Mastodawn

Beluga Mar 3, 2024

@baldur I thought all these use cases were already covered by blockchain?!

😁

enoch_exe_inc Mar 3, 2024

@aguleb @baldur Blockchain has covered absolutely *no* use-cases except for “the need for blockchain technology to exist” and “to automate the waste of electricity to a comically absurd degree”.

івась тарасик Mar 3, 2024

@enoch_exe_inc by that, do you mean that distributed ledgers are a bogus idea, or that only blockchain is a bad realisation and there are better ones, and if so, could you point me in that direction please?

@aguleb @baldur

@tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
People are prone to confusing a technology itself from its application in late stage capitalism.
Blockchain is an incredibly useful technology that's been steered toward evil.

@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur the useful pieces are all decades old tech with new jargon slapped on - you *could* call git or anything with a merkle tree or verifiable append-only history in it a "blockchain" if you squint hard enough, but you really shouldn't - since its mostly a marketing term for companies using that tech to do fraud

@cr8 @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
I'm sorry, that's not true. It's incredibly easy, trivial, to forge a fake commit history.
You are saying "verifiable" as though that were somehow a trivial task. It's not.
The components of the technology for a verifiable distributed database existed decades ago. In fact the technology in labs existed decades ago.
A working system that actually does something didn't exist until 15 years ago.

@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur its also "trivial" to forge a fake chain history - getting clients to accept it is the hard pard, but git clients *also* don't blindly accept forged histories - you need some way of handling fresh clones and deciding which *new* additions are valid, but for most applications you can just pick someone to trust.

the new bit was "trustlessness," but that doesn't solve a problem most (non-cryptocurrency) applications actually have

@cr8 @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
You can fork a repo, rewrite the entire history, and publish it as your own.
The entire reason you can't just mess with the history is because a maintainer decides whether to bring it into the main branch.
That's not distributed. It's impossible for Github to both be distributed and verifyable. It can be only one.
Also, maybe go read the actual papers on blockchain from the 80's and 90's.
You clearly seem to have a misunderstanding of what the technology is, and continue to confuse its application under the capitalist hegemon for what the technology actually is.

Proof of Work, and Proof of Stake are not possible under any standard version control system, and AFAIK no system of proof exists for them other than through a central authority.

@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur you know that git isn't the same thing as github right

@cr8 @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
Are you intentionally being insulting?

@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur anyway you can totally apply proof-of-work to git, stripe did it as a ctf challenge a couple years ago - there was never a technical reason you couldn't, there's just no good reason to do it

@cr8 @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
"stripe did it as a ctf challenge a couple years ago"
That's interesting.

@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur https://github.com/ctfs/write-ups-2014/tree/master/stripe-ctf3/level1

there wasn't a mempool or anything but if you were really into the idea of proof-of-work version control there's no reason you couldn't take it further

write-ups-2014/stripe-ctf3/level1 at master · ctfs/write-ups-2014

Wiki-like CTF write-ups repository, maintained by the community. 2014 - ctfs/write-ups-2014

GitHub

@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur proof-of-stake is too inherently tied to the concept of a crypto*currency* though because of the need to impose an extra penalty ("slashing") on elected validators that intentionally stall the system

@cr8 @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
The way I would have intuitively made a distributed ledger is with a (Bayesian) trust network. I could never figure out how to get the maths to work on it for something like a distributed ledger.
The fact is, the people who are developing the technology have little incentive to make anything other than coins or bank-ledgers. At least currently.
There are a lot of startups trying to put the tech to creative uses, but I haven't seen any of them take off yet.
I'd give one example I know well, but I'd have someone mad at me for "sharing their idea".

@AeonCypher @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur i worked on a lot of similar pre-"blockchain" tech and then after it took off watched a lot of my ex-coworkers and peers go on to blockchain co's that I thought were at best producing clunky subpar products and sometimes just outright scams

the incentives are toxic - crypto is a space where investors don't have to wait for an "exit," and can profitably just sell hype so even well-meaning projects get turned into pump-and-dump schemes

@cr8 @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur
Oof, yeah. That sounds rough. I definitely get the ire, hatred even, for the crytpto grifters.

Was your project using a trust network? Most people's eyes just glaze over at the concept. LOL

(Sorry if I was a bit aggro earlier. I'm having that kind of day.)