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Comment by sascha_sl | Hacker News Reader

Git. You want git. Git does this. Please use git. You can even validate your transactions with a hook.

I've joked about making a satire product website for a revolutionary new crypto. And because most people deep into NFTs have no idea how it works, I'd bet they'd love it. GitCoin? I'm out of energy, feel free to steal this idea.

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How would you gain consensus on which git repo is the original? How do you distinguish between the original repo and a fork?

Crypto is git + a way to determine who is a fork

Would it even matter? What percentage of people who’ve bought into the cryptocurrency/NFT craze without even know how to verify something that?

Just because they don’t know how to verify it doesn’t mean it isn’t important to them. They just need someone to be able to. If you can’t verify a fork, then you aren’t going to be able to sell your coins, and everyone wants to be able to do that.

> How would you gain consensus on which git repo is the original?

That is a problem with blockchain just as much. The only way to know what the original is, is to listen to the central authority here, which is the artist.

> How would you gain consensus on which git repo is the original? How do you distinguish between the original repo and a fork?

the one with the most commits? (perhaps, more accurately, the most commits all of which pass all tests)

> Crypto is git + a way to determine who is a for

agreed. also, in order to commit, (let's say) the commited changes have to pass all tests

So whoever has a faster computer who can create new commits faster in their repo is the original?

That is basically how Bitcoin works right now.

blockchain should have been called timechain, it’s a timestamping service

To know who was first, you can just record timetables with git and have various mirrors - if you can trust them to be adversarial such that if one alters its history that mirror gets flagged and rejected, then you have a distributed timestamp you can trust - but at some level of distribution and automation you reinvent blockchain

I guess the one where the commits are signed by the author. If there are forks, good for the author since these then are backups.

Disclaimer: I have only a vague idea about the whole underlying tech but I've also been wondering if there isn't a simpler approach.

That's actually kinda funny because at first I couldn't think of a single reason why that doesn't solve exactly the same problem.

I guess you can't prove who is 'in control' of the repo - the author could have sold the key privately and there's no way to tell if they sold it to multiple new owners.

Kinda like art in the 'real world' - you can 'prove' its the original but no way to tell whos hands its changed through over the years.

> signed by the author

With their encrypted keys I presume? A few more steps and you'll have reinvented cryptograpgic ledgers.

Signed by which author?

The whole point of a blockchain is for people who can’t trust each other. If you have a trusted author, you are correct, you don’t need a blockchain.

You can achieve consensus at small scale with an empty merge commit that merges several commits made by a quorum of trusted authors. You do not need to solve consensus at a large scale with no trust, and you cannot solve consensus at a large scale with no trust. Bitcoin has some mathematical approximations, but they are approximations, and the 51% attack is not only possible, but highly feasible. There's a reason why " six confirmations" was a long-lasting meme in the Bitcoin community

Originally I meant author of the piece who would confirm the sale. But basically anyone who feels like writing into the commit log, which can be a creator, a consumer for confirmation, a trustee or a clearing entity that creates merge commits. Even multiple commits by the same person are thinkable if there are handshakes.

> The whole point of a blockchain is for people who can’t trust each other.

I guess that's a very valid point and from my understanding the anonymity baked in is quite unique. And yet, even if I bought say coffee from an independent online market. Probably it's good to have a chain of trust to the seller to know that it's high quality. (Like Amazon reviews)

After all this is what GPG or x509 provide, a chain of trust.

It’s the main branch of the canonical repo on Github, obviously, and there is an automatic test to verify the ledger.

But now you have to decide who to trust as committers and they have to decide which pull requests to commit first. This might not scale as well as we hope. Transaction latency might be a little high.

If defi hacks can be conceivably clawed back under legal threat, I don’t see why a legal structure like a foundation can’t be relied upon to onboard new administrators of the Git repo.

We could use something like multi-signature Git commits [1] to enforce repo integrity. Clients could cross-check the signatures against an approved list published by foundation members. Anyone who co-signs an unapproved fork of the foundation’s repo could have their shares in the foundation slashed.

Post a ledger containing $JPEG balances to the Git repo, and require prospective foundation members obtain N JPEGs to apply for membership.

The ledger would operate at a snail’s pace, but “blockchains don’t scale”. We’d just need someone to design the “L2” of Git.

[1]: https://github.com/hashbang/git-signatures

That means you are trusting GitHub not to transfer the repo to someone else.

You are correct, if you trust a third party, a blockchain is not needed.

Is the way people can tell which blockchain is a fork because it is shorter than the original? And it is shorter because of the difficulty of adding blocks via proof of work?

A deeper issue is what happens if you sell the name NFT on two blockchains. Which one should count?

The valid fork is the one with the most blocks that adhere to the rules of consensus. Most “forks” have changed the consensus rules, which is why they’re “forks” rather than the canonical chain.

How do you know which blockchain is the original. How do you distinguish between the original blockchain and a fork?

After all most these things are on etherum, which itself is a fork.

He said without a blockchain ! :P

While Git is arguably...

https://medium.com/@shemnon/is-a-git-repository-a-blockchain...

P.S.: This is of course a joke - pretty sure that the GP had a more rather than less restrictive definition of "blockchain" in mind ? (So I agree with you.)

Gitcoin is very much so already a thing: https://gitcoin.co/

It's used to fund public goods/open source projects.

That's basically how this works. NFT's are store in IPFS which is essentially git + bittorrent

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ipfs/papers/master/ipfs-ca...

Stripe did something very similar as part of a programming challenge several years back.

https://abiusx.com/stripe-ctf-v3-writeup/

Right now there is a Product Manager at GitHub typing up a whitepaper…

> And because most people deep into NFTs have no idea how it works, I'd bet they'd love it

The market is telling you what to do

Git is the OG blockchain. Pros: (1) actually useful, (2) no financial motives, (3) serves humanity. Cons: none.

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