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> but a blockchain-based service with hosted nodes is better than a federated service

...and a federated service is better than a handful of silos controlling the network.

So if the blockchain is supported by the mining of many small miners, it's a decentralized dream. But if there are a handful of miners validating the majority of transactions, then it ends up smelling a lot like the handful of silos situation. Not exactly the same but very similar.

Miners cannot control your eyes. You can choose any record as your source of truth. If miners produce a good one, look at that one. If they produce a bad one, look somewhere else.

This sounds great but it is a dramatic misunderstanding of the real problem. Sure, you can personally decide you don't like a particular fork. However, the value of your position is not determined by you, it is determined by the community and their overall choice.

Bitcoin forking is dangerous. If it goes bad and the community becomes overly fragmented then everyone loses. The strength of a position in Bitcoin is a combination of many factors, but the most important ones are related to the size of the community, its relative stability as a crypto coin, and the relative ubiquity of it.

> Proof-of-work creates an illusion of dependence on blockchain miners.

How is proof-of-work's dependence on miners an illusion? Seems like a fundamental property of proof-of-work that it depends solely on the consensus of miners.

Miners only mine to gain more bitcoins. The market determines what bitcoins are. The market can decide to treat a different historical record with different rules as the ledger for bitcoins. This is much easier in proof-of-stake systems. You can't destroy a bad miner's mining equipment, but you can destroy a bad validator's deposit, which removes them from the system.

> you can destroy a bad validator's deposit

And how does this happen? By a consensus of miners?

If I, as an individual, were to find reason to distrust a entity who makes up the majority of mining transactions, how likely is it that I will be able to use the main blockchain ever again?

Yes, by a consensus of miners, or by users choosing a new set of miners. The "main blockchain" is not a decision of the miners. It's a decision of the people. If everyone agrees that current miners are behaving badly in a proof-of-stake system, they can just choose new miners.

OK, I'll bite, with a serious, practical question -- how would I do that this week?

Please assume that I have 100 BTC at a particular address or small set of addresses, and I don't like the Chinese mining consortia.

How do I actually move my value to a new chain that 1) excludes those mining consortia, 2) preserves my stored value, and 3) preserves my ability to transact with any other valid BTC address? How can I get this done by next week?

Fork Bitcoin to change the rules to exclude those miners, either by switching to proof-of-stake or just changing the proof-of-work hashing algorithm. Like this: https://github.com/bitcoinclassic/bitcoinclassic/pull/6

As I stated elsewhere, this is impractical for Bitcoin because the value of the currency would tank. For applications like the one in this article that use general purpose blockchains, forking is very practical.

OK, so the fork would accomplish goal #1, but not #2 or #3. I can have my own brand new BTCv2, but it has no value, unless I can get the majority of other BTC people to come over, and if a serious movement starts, the value on both chains tanks and needs to be rebuilt by trust, and the assumption that no one else tries the same thing.

Even when the point of the chain is not to store value, but just data, it seems that we're already losing the ability to track all the old data. Sure I extract a set of the stuff I want and carry on with the new fork, but no one else comes along, their data is lost, so they don't come along. If all I care about is a close network of friends, or perhaps an internal company data store, then fine, but how does one cleanly tear off a chunk of a network that looks like the graph of FB or Twitter? Am I missing something here?

If you have a good reason to switch blockchains, the developers of the clients users actually use should have a good reason to support the switch. If you can't convince people to change, you're stuck with the status quo. That's just a fact of life, not a flaw of blockchains.

> Sure I extract a set of the stuff I want and carry on with the new fork, but no one else comes along, their data is lost, so they don't come along.

That's not how it works. When you fork, you typically bring the entire history with you. It's the new data after the fork that causes problems. If people don't switch or publish to both, you're stuck.

> Fork Bitcoin

I love it when people say this shit. Ok, I'll just go fork Bitcoin. Unless I'm not a programmer. And I sure hope that somebody else follows me into my fork. Only a group of major (powerful) market players will have the ability to threaten to fork. And even then, they probably won't, for the exact reason you stated: a fracture in the currency would kill people's confidence in the currency and tank its value.

It's just an illustration. I think there will be far more valuable blockchain applications than digital gold, and those will be easy to fork.

And who is 'everyone'? Who decides who the next iteration of 'everyone' is?

The majority of participants in the Bitcoin network? Or the majority of its computing power?

This is a major worrying part about Bitcoin. Would it be really that difficult for a nation-state level player to buy enough capacity on the network to take it over?

Only if they were not competing against other nation-states

> Proof-of-work creates an illusion of dependence on blockchain miners.

PoW depends on blockchain miners by definition and the Bitcoin experience shows that at the end you have a concentration of power.

> With that said, it's still unclear whether blockchains are the right choice for publishing.

It is very clear that blockchains ARE NOT the right choice for publishing, its limitations for that purpose are based on strong computer science principles on distributed systems, consensus and network speed.

Technological frontiers are no place for dogma. Sure, blockchains probably aren't a good choice for publishing, but a culture that constrains people's technology choices is incompatible with progress.

