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Comment by turblety | Hacker News Reader

If you are using Skynet for your project, I believe you need to run a node, which will require downloading the 23GB [1] blockchain from sia.

I really hope these blockchain based projects can solve the sharding problem. These blockchains are getting so big.

[1] https://siastats.info/blockchain_size

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Its a myth that the whole chain is needed. Comes from BTC where you need the chain to recreate all transactions. It has zero practical use. If you would consider the current state of a blockchain to be "wrong" but everyone agreed to move forward anyway you may as well call it "correct" because by definition the majority decides what is right and what not in these systems. So you dont really need to validate the whole chain. All the splits and hard forks are well known and you can only agree or not use that particular chain. The accrual process of validating yourself is moot. Its not like you could find something new by running the exact same code thousands of other ran over that data before you.

Plenty newer DTLs have ditched the chain validation process completely and you can start at any point in time with the ledger state of that time and start going forward to the present. Whether that is years or seconds doesn't really matter. It all depend of whether you have an accentual use case for historical transaction data or not.

This is really important because second generation blockchains have way higher transaction throughput, integrated decentral exchanges (DEX) and other advanced feature that requires way more storage. Some already have reached uncompressed sizes of several TBs for the complete history.

See technical documentation for the XRPL https://xrpl.org/ledger-history.html

>second generation blockchains

Curious: beyond XRPL, what are examples of such blockchains?

I guess there is not really a definition. Some would say PoS chains is the second generation but its arguably worse than FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) and its first implementation in public blockchain came way after the XRPL (FBA) already existed.

There is Stellar which is kinda a re-implementation of the XRPL with many smaller changes but its also using a FBA.

There is Flare (only test net exists at time of writing) its the first Turing-complete Federated Byzantine Agreement blockchain. Kinda the ETH 3.0. but it a new project that just used the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) for code compatibility reasons.

Then there are DAG based "blockchains" but these are more experimental, as in no one really know if they "work" from a mathematical point of view. I would consider them to be the third generation if someone manages to fully implement it and run a public blockchain.

My cofounder has been working on an upgrade for Sia that switches the core consensus engine to 'utreexo', which uses an accumulator rather than an entire blockchain history to verify new blocks and transactions. This brings down the effective size of the chain for users to just a couple of megabytes for the same history that currently takes 23 GB.

It would be cool if you can implement a light node (just enough to download files) in a browser extension, so people browse Skynet directly.

Otherwise, if people mostly use web portals, then it's not really free and decentralized, as people are essentially at mercy of portals they use. In fact, if application code itself is served through a portal, it is less secure than normal web.

Note: Taek is the same user that the SiaSetup website (the main source of documentation about the project) is criticizing as "unstable project management". Be warned about this man before sinking any significant amount of personal time or money into this project. Source: https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet#banned

We've banned this account. Single-purpose accounts are not allowed on HN, and creating one just to stir up the community against a rival project or (worse) some person is a bad sign. Regardless of who's right in this, there's clearly a pre-existing agenda and probably an internecine conflict being imported to the community here, and that sort of campaign isn't in the spirit of this site.

What would be in the spirit of this site is open, thoughtful critique that explained what the problems or criticisms are so that readers could make up their minds for themselves. "Be warned about this man" is a long way down from that. Please don't do that here, and especially please don't create accounts to do it with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It’s a Software drama!

This is incorrect. You don't need to run a Sia node to develop and deploy apps on Skynet. https://sia.tech/docs/#skynet

The REST API you linked to requires a local node:

    curl -A "Sia-Agent" "localhost:9980/skynet/portals"

As I understand, there's also a public proxy https://siasky.net/. But being a single domain, it's not decentralized, is it?

So with Skynet, you can either do "easy" or "decentralized", but not "easy and decentralized", right?

That's the crazy thing about Skynet. You can do both "easy and decentralized".

For example, let's say you go to https://skyfeed.hns.siasky.net/ and you make an account (SkyFeed is a decentralized alternative to Twitter built on Skynet). You make some posts, follow some people, then siasky goes down.

So now you go to https://skyfeed.hns.skyportal.xyz/ - skyportal is another Skynet portal run by an independent party. When you log into Skyfeed, all of your previous activity is still visible. Your account and all of its information is hosted on the Sia network, which means siasky is nothing more than an access point, and you don't get any penalties as a user for switching access points.

