5 ms·

That's not going to happen, because "distributed" was always a misnomer when it came to blockchain things. "Massively redundantly replicated" would be better. I

That's not going to happen, because "distributed" was always a misnomer when it came to blockchain things. "Massively redundantly replicated" would be better. If work is distributed, every participant has a little piece of the work to do, but in e.g. blockchain contracts, all the participants need to do the whole calculation.

bluelightning2k 4y ago
This is a very articulate and interesting way to put it. "Massively redundantly replicated"
javajosh 4y ago
I don't know much about it, but I would assume that some effort would be made by miners to look in different parts of the search space - you don't want 1000 machines looking checking the same hashes, in order, after all.
z3c0 4y ago
Why not just "decentralized"? I'm not sure I ever saw a blockchain that was posited as "distributed".
- croes 4y ago
  Blockchain is a distributed ledger.
  - z3c0 4y ago
    Looking into it, you're correct, but only insofar as we're referring to two different meanings of distributed. Bitcoin is a distributed ledger, as in "fault tolerant". But the consensus mechanism is decentralized. Thus, the decision-making is not distributed. A distributed consensus mechanism would segment the decisions amongst nodes, not poll for a unanimous response.
dsco 4y ago
How would you incentivize nodes long-term without a reward/token system?
- croes 4y ago
  That's more cryptocurrency than blockchain. Blockchain as such has nothing to do with the costs of a node and incentives to run one
  - aliqot 4y ago
    "That's just the nose, see the nose can exist discretely without the finger to pick it."
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Bittorrent basically runs on social norms, and people's willingness to help their community. Or people go to private trackers, where contributing is a requirement for being in the community and having access to its resources. Blockchains are built under the assumption that everyone is selfish and untrustworthy. Which is a decent assumption when building a crypto currency, but that doesn't mean that every system has to run like that.
  - hazebooth 4y ago
    As much as I like private trackers, very few use the ratio-less model to protect against serial leechers. Typically on a tracker you’re given a currency (although not as sound as some e-coins) and can use that to influence your upload or download statistics, which in turn affect your ratio. Some trackers might employ rules where your user class has to have a certain ratio, or else you’ll lose privileges like certain forums or even the ability to download at all. (The trackers are private and can control which peers you can see)
- vintermann 4y ago
  That's a different question. But BitTorrent does fine with simple tit-for-tat rules, no tranferable tokens required.
uoaei 4y ago
BitTorrent then, under this perspective, is "less massively, less redundantly replicated" since people only hold onto and seed the torrents whose files they store locally, but they do not just go on and download and seed everything out there. Seems like a nice compromise to me, but obviously risks data becomming irrevocable in some cases. Is this also how IPFS works?
jlokier 4y ago
That's changing. The high replication to verify untrusted peers is decreasing and there's a realistic prospect of it going away due to gradual adoption and development of new zk-proof techniques. In zk proofs-of-computation-result, different nodes can perform different intensive parts of a calculation and send the results along with proofs that those are the correct results. Other nodes can accept the results and verify the proofs with remarkable efficiency, then use those partial results for further calculations. To me it still feels counterintuitive and almost magical that any large, arbitrary computation result can be easily verified without repeating the computation, without the verifier needing much memory or data. For cryptocurrency blockchains this allows smart-contract (computational) transactions to be accepted with only one node having to execute the code, everyone else just efficiently verifies the proof to accept the state change. As proofs can be aggregated, this scales well: it isn't necessary for every node to run all the verifications, either. For big, distributed calculations like the article's, the whole calculation can progress using those partial results without having to rely on trust and reputation, and everyone can have high confidence that the final result is what it should be, not undermined by subterfuge or subtly inaccurate contributions. This is an offshoot of zero-knowledge proofs, as ironically zero-knowledge is not required for these types of applications. Just the efficient verifiability part. (Fwiw, I am working on large, scalable zk-proofs-of-computation in my spare time, in optimised software and with hardware accelaration, if anyone is interested in discussing this stuff.)
- vlovich123 4y ago
  > To me it still feels counterintuitive and almost magical that any large, arbitrary computation result can be easily verified without repeating the computation, without the verifier needing much memory or data. Why counterintuitive? That’s kind of all of cryptography and most of computer science. Take factoring into primes (which has been done for forever): it’s really time consuming and expensive to determine what the prime factors for a number are, particularly if it’s a big number and you know it only has two. That’s because division is very very difficult and time consuming. Multiplication on the other hand is super cheap so once you tell me the prime factors, I can confirm much more quickly whether or not they’re factors. In computer science, one of the earliest identified computation classes is NP complete which has this property. Eg traveling salesman and knapsack packing problem are examples. It can be insanely difficult to find a path that exists between two cities in a graph under some cost. But if you give me a solution I can easily confirm whether it meets the criteria (global optimality testing is itself NP complete but if you give me a set of solutions you can verify which one is the cheapest). I’m not claiming that factorization is NP btw. There are complexity classes beyond NP that share this property. https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/159/is-integer-factorization-an-np-complete-problem https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/159/is-integer-... Anyway. ZK proofs themselves are super surprising and not intuitive but not because verification is fast but because verification reveals nothing to the verifier about the solution. That’s the mind blowing result.

