Comment by marknadal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marknadal | Hacker News Reader

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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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