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Blockchain at Berkeley

blockchain.berkeley.edu

180 pointsca98am7958 comments

There's a lot of pessimism in the comments here, and I feel like I'm the only one interested in where this will go. I can identify with what some of you are saying, but it is still interesting regardless. Distributed tech has some of the most fascinating projects right now. Here's a few examples:

Distributed file storage: Sia [1] and Storj [2] are both using blockchain tech to form a dropbox-like atmosphere where you can rent space for as little as 2c/GB. Renters can rent out their extra storage, while miners can mine and sell their units or use them on file storage to pay rent for their data.

Decentralized Content Platform: Steem-it. Very interesting concept here about compensating content creators with the currency that the platform surrounds. It bears somewhat of a resemblance to Reddit. [3]

Private yet fungible cryptocurrency: Monero (XMR) is a cryptocurrency on the rise that has privacy baked in, with the ability to opt-in to making your transaction public. It uses Ring Confidential Transactions [4] to mix the transactions and reduce the chances of the participants being identified to an almost 0 chance. It is ASIC resistant [5], has solid governance and dev team, and can even be used on hardware wallets like Tresor with a bit of hacking [6].

[1] - https://www.sia.tech/whitepaper.pdf

[2] - https://storj.io/storj.pdf

[3] - https://steemit.com/steemit/@panenka/what-is-steemit-and-how...

[4] - https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1098.pdf

[5] - https://monero.stackexchange.com/a/138

[6] - https://forum.getmonero.org/4/academic-and-technical/2495/ex...

Disclosure: There could be some bias, because I'm long on all of these except Storj, so I'm including sources that hopefully will allow you to make your own decision without me being preachy.

I like the concept of Sia but wouldn't the coin value be 1) loosely tied to Dropbox et al storage costs and 2) deflationary over time as storage costs are continually decreasing?

I'm pessimistic. Bitcoin's main use case is purchasing drugs, gambling, laundering and ransomware payments. Remittances and micropayment are a far distant second. Monero's main use case is even better money laundering than Bitcoin.

SIA and Storj's first users, if ever adopted, will be criminals, aka Pedophiles looking to store and share CP without fear of getting caught. I'm going to guess no one uploading anything legitimate is going to use Sia and Storj over AWS, Dropbox and Box.

I think blockchain technologies have the potential to disrupt whole industries and I'm glad to see that students at world renowned universities are backing it up. There's a student group from MIT that works on something mysterious related to litecoin: http://litecoin.mit.edu

Interestingly enough, it is launching when BIP148 activates for Bitcoin.

Sounds to me like an easy way to pump the price of LTC by using their university's name and creating hype.

'Blockchain' is literally the least interesting part of cryptocurrencies and their applications. its a boring flat file structure that is an artifact of needing many clients independently deriving a shared ledger, nothing more and nothing less. the interesting part is how you can bootstrap issuance of a new asset by incentivizing participants to assist in maintaining a specified computer network in exchange for cryptographically-{verifiable|enforced} units.

My layman understanding is that blockchain is literally singly linked list, except of "nextNode" you have "parentNode" pointer (which actually checks that parent is valid for "parenting" :)

The important part is how blocks get added over network, and decentralized consensus of the addition. (Well, socioeconomic phenomenon of adding monetary value to all that jazz is pretty cool too!)

There's a bit more to it. Proof of work hashing and ledger consensus rules and difficulty targets and fee schedules and forks.

It's still all standard bachelor's degree algorithms, and I agree with the gp that it's not the interesting part. The interesting part is using these algorithms for social consensus on value.

This. Seriously I was talking to a neighbor just the other day about how the most interesting aspect is the application!

I disagree those are essential. Federated chains like Elements Alpha are also considered block chains but lack many of those properties. I think it really is the case that a "block chain" is merely a singly linked list with hash linkages.

But that's just an hash chain, it has existed for longer than the blockchain. For example, all digital invoices in my country are hash-chained, to prevent the merchant from swapping one for another, and this standard was published before Bitcoin.

That sounds interesting. What is the standard called? I'd love to read more about it.

SAF-T: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAF-T

It's not that special, each invoice gets assigned as hash of (invoice number + total amount + date of emission + hash of previous invoice). Besides having to send that XML file to the IRS each month with all the issued invoices, the hash also gets printed on the invoice given to the client (paper or PDF), so it gets tricky to change the past without getting caught.

I don't disagree with anything you said. Even generously most of the "blockchain" hype is an excuse for cryptography that has already existed without application for some time.

It's more of a tree with single root and a function returning the longest tip by some distance method. Bitcoin uses amount of work proved as the distance. Bitcoin ignores other tips unless/until one of them becomes longer than the current tip but some systems like Ethereum leverage stagnant branches for their length function.

