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This must be the weirdest call to authority I've ever seen. Consens algorithms are important in both safety and distributed (High Availibility) scenarios. Ther

• benreesman 3y ago
  I made a typographical error because I typed that with my thumb: the gentleman’s name is Dr. Philip Wadler FRS FRSE (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler), I also forgot his proper title as a Fellow of the Royal Society. The contributions that merited his inclusion in a group that includes (in computing alone) people like Charles Babbage KH FRS and Alan Turing OBE FRS are too numerous for any HN comment: he’s got something like 20k citations of hundreds of papers. His contributions while working at IOHK were IIRC substantially around advanced formal proof systems for typed lambda calculus, the most recent of his IOHK papers I read was describing a System F implementation in the Agda proof system. I don’t think it’s called an appeal to authority when the topic is the merit of a field of study (I’ve never heard it referred to as a call to authority at all): when an overwhelming consensus of basically every reputable academic and scientific honor and award in the field (some among the highest honors in any field) are attached to research done over decades and reviewed, debated, cited, and recognized by a robust consensus, that’s an argument that the study was important, novel, rigorous, valuable and worthwhile. I cited the consensus of the entire reputable academic and scientific world because that’s how we codify a consensus into a formal recognition that a researcher has in the past, is currently, or is likely to again do important research. I think GP was mistaken to call this research junk or even imply it if someone is going to try to parse it that finely, and I thought that citing the ACM was a better citation than my own opinion. I agree that git is a blockchain, though not a particularly Byzantine Fault Tolerant one, along with Mercurial and Nix and many other tools many of us use daily. The broader convergence around previously disparate parts of the digital financial economy is just unambiguously happening: things like FedNow at the high end or Apple Pay / Venmo / Zelle / Wize / WeChat / etc. on a more retail level are arriving faster and faster, placing ever-greater demands on the technology involved, and similar pressures are producing related solutions: the NBBO system in US equities trading to name one example, the consolidated tape that results and the records around it used to be backed by all trades taking place on recorded phone lines, before that by taking place in a room full of witnesses, and before that in coffee shops and other gathering places. All of these systems were workable if imperfect solutions to questions of trust, escrow, reversibility or its converse, and broadly the ways in which Ricardian contracts are generally, in isolation, inadequate to promote a sufficient atmosphere of trust to admit active and reasonably efficient markets. Cryptographically durable and tamper-resistant ledgers remain in a sort of transitional state where they back non-trivial commerce and much more but still comparatively small amounts of speculation/price discovery: the jury is out on whether or not cryptography and BFT research is going to hit the truly big leagues in terms of notional value: right now they’re somewhere in the rough ballpark of equities transactions daily in the maybe mid tens to low hundreds of billions in notional USD, making both a flea on the ass of an elephant compared to say global forex at something like 5-10 trillion a day, and derivatives are just really hard to estimate, but the notional value of all derivatives contracts is like, easily in the hundreds of trillions and there are days when a lot of that moves quickly. But I wasn’t making the case that this stuff is like 100% locked-in the future, I was making a much weaker claim: that it’s dismissive and ignorant to call it “junk” and that what limited consequences fraudsters face for financial fraud are tightly clustered in this area. It’s well-understood that the mechanism design of a combination of a floating transaction fee structure (gas) and a market in that unit of account with a lot of speculative activity in it is problematic to put it mildly: transactions become too expensive to facilitate significant commerce rather often. A lot of things are being tried to improve the emergent incentives, some with more noble motives than others, but that’s finance: if you’re under any illusion that innovation in finance is a constant battle between people trying to generate better outcomes and people trying to game the thing then you can easily disabuse yourself of that notion by learning about the history of finance and I’ll recommend two excellent places to start: the emergence of massive OTC derivatives markets that began in the 1980s but really got big a decade later, and the emergence of fully-digital equities and futures markets around the turn of the millennium.
