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No blockchain in the world could store the hash of every post ever in a “retrievable way”. Even Elon understands this. The valid ideas that apply here are glob

No blockchain in the world could store the hash of every post ever in a “retrievable way”. Even Elon understands this. The valid ideas that apply here are global labeling and account subkey ordering. I have never seen a solution for either that is end-to-end without a client syncing gigs of data, so various intermediaries are always trusted. In practice a federated (“permissioned” I suppose) audit log is better, cheaper, and doesn’t require your users spend tokens if you want to go down this path. Then of course there is the UX question of the validity of using the same keys you use to make irreversible financial transactions to sign your tweets.

legutierr 4y ago
> No blockchain in the world could store the hash of every post ever in a “retrievable way”. Ethereum processes about 1MM transactions per day right now; other blockchains have higher throughput. It currently manages about 100MM accounts. Sure, I suppose that might not be enough to hash and sign all blog posts ever (has anyone ever counted?) but you could timestamp a lot of them. > In practice a federated (“permissioned” I suppose) audit log is better, cheaper, and doesn’t require your users spend tokens if you want to go down this path. Someone has to pay for the servers, etc., right? What's wrong with paying for that using a token? Blockchains may be expensive, but you get orders of magnitude more redundancy, and you don't need to worry about ever losing access. You get what you pay for.
- infotogivenm 4y ago
  This is not my understanding at all. Blockchains (speaking broadly) are based on an incentive economy which often historically struggles to support itself via its own transaction volume. What happens when a coin is no longer profitably mined, e.g. if no one wants to buy them? What happens if, one day, there is no node that feels like serving your request? The data is gone. All gone. There is no system that guarantees redundancy, just upload and pray that the economy sustains itself. I can appreciate this is much less of a problem for the more popular chains, but in any case, there are wayyy more than 1M tweets a day.
  - legutierr 4y ago
    > What happens if, one day, there is no node that feels like serving your request? The data is gone. All gone. One stated objective of the Ethereum project is to ensure that a whole blockchain node can run on a consumer PC. This does limit how much data can be stored, but it also means that if you yourself are interested in keeping a copy of the data, you can run a node yourself. As it currently stands, there are tens of thousands of identical copies of the Ethereum blockchain that are distributed around the world. It seems very unlikely that the data will disappear within our lifetimes. > There is no system that guarantees redundancy, just upload and pray that the economy sustains itself. I don't know if there are any guarantees in life, but the ongoing availability of Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain data seem to be as close to it as you can get, given how many copies are already out there, and the ongoing incentive that exists to keep them up-to-date. Do you really trust, say, Google Cloud (or any Google product) to last as long, given their history of shutting things down arbitrarily? Even AWS's services are subject to prioritization decisions made inside Amazon. How can you really know whether or not the service you depend on is profitable enough to ensure that it won't be discontinued? Or that some corporate VP whose bonus depends on the success of a competing product won't make it his mission to shut your service down? > I can appreciate this is much less of a problem for the more popular chains, but in any case, there are wayyy more than 1M tweets a day. You can't run a service like Twitter on Ethereum, but you can timestamp more valuable content that is generated at a lower volume. A specialized Layer 2 application chain that runs on top of Ethereum could conceivably be built to handle larger volumes at lower cost, however.

legutierr 4y ago

> No blockchain in the world could store the hash of every post ever in a “retrievable way”. Ethereum processes about 1MM transactions per day right now; other blockchains have higher throughput. It currently manages about 100MM accounts. Sure, I suppose that might not be enough to hash and sign all blog posts ever (has anyone ever counted?) but you could timestamp a lot of them. > In practice a federated (“permissioned” I suppose) audit log is better, cheaper, and doesn’t require your users spend tokens if you want to go down this path. Someone has to pay for the servers, etc., right? What's wrong with paying for that using a token? Blockchains may be expensive, but you get orders of magnitude more redundancy, and you don't need to worry about ever losing access. You get what you pay for.

infotogivenm 4y ago
This is not my understanding at all. Blockchains (speaking broadly) are based on an incentive economy which often historically struggles to support itself via its own transaction volume. What happens when a coin is no longer profitably mined, e.g. if no one wants to buy them? What happens if, one day, there is no node that feels like serving your request? The data is gone. All gone. There is no system that guarantees redundancy, just upload and pray that the economy sustains itself. I can appreciate this is much less of a problem for the more popular chains, but in any case, there are wayyy more than 1M tweets a day.
- legutierr 4y ago
  > What happens if, one day, there is no node that feels like serving your request? The data is gone. All gone. One stated objective of the Ethereum project is to ensure that a whole blockchain node can run on a consumer PC. This does limit how much data can be stored, but it also means that if you yourself are interested in keeping a copy of the data, you can run a node yourself. As it currently stands, there are tens of thousands of identical copies of the Ethereum blockchain that are distributed around the world. It seems very unlikely that the data will disappear within our lifetimes. > There is no system that guarantees redundancy, just upload and pray that the economy sustains itself. I don't know if there are any guarantees in life, but the ongoing availability of Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain data seem to be as close to it as you can get, given how many copies are already out there, and the ongoing incentive that exists to keep them up-to-date. Do you really trust, say, Google Cloud (or any Google product) to last as long, given their history of shutting things down arbitrarily? Even AWS's services are subject to prioritization decisions made inside Amazon. How can you really know whether or not the service you depend on is profitable enough to ensure that it won't be discontinued? Or that some corporate VP whose bonus depends on the success of a competing product won't make it his mission to shut your service down? > I can appreciate this is much less of a problem for the more popular chains, but in any case, there are wayyy more than 1M tweets a day. You can't run a service like Twitter on Ethereum, but you can timestamp more valuable content that is generated at a lower volume. A specialized Layer 2 application chain that runs on top of Ethereum could conceivably be built to handle larger volumes at lower cost, however.