I think the confusion stems from permissioned vs permissionless blockchain, and the comment you replied assumed you were talking about one instead of the other. I find the plain term "blockchain" rather vague in that regard.
For precision, it’s good to distinguish between decentralization and permissionlessness as separate axes. Technically speaking the two are commonly positively correlated, but you can build centralized, permissionless systems and decentralized, permissioned systems.
No, that's what a write-ahead-log is, or quite a few various databases, or a git branch are.
The key innovation of the blockchain was the use of proof-of-work in order to associate an amount of computer-time with a given block, and then pick, from competing views of a blockchain, which view took the most energy to arrive at... all while being resistant to a small number of subversive actors.
In short, the blockchain solved the Byzantine Generals’ Problem, and happened to use a append-only cryptographic ledger as part of it.
Proof of Work doesn't determine which view took the most energy to arrive at. What it does is give a self-adjusting brute force cracking problem that takes 10 real-world minutes to perform, regardless of the amount of energy put in. The assumption is that 10 minutes is enough for even the slowest links of the network to get an up-to-view of the world, preventing double-spends or similar issues.
> The key innovation of the blockchain was the use of proof-of-work in order to associate an amount of computer-time with a given block
Correct. In other words, proof of work is only a tool to make everybody slow
in producing data while keeping everybody fast in verifying it.
> In short, the blockchain solved the Byzantine Generals’ Problem,
No. It's a common misconception, but in fact it does not solve Byzantine
generals problem, with the simplest reason being that the problem requires the
solving protocol to terminate (blockchain does no such thing).
> and happened to use a append-only cryptographic ledger as part of it.
The correct terminology is not "ledger", but "document timestamping". You
don't need to record transactions in blockchain, they can be any statements.
Cryptographers already had such systems, except that each of those required
trusted third party to produce timestamps.
I agree that blockchain is overhyped right now, but I don't understand the common sentiment on HN that "you don't need a blockchain, just an append-only decentralized database with Merkel root logs", as if that's something easy to build. What is this hypothetical non-blockchain, where are you going to get it, and why not just use a blockchain if that's what you need?
Another one out there uses postgres. It turns out that you can use traditional databases in many cases where you think you need a blockchain, and you'll be able to waste vastly less energy on proof-of-work and vastly less time dealing with the terrible mess that is "blockchain".
The reason not to use "blockchain" is that it has 200 definitions, all of them full of people trying to get rich, not getting things done.
Databases have long-since solved the problem of storing and distributing data.
Distributed stores like etcd, zookeeper, and so on have long since solved the problem of duplicating data.
Very few people need byzentine fault tolerance (due to having a large number of untrusted actors with write access), which is the only time the additional complexity blockchain includes is actually useful
This. At my company, we want a way to show investors our actual revenue numbers in an auditable manner, trustless. This is because we are extrajurisdictional and have high opsec concerns and cannot simply hire an accounting firm to give us an OK.
Hence we shall issue signed receipts to all clients and providers then setup a system to pay out a large bounty if someone can produce a signed receipt not in our weekly-published-log. We'll automate the bounty, but perhaps a third party will also offer a validator. We will not even need Postgres for it, just nginx and a filesystem.
But that is not interesting enough by itself, and mentioning digital signatures just confuses people more. So we call it a Single-Issuer-Blockchain: Now people instantly get the idea.
> I don't understand the common sentiment on HN that "you don't need a blockchain, just an append-only decentralized database with Merkel root logs", as if that's something easy to build.
In my case, this sentiment accompanies an implementation in the form of an easily-deployable open source microservice.
If it's too hard for people to build, they can use what I wrote.
> What is this hypothetical non-blockchain, where are you going to get it, and why not just use a blockchain if that's what you need?
That's the tx/s limit on Bitcoin today? I can do hundreds of writes per seconds to Chronicle on a modest VM without sweat. This is possible because it's centralized, albeit supports mirroring (i.e. replication) and cross-signing.
Are people still fighting about this or have they come to a consensus?
I'm probably the worst person to represent whether there's a consensus or not since I'm one of the designers of Ripple. But the important thing, at least in my opinion, is that there is no "secret sauce".
The software is open source. People are free to modify it however they please. We run the exact same software that we make available on our public servers and our validators. Others are free to run validators and they do so.
As it happens, much of the network infrastructure is run by us today. But we are more than happy to turn that over to others who are willing to do it.
Why do you care if something is decentralized? The main reason is usually that you don't want the users of the system to be forced to accept changes made by an owner/operator of the system whose interest may be averse to them. Ripple is decentralized in this sense.
For example, eBay is not decentralized. They don't warehouse their goods. But if eBay the company says no auctions of adult merchandise, then there will be no such auctions. It wouldn't matter if every user disagreed with the policy. Their only recourse would be to re-create what eBay had done, that is, to themselves implement eBay's secret sauce.
By contrast, Ripple has no secret sauce. Anyone can run their own servers. If we make changes people don't like, nothing requires them to run the code with those changes. If Ripple disappeared and users of the ledger wanted it to continue, nothing would stop them from continuing it.
That's like saying the internet is associated with illegal drug distribution because sometimes people buy drugs over it. It's true, but not representative. That's not how most reasonable people would summarize it.
That's not how most reasonable people would summarize it.
Only because a reasonable person would choose a more subjective statement, to convey the full breadth of depravity a visitor could expect to find on 4chan.
I mean, you've also got the gore pics, the incitements to racial and political violence, the fucked-up hentai, the homophobia, the raids on children's games, and the incessant insistence that everyone kill themselves.
Or they might not take it so seriously, and describe it mostly as a bunch of bored immature people trying to blow off steam and entertain themselves and each other. And they take it too far somewhat frequently.
But maybe people at your middle school were more mature than at mine, and never tried to gross each other out by tricking them into checking out this really cool site called goatse.
Since when is it? If there is one thing that will get you banned from 4chan it is posting or requesting child pornography. I am not a fan of much of the content on that website, but linking them to child pornography looks like a smear job.
How many arrests have happened because of CP posted on, say, Facebook? Or on Reddit? Is there any proof that CP is more likely to be posted on the 4chan imageboard than anywhere else on the Internet? Do you think the owners of 4chan somehow encourage the posting of CP?
Literally the first discussion I had with a friend who used 4chan, a decade or so ago, was about how people posted lots of child porn on /b/, but it typically got removed.
It doesn’t matter who encourages what. The mods obviously don’t like it, but somehow 4chan spent years attracting tons of people who love to post child porn.
It's just as possible to post CP on any other web forum that allows images to be uploaded. Uploading illegal content has always been a rule on 4chan and has always lead to a rapid ban and report, attempting to pin 4chan as being complicit in spreading CP is a baseless smear.
> Good day, I've received word from the VAC team that this is intentional and not open for discussion on Github.
> In general VAC issues are not handled on Github in any capacity and further issue reports on this may result in being banned from the Valve Software issue trackers.
This is not the way to address a paying customer. These people truly are a bunch of clowns.
I was drinking too much of it, it became a problem - tolerance, withdrawal, messed up sleep cycles. Also I've read that it stresses adrenal glands and may cause cortisol issues.
Bottomline is - I want a sustainable lifestyle, and with coffee it became unsustainable.
This year I've learned that to achieve my goals I have to learn to think long term, treat it as a marathon, not a sprint. From a big picture point of view, steady, measured, consistent pace is better than short term highs followed by inevitable lows.
Tl;dr? This is word salad and isn’t saying anything other than “Sam Altman shouldn’t speak about this because he isn’t a sociologist”. Where is the author’s rebuttal?
Pardon my ignorance, but isn’t that what a blockchain is?