  • orthecreedence 3y ago
    > I agree that git is a blockchain Wait, isn't git more of a merkle-DAG? I thought one of the defining features of blockchains was effectively branchless global state. My understanding is that DAGs are a superset of blockchains. Is this a wrong? My comment about "blockchain junk" is mainly in response to the fact that it's nearly impossible to find any investment/involvement in the space without running into complete fraudsters and starry-eyed "entrepreneurs" who view blockchain as some sort of god technology that will lift us out of poverty and/or upend the corporate control mechanisms. AKA a bandaid fix by people who don't understand its actual limitations or the dynamics of the systems they supposedly oppose. As a system for maintaining auditable global state/knowledge in the face of sybil attacks, yes, it's impressive. However 99% of the projects people reach for it do not require it, hence the term "junk." It's more a condemnation of the space surrounding the technology than the technology itself. I figured that would be somewhat obvious.
    • benreesman 3y ago
      You sound like someone who knows your stuff on this and I regret if I was in any way making it sound personal or disrespectful to you personally. I maintain it’s an unfortunate if not offensive phrasing, but I’m in no position to carry rocks around glass houses: I say unfortunately or offensively-phrased things too. There isn’t really a robust consensus that I’m aware of as to what constitutes a blockchain per se: Wikipedia lists git as one, and I suppose that’s as good a source as any absent such consensus. git is an (often if not typically in practice degenerate) Merkle Tree, the contents of one atomic (and sometimes de facto immutable) node contain a hash (O(1)-verifiably k-equivalent… you know the drill) of ancestors. In more pragmatic/colloquial usage I might define a blockchain loosely as a “tamper-resistant, directed, and typically acyclic / bounded-cyclic data structure with an implied machine economics optimization around infrequent but critically important fully-verifiable history subject to heuristically-determined / freely parameterized bounds on branching factor, duration in branched states, and a bounded susceptibility to adversarial interference in a verifiable consensus on the periodic elimination of branching on some semi-predicable cadence”, which is pretty hand-wavy but I think captures the spirit of the general usage. By that definition git is only a blockchain by common convention, there’s nothing preventing or even discouraging arbitrary, unbounded branching other than it doesn’t have a ton of widely valued use cases: most any time you’re fine with a branch that never has any scope to interact with any other via rebase or merge you could just make a copy or maybe a copy and a copy of some metadata/history, though git in practical terms is a good tool for such a copy. And I think you’re right that as with any over-hyped technology, it gets attached to projects that don’t need it when it’s “hot”, preoccupies both investors and entrepreneurs without better ideas for how to deploy their time and money when it’s “in”, and is therefore constantly oscillating between being a magnet for snake-oil types and being out in the cold. Throw in a bunch of electricity consumption that’s maybe net driving up carbon emissions and maybe net attaching a financial incentive to electricity so cheap that it basically has to be renewable but it’s kinda too soon to tell, and I think I’m now having trouble seeing how crypto three years ago and “AI” last year are any different along these dimensions. The difference in my view is that AI is probably higher variance by a lot on social welfare, and not because of some dumbass “paperclip-indifferent AGI” tripe. Blockchain as applied to finance has the scope to create transparency into financial markets and compel governments to open the books on what is and isn’t legal regarding money, for who, and why. It will never like, totally disintermediate government from money, because money is the #1 national security priority of any functioning government, so inventing money that the government can’t control is more likely to buy you a R9x than a Turing Award (in a macabre way it’s darkly amusing to contemplate the fact that it could buy you both). It also has a positive (in my view) externality of creating broad-spectrum incentives for the public to understand a little better how important digital identity, security, privacy, and autonomy are in 2024 and build at least a little muscle memory around running a slightly or maybe even substantially tighter ship on personal digital footprint. I’ve apologized to two friends this week because I lied to them about something that is now news that recently broke on the Onavo/Meta thing TechCrunch ran and I wanted them to hear it from me. I lied about this because before it hit the press, I felt it would have been detrimental to the national security of the United States to talk about it, but what I really wish is that we wouldn’t end up in situations where anyone faces such dilemmas in private industry. AI has more obviously useful applications at the consumer level (though it’s largely a solution to itself as a way to get information one could previously get from a search engine before it ruined the indexes of search engines by making arbitrarily persuasive falsehoods too cheap to meter, we’ve had spam for a long time, but spam so good it’s convincing to experts in anything other than a bad mood? That’s new.). The danger with AI is that it winds up being something other than “available weight” and “operator-aligned”, i.e. whoever is the last man standing has arbitrary unaccountable power to convince anyone of anything and prevent that from being accessed by anyone else. So probably higher stakes.
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