen, they don't really care about the cybersecurity aspects. Even when cryptocurrencies are used as a medium of exchange or transfer, the main cited advantage is ease of use. I suspect that this comes only from the lack of regulations, and that it will die once governments start cracking down on exchanges, but perhaps I'm just being too pessimistic.
- FabHK 5y ago
  You hit the nail on the head, I'd say. If there is one chain, you need to amass 51% to attack it, which is nearly impossible. If there are 100 chains with 1% of the total hash rate each, you just need to control 0.51% of the total hash rate to take over one of those chains.
  - robcohen 5y ago
    This is technically correct, but a lot of applications that use blockchain store the proofs on multiple chains, which in your example is equivalent in hashpower to one big chain. Also you are describing PoW and lots of chains are not PoW now.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
People try to solve everything with blockchains. It's not always necessary. Cryptography yes. Blockchain only if you need distributed consensus for something. Most of what people actually don't want to do is reliability engineering. You can host it off your phone, but then it goes down if you're out of range or the battery dies. You can host it in your basement, but now you need to buy hardware and it goes down if you lose power or internet. And you have to keep up to date with patches etc. So just pay someone <$100/year to do it for you. But the design should make that thing the most commodified thing in the world. You should be able to switch to self-hosting and back or to another provider by just changing the host's address in your configuration. Everything should still point to you on the new host. Your own device should keep a copy of everything needed to switch even if the existing provider is unexpectedly incinerated by a meteor. They should not have the ability to prevent it and should be untrusted to the fullest extent possible. You can get that with ordinary cryptography. The thing you can't get from ordinary cryptography is disintermediated payment processing. Which you do actually want, but that's something else.
hiq 5y ago
> Why wouldn't there be as many chains as their are email providers Email providers can send email to each other, making them all as equally useful. Different blockchains wouldn't be compatible with each other by default, by definition, so it's more of a winner-takes-all situation.
- pharke 5y ago
  Isn't that a problem worth solving? It had to be solved for banks to work as reliable institutions. Having a single blockchain in the end is probably as bad as having a single bank, although for slightly different reasons.
  - thinkmassive 5y ago
    You’re confusing the money itself with the institutions that manage the money.
    - 0ldskool 5y ago
      I don't think so. They are creating the metaphor that banks == blockchain implementation + stakeholders, money == blockchain tokens. Currently most of the cryptocurrencies you see with ICOs are just erc20 tokens ontop of ETH (therefore centralized). For banks they leverage SWIFT + other more local mechanisms (double entry accounting, etc...) to resolve transfers. Its possible in the future we will develop a mechanism that allows two completely unrelated & unconnected blockchains to transfer tokens between eachother. I assume there would have to be either an intermediate chain specific to this purpose or both chains would need to follow a similar implementation. So far we started with Proof Of Work, we now have Proof of Stake and Proof of History. There may be more mechanisms in the future.
      - thinkmassive 5y ago
        Does your bank deal in dollars or its own token? Is a cryptocurrency exchange more like a bank or a currency?
bamboozled 5y ago
I have a domain with 3 users, I don't have any problems?
theptip 5y ago
The web3 answer here would probably be “use blockchain for identity” which is a hard thing to get right (understatement) when you consider “right to deletion” and various privacy laws, but imagine you could tie an email sender to some pseudonymous trail of transactions that prove it is a real economically transacting agent and not a bot. I don’t think anyone is proposing to use blockchain for email? (I’m prepared to be wrong here but it’s certainly not a common position to hold). They don’t eschew all the old protocols for every task.
- swid 5y ago
  If you want an email and okay with anonymous - send an email. If you want verification of economic activity without the right to see that activity - ask for a credit card. I trying to figure out the problem you want to solve here and how blockchain is better - but it falls apart. For one, most people don’t buy things with crypto and there are also many different coins on top of that. So even if tie an email to a particular crypto address, it’s not likely the average person can prove they have economic activity. Then the motives are wrong on both sides anyway - I don’t want services I use to have a copy of my spending history, and they want a way to deanonymize me to discourage abuse, or charge me for their services. Neither of which sounds like it is part of what you are suggesting.
qeternity 5y ago
> Email is one I keep coming back to when I try to picture a future that runs on blockchain tech. Fun fact: bitcoin's pow algorithm was invented to prevent spam.

distortedsignal 5y ago

I think the answer to why one chain is better than many chains is because it’s way harder to 51% one chain with many applications rather than having to 51% one chain with one application. I don’t know enough about blockchain tech to KNOW this is correct, but it’s something interesting that kinda falls out of the theory.

