You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: Social Courtesies: the witless and pointless example
Not sure about the monero point, but quality of discussion in the blockchain scene doesnt seem very high, and its more played on poker game kind of interaction about probability, fake and bluff, and intimidation , rather than sound technical argument.
Kinda sad because blockchain have lot of potential for distributed applications.
Its really becoming like the movie "equity" :)
Its akways nice to read things from people like you still interested about technical side of things and real security issue, beyond hype and buisness model dogma.
You are not missing much anything interesting by not reading bct imo lol
BCT is now mostly guys with inadequate technical knowledge—a severe handicap in this arena.
I committed too many pointless tangents there though. Mea culpa.
Yeah but we have the serious problem that neither PoW nor PoS are capable of solving the power vacuum problem of politcs.
This problem is less accute for distributed applications, with the blockchain seen as distributed transactional database, or distributed computing, like chaos++ grid, as the validation of data can remain semi centralized like private blockchain, or validation rules for data can he hierachized more easily than with the problem of managing coins and assets on a single decentralized world wide network.
Data can be decentralized and compurational power distributed with semi centralized or hierachical authority.
The issue of trustlessness and decentralized authority is more accute for coins and assets or things with competing interest on the manipulation of assets.
With distributed application the authority can be hierachized on the blockchain with scripts specific to an application, and there is not necessarily the same degree of contention on the ownership of data like decentralized currencies.
In many cases, nodes can verify the validity of data without having to rely on central authority, which is mostly needed to solve double spend on coins, or transaction order, which can be less critical for many distributed application.
I suspect that “distributed applications” also have external impacts which can be gamed by centralized control over consensus validation and chain reorganizations (i.e. undo).
Thus, I disagree that centralization can work in any way, because power (vacuums) corrupts absolutely. This is why I am creating something entirely different from PoW and PoS. Until we solve the centralization problem of blockchains, then we are still stuck in a clusterfucked world where the Internet becomes some totalitarian variant of “Facebook and Google”.
If everyone has to re-validate all the data from the start of the blockchain, so that nobody has to trust the consensus validation, then nothing scales. I’ve been studying this issue for past couple of years.
Well it depends on the barriers to interactions between applications and smart contracts. I tend to think we always need a consensus total order, because thermodynamics tells us it is impossible to maintain a barrier and have a dynamic/resilient/evolving system. Interactions between partial orders can livelock or deadlock.
Many applications works being totally centralized, and private blockchain also find applications in certain domain.
Depend on cases, its clear there are cases where centralization can matter, but there is not that much in depth study on this for the moment. I didnt really find even much any well studied paper who delve into the issue of how blockchain can impact distributed application paradigm.
Everything can potentially dead lock or live lock, but need to have strategy to either recover from it, or decentralize enough to compartimentalize the locks, making timeouts, etc well there are still strategies to work around potential dead locks even if they cant be proven not to happen.
The case with coins like bitcoins are clearly the hardest case where order and decentralization and trustlessness are the most critical, but in many cases for many types of application, the validation of data can remain pseudo centralised with trusted nodes without it affect too much the way the application works.
Computation on pre validated / static data can still scale even if everyone has to validate the data. Like typical web database where the computation is more on treatment of static data, rather than inserting new data or transactions like with coins where all operation are about adding new data that require consensus for each operations.
For coins its more critical.
What does that mean? If it is pre-validated or static, then it means we are trusting that data to be correct as given.
It can’t scale if everyone has to re-validate the entire lineal dependent history of an unbounded future.
What does a block chain have to do with it then? The entire reason to need a block chain is because we require consensus synchronization on the lineage.