bluelightning2k 4y ago

This is a very articulate and interesting way to put it. "Massively redundantly replicated"

javajosh 4y ago

I don't know much about it, but I would assume that some effort would be made by miners to look in different parts of the search space - you don't want 1000 machines looking checking the same hashes, in order, after all.

z3c0 4y ago

Why not just "decentralized"? I'm not sure I ever saw a blockchain that was posited as "distributed".

croes 4y ago
Blockchain is a distributed ledger.
- z3c0 4y ago
  Looking into it, you're correct, but only insofar as we're referring to two different meanings of distributed. Bitcoin is a distributed ledger, as in "fault tolerant". But the consensus mechanism is decentralized. Thus, the decision-making is not distributed. A distributed consensus mechanism would segment the decisions amongst nodes, not poll for a unanimous response.

dsco 4y ago

How would you incentivize nodes long-term without a reward/token system?

croes 4y ago
That's more cryptocurrency than blockchain. Blockchain as such has nothing to do with the costs of a node and incentives to run one
- aliqot 4y ago
  "That's just the nose, see the nose can exist discretely without the finger to pick it."
wongarsu 4y ago
Bittorrent basically runs on social norms, and people's willingness to help their community. Or people go to private trackers, where contributing is a requirement for being in the community and having access to its resources. Blockchains are built under the assumption that everyone is selfish and untrustworthy. Which is a decent assumption when building a crypto currency, but that doesn't mean that every system has to run like that.
- hazebooth 4y ago
  As much as I like private trackers, very few use the ratio-less model to protect against serial leechers. Typically on a tracker you’re given a currency (although not as sound as some e-coins) and can use that to influence your upload or download statistics, which in turn affect your ratio. Some trackers might employ rules where your user class has to have a certain ratio, or else you’ll lose privileges like certain forums or even the ability to download at all. (The trackers are private and can control which peers you can see)
vintermann 4y ago
That's a different question. But BitTorrent does fine with simple tit-for-tat rules, no tranferable tokens required.

uoaei 4y ago

BitTorrent then, under this perspective, is "less massively, less redundantly replicated" since people only hold onto and seed the torrents whose files they store locally, but they do not just go on and download and seed everything out there. Seems like a nice compromise to me, but obviously risks data becomming irrevocable in some cases. Is this also how IPFS works?

jlokier 4y ago

That's changing. The high replication to verify untrusted peers is decreasing and there's a realistic prospect of it going away due to gradual adoption and development of new zk-proof techniques. In zk proofs-of-computation-result, different nodes can perform different intensive parts of a calculation and send the results along with proofs that those are the correct results. Other nodes can accept the results and verify the proofs with remarkable efficiency, then use those partial results for further calculations. To me it still feels counterintuitive and almost magical that any large, arbitrary computation result can be easily verified without repeating the computation, without the verifier needing much memory or data. For cryptocurrency blockchains this allows smart-contract (computational) transactions to be accepted with only one node having to execute the code, everyone else just efficiently verifies the proof to accept the state change. As proofs can be aggregated, this scales well: it isn't necessary for every node to run all the verifications, either. For big, distributed calculations like the article's, the whole calculation can progress using those partial results without having to rely on trust and reputation, and everyone can have high confidence that the final result is what it should be, not undermined by subterfuge or subtly inaccurate contributions. This is an offshoot of zero-knowledge proofs, as ironically zero-knowledge is not required for these types of applications. Just the efficient verifiability part. (Fwiw, I am working on large, scalable zk-proofs-of-computation in my spare time, in optimised software and with hardware accelaration, if anyone is interested in discussing this stuff.)

vlovich123 4y ago
> To me it still feels counterintuitive and almost magical that any large, arbitrary computation result can be easily verified without repeating the computation, without the verifier needing much memory or data. Why counterintuitive? That’s kind of all of cryptography and most of computer science. Take factoring into primes (which has been done for forever): it’s really time consuming and expensive to determine what the prime factors for a number are, particularly if it’s a big number and you know it only has two. That’s because division is very very difficult and time consuming. Multiplication on the other hand is super cheap so once you tell me the prime factors, I can confirm much more quickly whether or not they’re factors. In computer science, one of the earliest identified computation classes is NP complete which has this property. Eg traveling salesman and knapsack packing problem are examples. It can be insanely difficult to find a path that exists between two cities in a graph under some cost. But if you give me a solution I can easily confirm whether it meets the criteria (global optimality testing is itself NP complete but if you give me a set of solutions you can verify which one is the cheapest). I’m not claiming that factorization is NP btw. There are complexity classes beyond NP that share this property. https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/159/is-integer-factorization-an-np-complete-problem https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/159/is-integer-... Anyway. ZK proofs themselves are super surprising and not intuitive but not because verification is fast but because verification reveals nothing to the verifier about the solution. That’s the mind blowing result.