Towards a design philosophy for interoperable blockchain systems | Hacker News Reader

Towards a design philosophy for interoperable blockchain systems

blog.acolyer.org

45 pointsgodelmachine22 comments

This has gone beyond silly and into irresponsible territory. Not only is this a tremendous amount of overhead to build on top of already extremely wasteful blockchain systems, but building a legal-trust-based distributed-transaction network on top of multiple blockchain systems would just immediately discard what actual benefits there are to using a blockchain. And if you do work hard and come up with a metablockchain system to record your cross-blockchain transactions, you still have to interact with the real world at some point, and that will always be the weak link. Building layers on layers of provable tech doesn't solve the real world problem of "how do you trust your business partners?" We have centuries of governmental and legal infrastructure built to solve that problem, and you will never be able to replace that layer so long as humans and human concerns are involved.

Not sure I understand your point.

The resilience, usefulness, and value of a system often isn' its elegance but its adaption. A decentralized trust system IS immensely valuable if it can be done because it allows for a lot of transactions that right now falls between chairs in the digital space.

A lot of the critique of the blockchain is based on the belief that digital allows for abundance (copy paste) and that that is the value of digital. But the reality is that there is plenty of value in scarcity ESPECIALLY in the digital space as it opens up for establishing a unique digital footprint which itself has a lot of value.

As an example, you can't easily exchange a piece of music with a game asset. Or an ebook with a digital pokemon card as there is no medium for the transaction. In other words, a decentralized trust-based system allows, for example, for a second-hand market for among other things digital assets. Or put another way a decentralized blockchain based trust system allows for more fluidity in the market and allow for an ever-increasing level of sophisticated trades.

Our legal infrastructure is built for a non-digital reality, even governments would be interested in adopting the blockchain to allow them to implement regulation in the digital space too.

So I don't think it's silly at all, in fact, it feels a little bit like we are reliving the birth of the internet again when it comes to peoples opinions about it.

> there is no medium for the transaction

Yes there is. They're called Dollars.

Thats not a medium but an asset and that asset requires a centralized system to be recognized. I want to be able to exchange non-monetary digital assets. The coming generations will adopt it without these discussions so i am glad someone is laying the groundwork.

> I want to be able to exchange non-monetary digital assets

Why?

Look in the other comment.

> In other words, a decentralized trust-based system allows, for example, for a second-hand market for among other things digital assets.

This sounds like you're trying to use blockchain to invent artificial scarcity for "digital goods." The only possible benefit I see from that is letting copyright owners preserve their current business models rather than adapt to the reality that bits are freely and easily copyable.

Why would we want that?

Because it allow for value creation in s digital space. If i spend two months in a game getting some asset i would like that to be recognized so that i could sell or buy that unique item.

Its not about copyright as much as its about trust in the transaction between two seemingly unrelated digital assets. It allows me to trust that i am getting what i actually paid for and not a knockoff.

Watching something like fortnite makes it obvious that there is value in digital scarcity.

The Chainlink project addresses many of these issues. https://link.smartcontract.com/whitepaper

Won't this mean that if you poison one Blockchain with child porn (or whatever) you'll poison all of them?

The use case for this is what?

I believe anything that uses blockchain. Use cases can range from record keeping to tracking data or flow of transactions. It can also span across multiple and diverse industries like healthcare, transportation and logistics, government welfare benefits distribution et al maybe even voting.

> Use cases can range from record keeping

I am told that an old-style SQL database can do that just fine. With a lot less overhead.

Blockchain is an open distributed ledger protocol. I don't see how that fits with SQL?

Am I missing something?

The question is exactly what does a blockchain get you for record keeping that overrides the many downsides. You can even have a central entity maintain their own database and provide a stream of edits to it for others to replicate if they want to prove that records are being kept accurately, without having to solve the issues a blockchain solves.

The "open distributed" part comes at a tremendous cost. A Bitcoin-style blockchain is a distributed database where you can't trust any of the other nodes, so you need a consensus mechanism that provides hard financial incentives for the majority to agree quickly. Proof-of-work systems like Bitcoin and Ethereum solve this by having miner nodes consuming energy and transaction parties paying them for validating transactions. Because the miners must get paid increasingly much as competition amongst them increases, transactions won't be getting any cheaper.

Some types of data are valuable enough to pay miners to validate and store the transactions, but usually it doesn't. To take one of your examples: why should government welfare benefits data be stored on a blockchain? Does it make any sense for a local government to reward foreign miners for storing their data on a global blockchain? In this instance, a replicated SQL database seems much more sensible.

(You might say that a blockchain without proof-of-work mining can also solve this -- but then you have to ask what is the essential difference between a blockchain where you implicitly trust some parties, and a traditional distributed database? Why do it the hard way when you've already compromised on the decentralized part?)

Exactly. All that I would add to that is:

1) you can add hashes etc to a database to verify data integrity. The cost is minimal compared to a distributed consensus mechanism. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_tree

2) Consensus mechanisms among untrusted parties open you to the infamous "51% attack" which should disqualify this design for much government data. But if you only allow trusted parties, why bother with proof of work at all?

I gave a talk in November at GOTO Berlin about why a globally consistent transactional database is a better fit for most distributed ledger applications than a blockchain.

If you are interested in the relational database approach, the middle of the talk (and the associated example code) might be a fun place to start. https://blog.fauna.com/talk-video-build-a-serverless-distrib...

The biggest problem with current blockchain implementations is the excessively low block size because of a irrational fear of centralisation yet mining profit just for bitcoin today is in the billions which is high enough to equip thousands of datacenters every year with hardware that can process 10GB blocks or even larger.

Visa processes 50000 transactions per second. Imagine each of them of them requires a single byte to store through black magic. If you do the math you will realise that 50kb per second over 10 minutes is 30 megabytes per block. 2MB blocks are not even remotely enough.

Not much really. Blockchains are a cool solution to a very specific problem. Trying to use them for everything as a general solution, as the author suggests, is not very practical.

For a new pump & dump scheme

Interledger and other such protocols are designed to facilitate exchanges across distributed ledger networks. The underlying whitepaper this article is based on mentions Interledger in a few places as a promising direction for some components of inter-ledger-transactions. In my view, Interledger/ILP is an elegant and simple protocol. I didn't glean (from only a cursory skim) what the paper finds is lacking in ILP?

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