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Did anyone else get bothered by the author saying that the Bitcoin Blockchain is more like a cloud service than P2P services? The Blockchain is literally almos

by eximius 13y ago

Did anyone else get bothered by the author saying that the Bitcoin Blockchain is more like a cloud service than P2P services? The Blockchain is literally almost exactly like P2P File sharing except the file can be updated across nodes in an extremely limited context.

dvanduzer 13y ago
She's saying some subtle things about what a "system" is. BitCoin and BitTorrent have almost nothing in common as protocols go. At a high level, BitTorrent's DHT uses some notion of consensus to communicate between peers about who is on the network and where they and their files are. There is never system-wide coherence of the DHT, but the algorithm (Kademlia) doesn't require anything like that. BitCoin's notion of consensus requires that coherence in all but the last ~10 minutes worth of the blockchain. Zooming out even farther, BitCoin requires the entire network for anything to happen at all. BitTorrent leverages the entire network to speed up interactions between two individual nodes. If you're still not convinced, consider what happens if 40% of the network is cut off from the rest for a large period of time. After the extended network partition ends, and the two big swarms rejoin, what do users find is different?
njyx 13y ago
Bitcoin as is, is more like a cloud service - you need the whole chain to be updated everywhere. You can do that P2P but you need full consistency. That's not a great property if you only have weak connections between nodes.
sroerick 13y ago
I think bitcoin is probably the closest thing we truly have to a "cloud". P2P requires seeds and peers. The structure of the Bitcoin network means that as long as there are miners, any information stored on the blockchain will continue to exist. This, in my opinion, makes it much more similar to the idea of a "cloud" than either bittorrent, or a corporate-controlled data server that hosts your information.

by eximius 13y ago

dvanduzer 13y ago

She's saying some subtle things about what a "system" is. BitCoin and BitTorrent have almost nothing in common as protocols go. At a high level, BitTorrent's DHT uses some notion of consensus to communicate between peers about who is on the network and where they and their files are. There is never system-wide coherence of the DHT, but the algorithm (Kademlia) doesn't require anything like that. BitCoin's notion of consensus requires that coherence in all but the last ~10 minutes worth of the blockchain. Zooming out even farther, BitCoin requires the entire network for anything to happen at all. BitTorrent leverages the entire network to speed up interactions between two individual nodes. If you're still not convinced, consider what happens if 40% of the network is cut off from the rest for a large period of time. After the extended network partition ends, and the two big swarms rejoin, what do users find is different?

njyx 13y ago

Bitcoin as is, is more like a cloud service - you need the whole chain to be updated everywhere. You can do that P2P but you need full consistency. That's not a great property if you only have weak connections between nodes.

sroerick 13y ago

I think bitcoin is probably the closest thing we truly have to a "cloud". P2P requires seeds and peers. The structure of the Bitcoin network means that as long as there are miners, any information stored on the blockchain will continue to exist. This, in my opinion, makes it much more similar to the idea of a "cloud" than either bittorrent, or a corporate-controlled data server that hosts your information.