Sorry, but this is not decentralized at all, as you are at mercy of siasky.net serving you the right code. If siasky.net is compromised it will serve you code which steals the account. This is strictly inferior to normal web, as you need to trust both the app developer and the portal code is served from.

Having multiple mirrors is NOT decentralization.

My criteria for "decentralized web" candidates are:

  * credentials are managed by a trusted component outside of controls of apps, let alone mirrors
  * content integrity is checked before it is used
  * switching between nodes happens automatically in 
    background, there should be no SPoF (i.e. if download 
    through node 1 fails client should automatically retry 
    from node 2 and so on).

I don't think you can achieve this without integrating with a browser.

We're closer than I think you give us credit. The only major component we're missing is that normal browsers don't have the ability to verify that the portal is serving you the right code - which is of course super important.

Once you have that though, the rest can be done within the webapp itself. Credentials are managed by a separate webapp like https://sky-id.hns.siasky.net/, and some apps already have built in failover to try other portals if one is not responding.

With the advent of utreexo, it's even possible to run full blockchain nodes inside of a webapp. Again you need an integrity check on the code served by the portal, but if you have that you can independently do everything else.

The only missing piece is a browser plugin or a dedicated browser that verifies that each piece of content you are served corresponds to the hash you are requesting. This is on the global roadmap, as well as automatic portal switching. The philosophy of the project is absolutely in line with your thinking.

Perhaps like the IPFS browser plugin?

That's fine, you can switch if necessary. Like a backup, you don't need decentralization 99.9% of the time, but the 0.1% of time when you need it, it can save your ass.

I agree! Ethereum is already to big and too expensive to use. I hold a lot but worry about both BTC and Ethereum. Normal people can no longer use either chain for everyday transactions and at this rate Ethereum will never work as a global computer. To me only Bitcoin Cash and Monero really have their use cases and code sussed out. Sia (and filecoin) work great but both have issues with their insentives, in Sia's case they issue too many coins and it's not profitable to host content.

ETH has already solved scalability with Zero Knowledge Proofs and Optimistic Rollups. Some dapps are clocking 2000 transactions per second. Also, ETH 2's initial beacon chain has launched and when ETH2 fully rolls out, there will be 64x that available on the network.

Please elaborate.

Also when will ETH2 roll out?

It's already out, but most people are still on the eth1 chain

I think you misunderstand the state that Eth2 is in. It's technically "released", but Eth2 cannot be used to transact. If you move money to Eth2, it must stay in the same wallet/address until more features are rolled out.

Everyone who uses Eth today is still on Eth1 because Eth2 is only good for having your coins sit there and accumulate interest.

And furthermore, it would be years until the actual ETH2 is usable, right?

No, they are making rapid progress on ETH2. The beacon chain is the root chain for the other 63 shards that will be launched. That is the chain that is currently running in parallel with the ETH1 chain.

See Vitalik's blog on rollups: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html

The official estimate[0] is 2022. Given the general track record of their development pace, I'd be surprised if it goes fully live before 2023.

[0]: https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/

It says shard chains ship in 2021. They are saying the ETH1 chain will be migrated to proof of stake in 2022.

You claim Sia issues too many coins. That is a myth. Inflation in 2021 will be no higher than 7%, declining every year after that. In case you are referring to the total supply, would it make you feel better to move the decimal to the left? Hosts have been saving and serving content since the launch of the Sia network years ago. It is profitable if done at scale. For more information, https://siastats.info/storage_pricing

Hmmm I would backtrack on saying bitcoin cash.. Bitcoin lightning works, is in production and has real usage

Lightning network is a joke tbh. It’s just gonna be a few large payment processors acting as banks (it can’t be decentralised cos the routing will just break.).

As the original post said BCH and Monero are real world ways to transact right now.

Although I figure long term the whole cryptocurrency space will implode (due to greed, infighting, technical problems etc.)

Theres more bitcoin on ethereum than on lightning.

Does sharding help a fully verifying node to reduce the bandwidth needed for an Initial Block Download (IBD) ?

Wouldn't it need to very each individual shard?

Not sure, but I really like the modal of MaidSafe where there's no blockchain to download. Instead, data is shared amount a group of peers.

We're using them without running our own node :P

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