This is not dogma but computer science research, you need to find the right tools for the right problem.

BTW one of my companies is focused in blockchain, cryptocurrencies, etc and I can't believe the level of hype experienced there. For example, I read about the DAO Ethereum crowdsale but we experience serious technical issues with Ethereum that clash with that hype.

Your last point is important-- I think too many people in the distributed systems / decentralization community rush to block chain as the one hammer to pound every nail. It's not. It's a solution to a very specific set of consensus problems but outside that it's not the best thing.

> An IPFS-based Twitter is probably a better way to start

Did you see the AKASHA discussion, last week?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11678810

Intel recently unveiled PoET - proof of elapsed time - in Sawtooth Lake. https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html

What part isn't true, specifically? We are dependent on blockchain miners, because without them our transactions don't get accepted. Moreover we have a couple established big players that control the market and no clear way for them to get disrupted, save abandoning Bitcoin entirely.

Blockchains are much more than receipt paper. Receipt paper is a superfluous byproduct. The blockchain is the system of record.

This is untrue: "Because blockchain is consensual, after a certain point of centralization, the rules of the system depend on very few users."

If a blockchain has rules that don't meet my needs, I can choose a different blockchain. If I adopt a blockchain that changes its rules to be undesirable, I can take the history I care about and move it to another blockchain.

This argument depends on proof-of-stake. Some people think proof-of-work blockchains are the only useful ones, but I disagree. It's also a boring debate to have, so I won't be doing that here.

> If a blockchain has rules that don't meet my needs, I can choose a different blockchain.

Had this happened with Bitcoin? I think I heard there are some quite major disagreements (something about block sizes and stuff) and there are a lot of users that aren't happy. I don't remember hearing them just "well, whatever" and forking off.

Bitcoin is a special case because it's only really intended to be used as a ledger for bitcoins. Currencies are a collective delusion: they're valuable because other people think they are valuable. Any dispute over what the source of truth is for a currency's ledger strains that delusion, possibly to the breaking point. The value of the currency would suffer, which would defeat the purpose of a fork.

Ethereum is a general purpose blockchain. Forking it could hurt the value of ether, but for many applications, the value of ether doesn't matter. Moving a blockchain-based Twitter from one fork to another is relatively easy and consequence-free.

> Moving a blockchain-based Twitter from one fork to another is relatively easy and consequence-free.

I'm not sure it's really consequence-free. It's essentially a netsplit, where the forking party lose connectivity with everyone who's left. Consider the case where Twitter (the centralized one) is suddenly falling apart over some issue into two distinct non-interoperating services. Technically - sure - it's a no-brainer, but socially it feels quite complicated to me.

(I guess, this would work if the app would be designed to use multiple blockchains. I need to give it some thought.)

You got it. Push a new client that supports both chains to users with enough time before the switch for people to upgrade.

Technical curiosity---if I use such a client, and two block chains disagree (on, say, some history that affects the current operation), then won't I end up choosing and sticking one?

Yep! At that point, the problem isn't a blockchain-specific one, it's a more general problem of reconciling conflicting truths. A common, trivial solution is to rank sources of truth.

What's the benefit of being 'completely decentralized', if the individual joining the network still needs to decide which network and set of rules to trust? Answer: none, you've just pushed the question of trust / centralization to that of choosing the particular fork you want to use.

> Currencies are a collective delusion: they're valuable because other people think they are valuable.

This is not true of most currencies. Most currencies are valuable because governments force you to pay them on threat of imprisonment. Bitcoin does not have this feature and therefore, yes, it's hard to see what its fundamental value is.

You can fork the blockchain, sure. But unless the majority of users do so, as well, the resulting fork is useless if you actually want to be able to send and receive money.

Now, banks and such will be some of the biggest users; and your average Joe won't even understand what the problem is with trusting them with the blockchain. So... good luck with getting that consensus.

If you're not happy with Facebook you can create your own social network.

One idea I had was if it is possible to somehow have all the miners "guessing" where the next block is going to be signed. A correct guess would net a bit of the transaction fee. Huge server farms concentrated in an area would therefore lose out, because everyone would guess that location.

The biggest difficulty would be accurately identifying where the signature came from, but with clever timing mechanisms, it might be possible given the latency of light. I haven't thought about it much, but maybe require the current time be included in what gets hashed. Anyone cheating by using a future time could be caught by looking for missing transactions in that time space.

I believe Ethereum does something like this:

"The Casper protocol is intended to offer stronger finality guarantees than proof of work. First, there is a standard definition of “total economic finality”: it takes place when 2/3 of all validators make maximum-odds bets that a given block or state will be finalized. This condition offers very strong incentives for validators to never try to collude to revert the block: once validators make such maximum-odds bets, in any blockchain where that block or state is not present, the validators lose their entire deposits. As Vlad Zamfir put it, imagine a version of proof of work where if you participate in a 51% attack your mining hardware burns down."

https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/05/09/on-settlement-finality/