But yes, dynamic-membership multi-party signature schemes and their use for creating permissionless systems is the real innovation.

Straight question for the uninformed (me):

Do you (or anyone else) have a technical reference for differences between the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain length function?

Bitcoin's method is detailed in Satoshi's classic paper:

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Ethereum uses a variant of the GHOST algorithm, which was introduced in the paper Accelerating Bitcoin’s Transaction Processing: Fast Money Grows on Trees, Not Chains.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf

The Ethereum white paper mentions how they modified it:

https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper#modified-g...

Full detail is in their infamously difficult Yellow Paper:

https://github.com/ethereum/yellowpaper

Thank you for all those links!

I had some idea about the Bitcoin blockchain - also succinctly summarized by @tylerswift.

But the Ethereum material is all new to me. It at least sounds more interesting than "the least interesting".

You call it boring, others call it the most important invention in the last 500 years:

https://hackernoon.com/why-everyone-missed-the-most-importan...

I'm a huge fan of cryptocurrencies and related decentralized technologies, but that is immaterial to the fact that anyone who acts obsessively focused on the blockchain data structure is missing an appreciation of what the actual underlying innovation is - please re-read my previous comment, it seems clear you didn't spend time thinking about the actual words I wrote.

> the interesting part is how you can bootstrap issuance of a new asset by incentivizing participants to assist in maintaining a specified computer network in exchange for cryptographically-{verifiable|enforced} units.

Hi! Blockchain at Berkeley executive here, we totally agree with you, and with all the buzzwords being thrown around these days, skepticism is understandable.

At the end of the day, we see blockchain as a general term. We have humble roots as the Bitcoin Association of Berkeley, but we wanted something agnostic and recognizable for the future, so we ended up with this. Sure, blockchains are just a data structure but the cryptographically enforced units wouldn't exist if it weren't for blockchain, or something like it (IOTA Tangle). I can assure you that the people here are only interested in the real stuff. :)

Some of the things we do here are related to teaching ([1]), Ethereum Dapp Development, and whitepaper talks. [2]

[1] https://blockchain.berkeley.edu/decal [2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5sgoRfoSp3jeX4DEqKLwKg

More important than the Internet? More important than computers? More important than electricity? That's ridiculous.

> More important than the Internet? More important than computers? More important than electricity? That's ridiculous. reply

its given, we've passed those stage already

I don't think you can really split one from the other, the blockchain and its surrounding algorithms is how "you can bootstrap issuance of a new asset by incentivizing participants to assist in maintaining a specified computer network in exchange for cryptographically-{verifiable|enforced} units".

I find the blockchain technology very interesting because it solves a very hard problem in an inventive way and at the same time once you hear how it works it sounds almost obvious. All the individual parts have been known for ages but they're combined in an innovative way.

I'm personally not convinced by the "political" side of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies but on the technical side it's one of the most inspiring piece of software in the past decade IMO.

If you talk about the general idea of an append-only distributed database with no central point of control, I agree with you.

However the proof-of-work/auto-adjusting-difficulty method of asserting truth still seems horrible to me from a technical perspective.

Politically, I don't want to live in a world where this principle catches on and an ever-growing % of energy production would be spend on solving meaningless math problems.

Yeah the proof of work is probably the less elegant aspect of it all, I can agree with that. But theoretically you could replace by any other function that's difficult to compute but easy to verify. Maybe it's just a solution in search for a problem.

I don't understand how that would fix proof of work. The whole point is that the voting power is proportional to how much computational power you are willing to burn away, in order to protect against Sybil attacks.

I was thinking that eventually we may discover a proof of work that would actually compute something useful instead of burning electricity away. One can hope at least.

Ethereum

I'm not savvy in the technology, but are the contracts actually executed as part of mining?

Recommend you check out Proof-of-Stake. It solves the problem of power wastage. ;)

But many people (including those who are actively developing it) aren't even sure if Proof-of-Stake is even fully possible.

As far as I know there are still some pretty big holes in PoS that still need to be filled in.

That requires solving the 'nothing at stake' problem. I recall reading some proposed solutions, but they were complicated.

If anything is great about proof-of-work, it's how simple it is.

Sorry, but I don't think you understand what a public blockchain is and the improvements/innovations that it requires to sustain a higher volume with faster blocks creation. This is connected to what you said about issuing tokens: last week Status.im (shameless plug: security audited by my company) related transactions caused a DDoS over the Ethereum network, which it means that we need to improve the current blockchains to support the kind of innovations you like.

On the other hand, lowering the barrier for issuing equity or app coins make creating scams or tempting people to run with a lot of money trivial. A recent Fred Wilson's post[1] about this makes the point very clear.

Lastly, not everything can be descentralized because you are challenging computation limitations and/or you need oracles outside the network that are the weakest point of the whole system.

