trentmc

10 ms·

31.
by trentmc 9y ago
Hi, it's Trent here, CTO of BigchainDB. The word "blockchain" is much misunderstood. There is a ton of argument over what it actually is. Just a linked list of hashes? Bitcoin and nothing else? I could go on and on. To me, th
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by trentmc 9y ago
Hi, it's Trent here, I'm CTO at BigchainDB. BigchainDB targets giving the following benefits beyond traditional database as a service: 1. decentralized - no single entity controls it, which means tolerant to malicious / Byzan
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by trentmc 9y ago
BigchainDB | Python - Decentralized Software Engineer| Berlin, Germany | Full-time ONSITE | http://www.bigchaindb.com BigchainDB is a leader in the blockchain space. We're building a decentralized database, and a data marke
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Blockchain Infrastructure Landscape: A First Principles Framing(blog.bigchaindb.com)
2 points by trentmc 9y ago|0 comments
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AI DAOs, and Three Paths to Get There(blog.bigchaindb.com)
3 points by trentmc 9y ago|0 comments
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by trentmc 10y ago
BigchainDB is open-source; with same licensing as MongoDB which it wraps. http://github.com/bigchaindb/bigchaindb . It has quickstart that takes about 20 min to do. By the time you're done, you'll have issued
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by trentmc 10y ago
Hi! I've been working on blockchain tech professionally since mid 2013, and been writing software since the 80s. I'm CTO of BigchainDB. Here's how I see things. Blockchains are distributed databases (e.g. MongoDB) with three
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by trentmc 10y ago
Articles like the "AI + Blockchain" one are meant to be forward-looking, to help inspire people to build. Call it hand-wavy if you wish; I call it laying out a vision:) But we're all about real apps getting built. Many comani
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by trentmc 10y ago
To me, incentives can be intrinsic (built into the system) or extrinsic (outside the system). Each has pros and cons. Bitcoin is intrinsic, based on mining reward and tx fees. Traditional private blockchains are extrinsic, where the folks r
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by trentmc 10y ago
> You're the one who asserted that CAP-style consistency is required to prevent double-spends Could you point me to where? I like my thinking and expression to be consistent (pun intended:) > I asked how the nodes federate .. who
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by trentmc 10y ago
> have something close to a consensus mechanism For this context it's really about whether or not it can prevent double spends. Currently, it can't. Though its protocol stack has a place for consensus algorithms to achieve CAP-
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by trentmc 10y ago
To clarify: "distributed" and "decentralized" are different. "Distributed" spreads compute among many physical resources, but may still have a single entity controlling it. "Decentralized" has no sing
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by trentmc 10y ago
Hi, this is the author:) I've been using Python in enterprise-grade, large-scale production systems since the early 2000s. And it works, well. Most python libraries where performance matters have C under the hood. E.g. numpy matrix man
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by trentmc 10y ago
We acknowledge this attack vector and others; and list them in github. It's in our roadmap to address them. The current schedule is the following: we're currently wrapping up the a base MongoDB integration (next couple weeks); on
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by trentmc 10y ago
Great question. As the article says: there are many ways that AI can help blockchains, such as mining blockchain data (e.g. Silk Road investigation). That’s for another discussion:) I'd love to see more suggestions here or elsewhere. I
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by trentmc 10y ago
I'm looking forward to seeing these. It's gonna be fun:)
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by trentmc 10y ago
IPFS is very close to what you describe (Merkle trees! Globally-identified hashes!) but it doesn't claim to be a blockchain because it doesn't have a consensus mechanism, let alone a way to prevent double spends. And that's o
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by trentmc 10y ago
As the article discusses, it's not an either-or. Blockchains are simply databases with specific properties; if some of those properties help your app, consider using one. They are sometimes deployed to the public, sometimes private, wi
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by trentmc 10y ago
Oh cool! Thanks for the link. I just added it to the "further reading" section on the bottom.
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by trentmc 10y ago
Thanks for the thoughts. I'll respond to each point in turn. > I don't understand the assertion made regarding blockchains/digital signatures supposedly increasing accuracy or trust in IoT sensor-reading reliability. If ea
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by trentmc 10y ago
You're absolutely right - there is a lot of room for improvement. One of the big research threads in ML is better unsupervised learning - to learn from data without labels. Another hot topic is adversarial networks, which generate thei
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by trentmc 10y ago
> increasingly a literally meaningless marketing buzzword Agree, "blockchain" is getting more diluted. To me, it still has enough information content to be useful. Just because different people have different definitions does
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by trentmc 10y ago
Ditto on agreement about what properties (including guarantees) a system provides. To me, definitions are nonetheless useful to help summarize a set of properties, help communication, and more. Even if people have different definitions, the
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by trentmc 10y ago
> Care to link to sources for server-based and server-free decentralisation that aren't your own blog posts? The best precedent is simply the long-standing difference between servers and clients in computing systems. In blockchain d
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by trentmc 10y ago
I define "decentralized" as "no single entity owns or controls". It can be further distinguished with "server-based decentralization" and "server-free decentralization" [1]. You only need to be Sybil
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by trentmc 10y ago
Hi, it's Trent here, I'm CTO of BigchainDB and also the author of the blockchains-AI article. Yep, it's a [database] cluster, and proud to be that:) But, it's special in that there isn't a single organization that o
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by trentmc 10y ago
Throw a rock in the blockchain space and you'll find a different definition of blockchains, or what it means for one thing to be a blockchain or not. It doesn't really help anyone to argue for hours on end over this, when it'
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by trentmc 10y ago
It's the author here. (Hi!) I agree, for the use cases that involve sharing, how do you incentivize this when many see data as the moat? This is why I wrote the section about "Hoard vs. share?". In some applications, there wi
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by trentmc 10y ago
Hi, it's the author here. > This really doesn't make any sense. Disagree. Below, I respond to each of your points. > Blockchains aren't immutable, they are just expensive to mutate. Agreed; very little is truly absolute
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Blockchains for Artificial Intelligence(blog.bigchaindb.com)
121 points by trentmc 10y ago|60 comments

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