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Comment by nutellaandgo | Hacker News Reader

One "killer feature" of blockchain is availability. For example, the bitcoin network has something like 99.99999% uptime since it was invented. I think is was down for something like half a day back in 2009 due to a bug, but since then it's had basically 100% uptime.

Blockchain can be used as a rather expensive and crude database, so one possible application is a key-value database which is guaranteed to always be up.

I suspect that as blockchain technologies improve and better techniques for sharding are developed, this could become quite a common real-world application.

From reading the comments most people here don't have any idea about the research that's currently happening in the blockchain space. They're just making ignorant comments about ponzi schemes and money laundering.

Very exciting research happening in blockchain.

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This doesn’t quite hold. It’s only as “up” as the node you’re connecting to is, if that node is down then for all intents and purpose the “blockchain” is down as far as your ability to access it is concerned.

Connect to multiple nodes and this won't be such a problem.

Obviously if a single node has a disk failure or OS crashes, and you are connected to that node, the blockchain is down for you and everybody else connected to that node .... but most of the other nodes are still up and the system as a whole is up.

So you’ll build a load balancer for the nodes you might connect to, is what you’re saying, and where will you host said load balancer? Wherever you host it that’s the availability level you’ll achieve. High availability is not a feature of the blockchain, if you would of said data resilience, I might have agreed, but availability, no, that falls into the same availability standards as any other computing platform.

I never said anything about a load balancer.

"Availability" means being able to access the blockchain/system/network and get the data you want, when you want it.

The way most blockchain systems find out which nodes are on the network is usually through a gossip protocol, so typically your app will start off with some "seed nodes", which it contacts, then gets information about other nodes on the network.

Once you have the IPs of say 100 nodes scattered around the world, on different networks, running different OSes, etc. the chances of losing access to all those nodes is virtually zero.

Edit: You seem to be thinking about blockchains in terms of how traditional cloud/web based systems work. That's the wrong way to think about it. Blockchains have fundamentally different architecture. They do not use load balancers.

I won’t labour the point but you’re mistaken, nodes ARE traditional cloud/web based systems. All you have to do is check https://www.ethernodes.org/network-types to see that, 65% of Ethereum nodes are hosted and 25% of those are on AWS. Blockchain is built on existing infrastructure, there is no silver bullet availability it’s offering.

I'm wasting my time here.

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