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Comment by Shawnj2 | Hacker News Reader

As much as it pains me to say this this might be a good use of blockchain

Blockchain is just a slow database. What you want is a peer to peer system which actually has peers instead of a couple super nodes and ephemeral drive-by clients.

"Just" a slow database that allows coordinated writes in a decentralized way, effectively solving the Byzantine Generals problem. That's what made Bitcoin a novel idea.

How does it solve the Byzantine generals problem?

By proof-of-work consensus. This makes attacks costly, basically they have to spend more resources than half the network, hence the name "51% attack".

The Bitcoin whitepaper [0] is a very accesible read, but the revolutionary ideas are not immediately obvious.

[0] https://www.bitcoin.com/bitcoin.pdf

Care to explain? If you just mean verified tree, git already is that.

I think he means uncensorable or at least very very hard to censor.

The problem is it could be very expensive. Think NFT but the metadata is the source code of the emulator. You're not removing that from the blockchain, ever. It also needs to be a popular blockchain, like ETH, BTC, SOL or whatever people still use today.

There are "coins" where your stake is disk space but if it's not a widespread thing it just dies off (conway GoL style)

I think he's referring to the distributed portion of a blockchain. A centralized github-type for profit business is required to respond to these takedown requests. Nintendo's lawyers would need to go after every individual node hosting this vc blockchain.

I agree, at least in theory (not sure if any existing blockchains could adequately solve the problem today). Someday, you could imagine essentially running gitlab on a blockchain. Actually, it's not a stretch to include access control such as public key management, "Issues", etc. It would be publicly readable, not censorable, no single point of failure, and unlike torrents, fully mutable. Obviously, today the cost would probably be prohibitive for most purposes.

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