4 ms·

> distributed E2E messaging system The thing is, customers don't necessarily want a distributed messaging system, they might be perfectly fine with a decentral

> distributed E2E messaging system The thing is, customers don't necessarily want a distributed messaging system, they might be perfectly fine with a decentralized one if it supports E2EE. Matrix went the way they did and it's far from obvious whether it was a good choice. I'm leaning towards no. > but someone's done it three times You can do it however times you want and it will be easy to do if you have access to one of the few domain experts of the protocol. It can be considered easy to implement once someone else successfully implements it and continues to support it for a significant period of time. Rewriting one thing three times inside a single org is not something of interest. > Blockchains are Merkle trees This is getting offtopic, but anyway. Blockchains are DAGs, they are not necessarily trees. The canonical chain and candidate blocks have only one genesis block, and non-genesis blocks could have multiple parents (e.g. one main parent and orphaned uncles), which by traverse still converge to the same genesis block. Although Merkle trees are used in the underlying block data structure, this is orthogonal to the blockchain concept and any data structure could be stored there. > MLS Unless I'm missing something about MLS, you're mixing unrelated stuff here.

camgunz 3y ago
> The thing is, customers don't necessarily want a distributed messaging system, they might be perfectly fine with a decentralized one if it supports E2EE. Maybe! You could argue that basically all the successful messaging systems except for email and IRC (if IRC still counts as successful) are centralized, so there's that. > You can do it however times you want and it will be easy to do if you have access to one of the few domain experts of the protocol. In fairness, I don't know how you implement a client/server for a protocol w/o being a domain expert in it. Try building an IRC server, an IMAP server, an ActivityPub server, etc. and remaining ignorant about the details about IRC, IMAP, ActivityPub, etc. This has felt like an odd benchmark to me this whole thread. > Blockchains are DAGs, they are not necessarily trees. Eh, I really think they're trees because they're Merkle trees. Each block contains the hash of the previous block, not some random other block as it would be if it were a graph. Even with uncle/orphan blocks, it's still a tree. > Although Merkle trees are used in the underlying block data structure, this is orthogonal to the blockchain concept and any data structure could be stored there. Definitely not, because the hashes prove the tree's correctness. You can verify any branch, which you want to do to ensure you're not getting scammed. The Merkle tree concept is essential to the verifiability of blockchains. > Unless I'm missing something about MLS, you're mixing unrelated stuff here. Sorry I was a little opaque. Matrix' handling of rooms is suboptimal for lots of reasons, but one is what you pointed out: they don't have great performance and thus desync a lot. MLS has a cool tree-based Ologn algorithm for fixing this. It's a process to get there [0], but I'm excited for when it happens. [0]: https://arewemlsyet.com/ https://arewemlsyet.com/

camgunz 3y ago

> The thing is, customers don't necessarily want a distributed messaging system, they might be perfectly fine with a decentralized one if it supports E2EE. Maybe! You could argue that basically all the successful messaging systems except for email and IRC (if IRC still counts as successful) are centralized, so there's that. > You can do it however times you want and it will be easy to do if you have access to one of the few domain experts of the protocol. In fairness, I don't know how you implement a client/server for a protocol w/o being a domain expert in it. Try building an IRC server, an IMAP server, an ActivityPub server, etc. and remaining ignorant about the details about IRC, IMAP, ActivityPub, etc. This has felt like an odd benchmark to me this whole thread. > Blockchains are DAGs, they are not necessarily trees. Eh, I really think they're trees because they're Merkle trees. Each block contains the hash of the previous block, not some random other block as it would be if it were a graph. Even with uncle/orphan blocks, it's still a tree. > Although Merkle trees are used in the underlying block data structure, this is orthogonal to the blockchain concept and any data structure could be stored there. Definitely not, because the hashes prove the tree's correctness. You can verify any branch, which you want to do to ensure you're not getting scammed. The Merkle tree concept is essential to the verifiability of blockchains. > Unless I'm missing something about MLS, you're mixing unrelated stuff here. Sorry I was a little opaque. Matrix' handling of rooms is suboptimal for lots of reasons, but one is what you pointed out: they don't have great performance and thus desync a lot. MLS has a cool tree-based Ologn algorithm for fixing this. It's a process to get there [0], but I'm excited for when it happens. [0]: https://arewemlsyet.com/ https://arewemlsyet.com/