LegionMammal978 5y ago
I guess the natural response would be that the companies running these myriad chains simply wouldn't care about abstract cybersecurity concerns like 51% attacks, but instead selling services to users. Just consider all of the companies today which have horrible security. The main factor that they care about is whether their business will get attacked in practice, which is infrequent enough that it always makes the news.
- lfuller 5y ago
  If a company didn't care about security or other "abstract cybersecurity concerns" and instead only cared about selling something to their users, why would they use something like blockchain which is entirely based on abstract technical and cybersecurity concepts instead of existing web technologies which are more efficient and easier to use?
  - LegionMammal978 5y ago
    In this scenario, presumably so that it can market itself as a Web3 company, which is the Future of the Internet™ and will attract investors. After all, the vast majority of NFT buyers and other crypto holders are in it to make money for free, not because they want to buy and sell real-world goods and services; as long as their money doesn't get stolen, they don't really care about the cybersecurity aspects. Even when cryptocurrencies are used as a medium of exchange or transfer, the main cited advantage is ease of use. I suspect that this comes only from the lack of regulations, and that it will die once governments start cracking down on exchanges, but perhaps I'm just being too pessimistic.
FabHK 5y ago
You hit the nail on the head, I'd say. If there is one chain, you need to amass 51% to attack it, which is nearly impossible. If there are 100 chains with 1% of the total hash rate each, you just need to control 0.51% of the total hash rate to take over one of those chains.
- robcohen 5y ago
  This is technically correct, but a lot of applications that use blockchain store the proofs on multiple chains, which in your example is equivalent in hashpower to one big chain. Also you are describing PoW and lots of chains are not PoW now.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

People try to solve everything with blockchains. It's not always necessary. Cryptography yes. Blockchain only if you need distributed consensus for something. Most of what people actually don't want to do is reliability engineering. You can host it off your phone, but then it goes down if you're out of range or the battery dies. You can host it in your basement, but now you need to buy hardware and it goes down if you lose power or internet. And you have to keep up to date with patches etc. So just pay someone <$100/year to do it for you. But the design should make that thing the most commodified thing in the world. You should be able to switch to self-hosting and back or to another provider by just changing the host's address in your configuration. Everything should still point to you on the new host. Your own device should keep a copy of everything needed to switch even if the existing provider is unexpectedly incinerated by a meteor. They should not have the ability to prevent it and should be untrusted to the fullest extent possible. You can get that with ordinary cryptography. The thing you can't get from ordinary cryptography is disintermediated payment processing. Which you do actually want, but that's something else.

hiq 5y ago

> Why wouldn't there be as many chains as their are email providers Email providers can send email to each other, making them all as equally useful. Different blockchains wouldn't be compatible with each other by default, by definition, so it's more of a winner-takes-all situation.

pharke 5y ago
Isn't that a problem worth solving? It had to be solved for banks to work as reliable institutions. Having a single blockchain in the end is probably as bad as having a single bank, although for slightly different reasons.
- thinkmassive 5y ago
  You’re confusing the money itself with the institutions that manage the money.
  - 0ldskool 5y ago
    I don't think so. They are creating the metaphor that banks == blockchain implementation + stakeholders, money == blockchain tokens. Currently most of the cryptocurrencies you see with ICOs are just erc20 tokens ontop of ETH (therefore centralized). For banks they leverage SWIFT + other more local mechanisms (double entry accounting, etc...) to resolve transfers. Its possible in the future we will develop a mechanism that allows two completely unrelated & unconnected blockchains to transfer tokens between eachother. I assume there would have to be either an intermediate chain specific to this purpose or both chains would need to follow a similar implementation. So far we started with Proof Of Work, we now have Proof of Stake and Proof of History. There may be more mechanisms in the future.
    - thinkmassive 5y ago
      Does your bank deal in dollars or its own token? Is a cryptocurrency exchange more like a bank or a currency?

bamboozled 5y ago

I have a domain with 3 users, I don't have any problems?

theptip 5y ago

The web3 answer here would probably be “use blockchain for identity” which is a hard thing to get right (understatement) when you consider “right to deletion” and various privacy laws, but imagine you could tie an email sender to some pseudonymous trail of transactions that prove it is a real economically transacting agent and not a bot. I don’t think anyone is proposing to use blockchain for email? (I’m prepared to be wrong here but it’s certainly not a common position to hold). They don’t eschew all the old protocols for every task.

swid 5y ago
If you want an email and okay with anonymous - send an email. If you want verification of economic activity without the right to see that activity - ask for a credit card. I trying to figure out the problem you want to solve here and how blockchain is better - but it falls apart. For one, most people don’t buy things with crypto and there are also many different coins on top of that. So even if tie an email to a particular crypto address, it’s not likely the average person can prove they have economic activity. Then the motives are wrong on both sides anyway - I don’t want services I use to have a copy of my spending history, and they want a way to deanonymize me to discourage abuse, or charge me for their services. Neither of which sounds like it is part of what you are suggesting.

qeternity 5y ago

> Email is one I keep coming back to when I try to picture a future that runs on blockchain tech. Fun fact: bitcoin's pow algorithm was invented to prevent spam.