Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

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> How can Ethereum be decentralized if they can so easily keep changing it?

The development of crypto has really demonstrated an institutional inertia to moving away from the blessed official implementation. Tons of BTC forks were tried and failed, and almost all coins die when development stops than see their clients forked.

A lot of it, I imagine, has to do with... trust. That magical thing crypto users keep trying to keep decentralized. But when development of the currency is centralized... and at the end of the day, someone is the owner of the git repo... you can't decentralize the implementation of the currency.

So what we see instead is enthusiasts putting their faith and trust in the sense of the developers of their chosen coin pretty much to the bitter end. You can fork these currencies - like Bitcoin Cash succeeded in doing for the most part - but you won't steal their mindshare or userbase to any major degree. They will stick to the original client or see that particular chain abandoned entirely.

Doge and so many other coins died to negligent or exploitative developers and whomever that someone is thats proposing to take over is an unknown, at least less trusted quantity. So most would jump ship than take the chance, so coins either stay under one development process or die completely with no real middle ground.

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm This paper is ever important when trying to come up with technical solutions to societal organization.

Oh this is the article about feminist organizations? Yes, that was a fantastic read, and I always use it when I want to argue against flat organizations, it's very compelling.

Strange how things have changed and yet stayed the same. From the universalities of power struggle, to problems like 'printing press belongs to husband' depriving the 'movement'.

I am shocked at how true that rings even though my circumstances are so different from hers. Thank you for linking!

Fascinating reading. Thank you for this article!

>Doge

Isn't this an odd example to use since it was created to be a parody of cryptocurrency, or did I mix up my crypto-history?

And still has a $280 million cap which isn't bad considering. I'll consider the crypto bubble done when parody currencies are not in the tens of millions.

Market cap is not a valid measure of success.

If I issue 100 trillion “runeks”-tokens, and sell you one for one cent, this crypto will have a “market cap” of 1 trillion. But that doesn’t mean it’s either useful or successful.

Your example shows there’s something wrong with using market cap to measure the success of cryptocurrencies, not that Dogecoin is successful.

I've seen several people accept it as the preferred method.

You are spot on, until...

The Goldilocks Zone.

Or shall we call it The Goldiblocks Zone?

Most projects will be by successful leaders and enthusiasts, until one of these experiments will hit the perfect combination of factors, and gain world traction.

Think of the crypto industry as AI training, most is pure junk, until a regression is fit.

Grandparent had a good point:

TCP/IP were the right approach, and the internet grew rapidly in a big bang.

Personally, I think The Goldiblocks Zone won't be blockchain at all, it'll be decentralization.

We've seen sites like D.Tube grow 2,000,000% because there is NO pay-to-play scams, you just use it and it just works.

They, and other sites, including the Internet Archive (top 300 in world), use GUN for decentralization. Ethereum makes the mistake in assuming every site needs to operate like a bank, but people hardly use banking websites compared to YouTube or Reddit.

The best way to cut 99% of power out of Ethereum is to just make it a decentralized compute platform, not some pay-to-play blockchain. Then you can really scale up.

As a comparison, for instance, a P2P version of Reddit (notabug.io) can handle 1000X the throughput as Bitcoin on only $99 worth of networking hardware.

The efficiency gains here are economical, but also scalable. Neither PoS or PoW will ever be able to fine-tune for that.

Except without a proofing algorithm your decentralized social network or reddit or video platform doesn't need the proofing algorithms which was the whole innovation of cryptocurrencies and what blockchains are.

Otherwise you just use a torrent network or IPFS as your decentralization store.

I do think there is a lot of potential there, especially with how ipfs-js and webtorrent are getting to where you can have users transparently seeding and reinforcing the network in the browser. Its going to open up a lot of alternatives to big dumb data centers storing exabytes of cat videos.

> Ethereum makes the mistake in assuming every site needs to operate like a bank, but people hardly use banking websites compared to YouTube or Reddit.

Strawman. There is a time and place for strong security guarantees, nobody said social networks and media hosting should be done on the same network you use to transact money with.

Maybe you'd be interested in EOS, Stellar and other transparent blockchain platforms? They make the same observation you do, not everyone needs to have complete control over everything they do online if that means every action has a cost, sometimes only having auditability is fine.

> nobody said social networks and media hosting should be done on the same network you use to transact money with

It's a strong consequence of the 0,1,N rule. The correct number of networks is clearly not "zero", and Metcalfe's Law ensures N networks are worse than N-1 networks with the same nodes in, so you get one network at the limit.

Once upon a time I'd have called it "the Internet" but that's really redundant at this point, just call it "the Network" and have done with it. One network, for everything, for everyone, for ever.

This isn't even a new idea, the Bell company couldn't build a single telephone network across the continental US until a better electrical repeater technology existed (today we barely even think of this problem because the transistor is so ubiquitous its original purpose becomes invisible) but they insisted it was a single network anyway, because that's very obviously what you actually want even if you still haven't invented the technology to do it.

Metcalfe's law is only one of the forces applicable. People also care about sovereignty, which is why N > 1 is most likely.

This is also why federation is a thing. You can have a single "network" with arbitrarily many "services" and not have smaller services destroyed by Metcalfe's law because they're part of the same network.

The great thing about all this smart-contract stuff is that we're not limited to simplistic abstractions anymore. Rather than a linear approach, I think what's going to succeed is a "tree" of networks, with weaker ones committing hashes at regular checkpoints to stronger, more expensive chains (sort of a sparse Merkle tree[1]). This is already the approach taken by scaling solutions such as Thunderella[2] or sharding proposals[3]. This allows a more organic hierarchy between secure and fast networks.

e.g.: Imagine a fast but slightly centralized Twitter chain (only 21 validators let's say), committing hashes of every day of tweets to a decentralized public blockchain.

I'm not 100% sure whether that tweet posted by my friend 5 minutes ago is legitimate, but I don't need to be 100% certain to answer them and carry on the casual conservation. I can verify though, that the Trump tweet bordering on declaration of war posted 24h ago is indeed real, because the hash of the whole day of tweets was committed to a strong blockchain, and the author of the tweet didn't post any subsequent objection to it. I can proceed to hide in my bunker, confident in my choice.

[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_documentation#Merkle_Tre...

[2]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/913.pdf

[3]: https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQs#what-mig...

>Think of the crypto industry as AI training, most is pure junk, until a regression is fit.

This is perfect description. Best sentence I've read today.

Is there anything worth looking at on d.tube? They've done a good job of cloning the interface but what kind of content do you get? Do they have music on there and do they circumvent copyright takedowns by being decentralised?

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