Exactly 14 years ago , Satoshi Nakamoto designed the most pathetic / inefficient system ever invented by humankind : the blockchain.
Today, it weights 60 000 tons, wastes constantly 10 gigawatts (more than Belgium or Chile) to process less than 7 transactions per second :
Less than a 33 bps modem from 1990.
This could be a joke if it didn't have such gigantic environmental impact, wasn't enabling billion dollars ransomware industry and was not crushing thousands of lives in the process.
@FranckLeroy Oh, did it not turn out to be useful for buying a newspaper then?
One does have to wonder why nobody did the performance calculations ...
Check out IPFS and Arweave. Protocols are designed specifically as data stores, rather than having data storage as a side effect of intended purpose.
Also, simply incorrect to say Ethereum had rewrites and Bitcoin hasn't. Bitcoin has had several rollbacks in history.
@ceresbzns @adamrice @FranckLeroy I haven’t looked at Arweave. Will do, so thanks for the tip. From my recollection of IPFS it is not immutable. Nodes can discard data and eventually it could be lost. The whole reason the blockchain works like it does is to avoid double spend, so immutability is a requirement. If it can be done more efficiently, great.
I stand corrected on the rollback, albeit in somewhat different circumstances.
Yeah, most of the file storage protocols have some kind of garbage collection. IPFS only needs one node to "pin" a file in order to keep it around though, so on the spectrum of available solutions, it's reasonably resilient with good integrity guarantees (IMO)
@Setok @adamrice @FranckLeroy Unfortunately we're too far into "extremely vested interests" territory to assume that anything else will take over - or even get attention at all - even if it's a better alternative.
It's one of the curses of the Unicorn culture; everyone wants to own a space entirely, whether warranted or not...
@Setok @jwcph @adamrice @FranckLeroy
Might be thinking of one based on DAGs (dirrcted acyclic graphs) like Nano (used to be called Raiblocks) and IOTA.
I really thought Nano would catch on. Super efficient, focused purely on transactions (no VM or other stuff like Ethereum). One big thing is it works by everyone having their own chain.
IOTA does something similar.
The problem is, since there is no mining, no making money with these, they died to get rich quick shit coins.
@adamrice @Setok @FranckLeroy
Yeah, cryptographically signing transactions is not super innovative: it's how distributed source code systems like git work. There are plenty of more efficient ways to do it than blockchain if you only want it to be *useful*
If you had to wait as long as a bitcoin transaction to commit code in git, the software industry would grind to a halt.
@adamrice @Setok @FranckLeroy Yeah, it's called Git. :-) Merkel chains are nothing new.
There are even other blockchains that don't use PoW that aren't the world-destroyers that Bitcoin is.
@Setok @FranckLeroy Which is why, of course, when one of the leading Bitcoin developers recently had all of his bitcoins irreversibly stolen (& that in itself raises 1 or 2 tiny questions); that the owners of the leading exchanges all agreed to blacklist his stolen bitcoins & prevent them from being transacted.
So it's still very much controlled, only now instead of regulators and laws protecting you, it's "beg for favours from oligarchs". Sounds fantastic.
No, that's a different ideology.
Blockchain goes beyond decentralization and pretends to be "trustless" .
That's libertarian fanatism : noone can be trusted, no regulation is useful, full freddom, code is law, etc, .... Pure individualism = the rejection of any social construction other than contractual = pure market.
Fediverse on the other hand more like like anarchy : flattening / distributing the power, but still with trust on actors of good will ...
@FranckLeroy @Setok @aaronwinstonsmith > Fediverse on the other hand more like like anarchy : flattening / distributing the power, but still with trust on actors of good will ...
Only by sheer technicality that it's possible to self-host (with considerable accessibility/applicability issues).
In practice the way it forces hierarchy on most is not compatible with anarchism.
@grillchen @Setok @aaronwinstonsmith @FranckLeroy I'm not sufficiently versed to answer that confidently.
But generally? No. Hierarchies favor abusers first and foremost.
A generally agreed upon rejection of coercion, oppression and hierarchy is actively detrimental to most such people.
How to handle personal limitations and cooperation with others without introducing informal or formal hierarchies, or other coercive power dynamics gets complicated.
The difficulties with the Fediverse and self-hosting are a direct result of its server-centric design (within a network built on statist & capitalist hierarchies and assumptions) which is itself preferred (in software systems in general) as a result of capitalist ideology and its desire for (centralized) control making that schema omnipresent and more obvious/typical to software designers. That is not to say that the designers of ActivityPub were malicious, but that they did not foresee the flaws of the system fully (and a redesign is impossible without effectively scrapping the current iteration).
@lispi314 Well let me put it this way, can you read the decision to build a "computing utility" as anything but political? General Electric alongside Bell Labs and MIT had a vested interest in tra...
@grillchen @Setok @aaronwinstonsmith @FranckLeroy For a schema that isn't rooted in infrastructural privilege, something like a Secure ScuttleButt (I think it's message-based? It should be) would be a start (with an implementation not built in the nightmarish JavaScript ecosystem or something similarly nonsensical and dependent on omnipresent low-latency networking).
Obviously it wasn't designed for the kind of trust & task deference (moderation, etc) you mention, but it still provides a viable starting point for what an appropriate option might look like.
(A reified opt-in proxy/mailman/gateway role or suchlike could exist, for example.)
@Setok @FranckLeroy I have hard drives older than Blockchain, and you can still listen to wax cylinders - or watch films - recorded in the 19th century.
Bitcoin requires a constant input of energy to maintain the network. If the ratio between price and cost goes upside down, the network vanishes.
@opendna @FranckLeroy actually that's not true. The system balances itself out, so if electricity prices go up, fewer will mine, making it take longer, and it self-adjusts to make it easier. As long as even one machine is mining, even a Raspberry Pi, the blockchain is alive.
Many wax cylinders and old film reels have been lost to time, and they are easy to manipulate.
@Setok @FranckLeroy Six Raspberry Pi with a combined 2.6TB in disk space, and whomever controls more than half of them has full authority to edit the "immutable" ledger in any way they like.
...which is good because it would otherwise take them over 66,000 years to confirm a transaction.
@berto @Setok @FranckLeroy The immutability that a system of this nature banks on, and is making bank off, is predicated on underlying greed, scarcity, desperation, inequality. Simultaneously it is contributing to the ecological and resource collapse that will accelerate those social factors.
Fascinating to watch in progress I am sure, but the OP accurately summed up the nihilistic stupidity of a planet-collapsing chain letter.
@Setok @FranckLeroy ideologically, I have problems with the "controlled by no one".
The problem blockchain tries to solve: we're having a hard time currently trusting each other, or trusting institutions like the Fed, and at the end trusting democracy. Making society.
But the solution to that isn't avoiding the need of trust, like Blockchain. It's rebuilding trust (and society, and democracy).
@Setok lol, no. you don't need to solve stupid puzzles to achieve immutability. (nor is immutability such an important attribute in most use cases).
@Setok @FranckLeroy if I hand you a file and a checksum for that file it is effectively immutable as well, as long as we all promise to respect that checksum.
Didn’t even have to destroy thousands of lives to do it!
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