hudon

35 ms·

331.
by hudon 9y ago
If you don’t understand that the process of reconciling 2 chains of blocks is for the sake of consensus on 1 ledger, maybe you just don’t understand distributed systems ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Because if you did, you would understand that when your
332.
The 2013 Bitcoin fork: centralized decision-making saved the day (2015)(freedom-to-tinker.com)
1 points by hudon 9y ago|0 comments
333.
by hudon 9y ago
> Facebook and Google are not evil. [...] Everyone's economic incentive is to make more money. I don't buy the claim that everyone just wants more money above all else and you seem to agree if you're claiming that people c
334.
by hudon 9y ago
The ledger that is Bitcoin changed. From the merchant's perspective: Bitcoin was one ledger, then it became another. Transactions that were 24 blocks deep changed. That is the ledger changing. The developers are the ones that told eve
335.
by hudon 9y ago
If I had a data structure whose contents could be interpreted differently by different parties, I'd have a very hard time convincing stakeholders that it was immutable... and I'd feel bad trying to do so. > We would know and be
336.
by hudon 9y ago
Repeating things don't make them true. You defined immutability as the inability of changing the past. I have provided you an example of the past of Bitcoin being changed (24 blocks were invalidated). I await your rebuttal.
337.
by hudon 9y ago
When a chain fails to find consensus and forks due to different consensus rules, the 2 chains persist until the developers tell us which chain is the right one. Let's take the 2013 Bitcoin fork for example. OK now a merchant who has ac
338.
by hudon 9y ago
Not only that, but the blockchain is not even immutable... Forks happen all the time and the developers end up arbitrarily choosing which fork is the real blockchain. Anyone that was using the other fork in the meantime sees their chain mut
339.
by hudon 9y ago
I don't want to start a "Bitcoin is useless" flameware but to your question: the reason why the energy consumption of proof-of-work is important is because society hasn't found a purpose for Bitcoin to exist yet. Therefo
340.
by hudon 9y ago
I believe that the name of a currency is important so that merchants know what they're accepting. How will the merchants in your world know which currency they're accepting?
341.
by hudon 9y ago
Sorry you've lost me. How do you differentiate between blockchains if not at least by name? How will a merchant know which currencies to accept if they have no names? When I'm trading Bitcoin for Litecoin, am I just trading the sa
342.
by hudon 9y ago
> everyone does not consider it a different currency, you consider it a different currency. Um ok we're spreading lies now. Do you have evidence that the vast majority of people consider Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin to be the same curr
343.
by hudon 9y ago
Are you saying trademark law would help resolving forks?
344.
by hudon 9y ago
Your fork is not the same system though, everyone else considers it a different currency. The argument is whether or not 1 given currency is decentralized, not whether or not you as a human have the freedom to use any currency you want... I
345.
by hudon 9y ago
In 2013 literally the system could not find consensus until the central party told people what to do. If you're still calling that "decentralized" then I'm afraid the word has lost any useful meaning... But I'm with
346.
by hudon 9y ago
Satoshi told everyone his fork was Bitcoin and Vitalik told everyone his fork was Ethereum. The fact that more people disagreed with Vitalik than people that disagreed with Satoshi doesn't change the fact that the same thing happened i
347.
by hudon 9y ago
It’s not clear that it doesn’t need a central authority. There is a rich history of blockchain consensus failure needing a central authority to tell everyone which chain is the right one. Satoshi did it in 2010, the Bitcoin developers did i
348.
by hudon 9y ago
If Alice changed the ruleset so drastically, I don’t think she could find any Bob that would be willing to accept this thing as Bitcoin. But maybe the probability is not 0. If Alice only changed 1 little rule and made it conflicting with th
349.
by hudon 9y ago
An actual great example is in 2013 when this happened [0]. For 24 hours, Bitcoin could not reach consensus and users could double-spend. The fact that we do not know how likely Bitcoin consensus failure is—especially when so many forks and
350.
by hudon 9y ago
“Of course” we have 2 ledgers and no consensus between them? So do we all agree that Bitcoin does not solve decentralized consensus and I missed the memo?
351.
by hudon 9y ago
How hard? We need to understand exactly what the probability of consensus failure is. Otherwise, we have not built a working distributed system...
352.
by hudon 9y ago
Both Charlie and Bob have received bitcoin. This is a double-spend by definition.
353.
Undocumented Double-Spend Risk in Bitcoin(medium.com)
19 points by hudon 9y ago|10 comments
354.
by hudon 9y ago
Is anyone actually playing? I thought that was like a short-term gimmick where people were trading cats but there is no actual game. I don’t know if I’d call it a successful use case just yet, but rather I would wait at least a year or two
355.
by hudon 9y ago
For something practical, I’d look at Bitcoin. It seems to be somewhat useful for routing payments around regulation. Even at that, though, it currently isn’t very good due to how inefficient the blockchain is. Maybe non-blockchain technolog
356.
by hudon 9y ago
One of the first ICOs, Ethereum, run by the Ethereum Foundation in Switzerland, has successfully created a platform to run ICOs. It is legitimate so long as there is at least 1 Ethereum-based ICO that leads to a useful product.
357.
by hudon 9y ago
Your example of digital scarcity is basically legendary items in world of warcraft, and that also historically hasn’t needed a blockchain.
358.
by hudon 9y ago
That’s historically untrue. Bitcoin forks and Ethereum forks have users. I don’t think there is such a thing as this “real blockchain“... care to define what “real” means? If you say it’s the one with the greatest market cap, then you’re ag
359.
by hudon 9y ago
For 10 years of “blockchain”, the market has had more and more blockchains. So in absence of the consensus you’re hoping for, who decides which blockchain is the source of truth?
360.
by hudon 9y ago
If the game is open source, you can copy the game on your fork. If the game is closed source, you are trusting it to not mess with the scarcity and thus the blockchain isn’t providing scarcity, the game providers are.

More ›