[1] Buyer Beware - VC Fred Wilson on ICOs https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6h7d0j/buyer_bewa...

Well, that is your opinion. I personally think that all public cryptocurrencies are eventually worth precisely zero because of the of the nature of probabilistic data loss due to hardware failure or otherwise, and the only thing holding them up is the honeymoon phase of the mining gold rushes. Blockchain (and associated distributed consensus systems) is interesting, though, for no-trust distributed workflows.

The whole "cryptocurrencies are lame, but blockchain is worthwhile" argument is so dumb. Any blockchain could be used as cryptocurrency or a distributed consensus system

Honestly, it just looks like a group of students piggybacking on Berkeley's reputation to make some money doing blockchain consulting

Knowing student groups, it's not about making money, but a few smart undergrads showing other undergrads emerging fields and letting them get some hands-on experience.

A group like this has a DeCal (a student-led university-credit course), events, speakers, and probably a selected group that works on club leadership and consulting.

It's definitely a mix of the two, speaking from experience.

Experience with this club, or experience with some other random club?

Hi there, I am one of the executives of Blockchain at Berkeley. Happy to see we're getting some attention on here! I would love to clear some things up about what we do. :)

We're a student group (mostly undergraduate) that runs somewhat like a non-profit. We focus on all things related to cryptocurrency and decentralized tech (more simply put, blockchain - that's at least how the world sees it).

In the case of consulting, no one is actually pocketing money for themselves. While there is money involved, it is essentially a donation contract between us and our clients. Everything goes back towards the organization and the cause. We all work for free in that sense, and we reward the community with what we earn where we can.

What we do for consulting is mostly on the lines of Ethereum smart contract PoCs with front-ends. It's a lot of investment for a company to make their engineers go out and do this themselves, but not unreasonable for some students with a lot of motivation and decent programming knowledge to learn and build. We don't ask for much so companies are happy to work with the group of amazing students we have here to benefit the cause. ;)

Fundamentally, the whole thing is a learning experience for those who lead, those who consult, and even those who teach. Everyone who's a part of us at the end of the day is learning. We try to reach professional standards where we can - we love the personal development aspect that grew from so many people putting in their efforts to make the org a reality.

Blockchain at Berkeley does a few things beyond consulting - we run an undergraduate cryptocurrency course during the school year and post materials online (see blockchain.berkeley.edu/decal), we host events with well-known industry speakers and workshops for the public to join which can be found on Facebook, and we also teach executives about the technology in custom sessions. We're also working on an Ethereum Dapp course which will be offered Fall 2017 at UC Berkeley and will be recorded for the public with open sourced materials.

You could say we're just trying to demystify buzzwords for the world!

If you have questions or are interested in talking, you can ping me personally: akash@blockchain.berkeley.edu

Does anyone in your group receive ether or tokens from your work with Ethereum?

Tangential: is "blockchain" a Proper Noun? This page can't seem to decide.

I always thought this phenomenon came from journalists writing about blockchains not understanding that a blockchain is a data structuture and not a singular proper entity, but I give Berkeley more credit. So what's up?

Blockchain @ Berkeley is a student-led group, so maybe that's why.

blockchain is a concept. It can refer to the actual implementation seen in bitcoin, ethereum and others. Or it can refer more generally to the algorithmic backing of crypto-currencies.

Many elite schools have groups of students building organizations. Wake Forest has an organization advised founders of Storj and Tilt, as well as alums working at firms like Microsoft.

http://wakefintech.club/ https://articles.wakefintech.club/

I don't understand what this is. Is it a consulting company run by students? Is it normal to be able to use the name (and sub domain) of your school like this for a for-profit pursuit?

This doesn't seem to open in Firefox on OSX for me. Anyone else facing an issue?

The site runs abysmally for me (Firefox/Win10). It's on the verge of crashing my browser.

Ditto for me. Chrome on MacBook Pro is grinding to a halt.

Worked on Firefox 54.0 on macOS 10.2.5 for me. Though it was incredibly slow, taking 5-10 seconds to load for me. (And also just updated and Firefox 55.0 works too)

Berkeley undergrands have a special talent for building pretty websites that are terribly underperformant.

I say this with the utmost respect; I built a few of those as an undergrad too. :)

(And yes, it's obviously not just us Berkeley folks.)

Haha, thanks for the feedback. We're gonna redesign soon so we'll make sure it's performant next time. :)

May I suggest HTML? It's a revolutionary new technology developed by CERN that's accessible on virtually all web browsers.

That's not-invented-here at Berkeley.

How do I join the slack team?

You guys should checkout the one they did on iota the blockchainless cryptocurrency using direct acylic graph

Reply on news.ycombinator.com