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

@cr8 @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur

It's hard for me to imagine a system of federated micropayments, which we're going to need as the old internet dies, without resorting to some form of blockchain.
The alternative is a central authority.
I'd love to hear alternative ideas.
Though, I'll be honest, my complaint here is with the principle of attacking the technology and not the people wielding the technology.
A technology is just a tool.

Greg Wellman Mar 3, 2024

@AeonCypher @cr8 @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur There are some odd assumptions in this reply. "... as the old internet dies" - the old internet is dying? How and why? In apparently such a manner that it won't support micropayments? We already have a bunch of micropayment services supported by banks. Banks are "central authorities", but what's wrong with that? Honestly, most of the arguments I see against "central authorities" sound more like people evading the argument for "We must keep our system of laws and government democratically accountable so that central authorities remain trustworthy".

@gfwellman @cr8 @tivasyk @enoch_exe_inc @aguleb @baldur

How and why? - Because everything is going to be paywalled. Because AI can read things for you.

"it won't support micropayments? " - Micropayments currently exist from authorities. I said federated micropayments.

"We must keep our system of laws and government democratically accountable so that central authorities remain trustworthy"
I would _MUCH_ rather that banking, as in money creation, and for that mater payment processing were run by a competent government. I'm not holding my breath for that.

inhuman resource

@AeonCypher @gfwellman @tivasyk I think money creation is not really a problem with a technical solution.

Decentralizing things at a protocol level *does nothing* to decentralize **power** - pretty much every chain of any size has far more drastic wealth concentration than most govt currencies and could be (and sometimes are) crashed by the actions of just a few individuals.