Comment by natrius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by natrius | Hacker News Reader

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Persistent pseudonyms seem to be required for voting-based communities to work. Without them, what is a vote? Whose votes do I trust?

Distributing reddit is a hard problem, but making it anonymous is even harder. It'll be easier to start with cryptographic identities and add anonymity later. In the meantime, users can generate new identities for every action. They will be ignored by other users, since reputation is the easiest way to separate signal from noise.

Building this system will be much easier if you investigate the toolkits for building distributed systems that have been built since Aether started. Ethereum has three building blocks for distributed systems: a blockchain for storing data that requires consensus, like the identities of the creators and moderators of a community; Whisper, a messaging system for sending data that doesn't require consensus, like broadcasting the existence of a sub-forum; and Swarm, a distributed data store for things like discussion archives and the HTML, CSS and Javascript that such a discussion system could be built from to run on every device that every user owns. (For an example of an application with this sort of architecture, see Augur. http://augur.net)

Besides the development speed gained from using these tools, your system will gain benevolent forkability. You want developers with ideas about decentralized communities to write forks that effectively don't steal users since everyone's using the same data sources to read from and write to. But using a homegrown distributed system makes that less likely. If it were built on Ethereum's toolkit, even if a developer disagrees with most of what you've done, it's in their interest to use the same data source even if they rewrite everything. The userbase of benevolently forkable distributed systems never needs to be split, which is a powerful characteristic for growth.

Aether is fantastic, and it's where the web is heading. Good luck!

Ethereum is super interesting but I'm kinda turned off by seeing "Licensing" and looks like it's aimed at some sort of profiteering, which I don't think is compatible with the sort of architecture we are going for, but I might be wrong here, please feel free to correct me.

Nothing wrong with licensing, cryptocurrencies on the other well meh...

All of those "proof of work" type schemes eventually will dwindle down to the same centralized network they are aiming to replace.

With the amount of compute power required to perform any operation mining will end up being handled by a couple of big players which the rest will use a proxy.

BitCoin already is pretty much centralized with mining becoming an operation which requires you to setup a bloody data center to get into the game, yes allot of those are some weird complexes in the middle of no-where China, but they are still bloody huge and expensive.

And there isn't much you can do about it, if you build a network which establishes "trust" based on "effort" the effort cannot be trivial, or to be more exact the amount of trust one will have in such network is tied directly to the amount of effort one has to put into it to perform a given task.

That's not true. While bitcoin mining is conducted through pools, what mining pools do is entirely public. Miners can easy choose another pool if one abuses their power.

For example, in 2014 a pool named GHash.io was close to obtaining 50% hashpower. It is customary for pools to stop accepting new signups when they are close to 50%, however GHash.io refused to do so. The miners organised an exodus and GHash lost half of their miners in a month.

What is stopping people from setting up multiple pools and getting 50% that way?

How do you really know all those pool operators are actually different people?

For a 'trustless' system, it seems like you need to place an awful lot of to trust in this small, secretive cabal of mining operators.

I understand from what you're saying that bitcoin is continually dependent on social customs that have already reached the verges of failure.

At the moment (some) miners are motivated to avoid 51% attack because they gain more from protecting Bitcoin's value than they do from profiteering with a 51% attack.

If that stops being the case, even for a moment, then the 51% attack will happen.

http://www.coindesk.com/eba-51-attack-remains-bitcoins-bigge... [2 weeks ago]

Yup, it's like pretending VISA and MASTERCARD are decentralized forms of currency. At least you can buy a beer with them in under 10 minutes.

You can indeed buy anything less than ~$100 instantly with Bitcoin. Payment processors like BitPay and Coinbase accept zero confirmation transactions for small amounts, simply because the costs of double-spending 0 confirm are massive.

So what you're saying is that you can do instant transactions with bitcoin if you don't actually use bitcoin.

No he's saying the cost of double spending is much larger than $100 so merchants will/should generally accept those.

No, Coinbase and BitPay accept 0-confirmation transactions when you pay a vendor by publishing a Bitcoin transaction through the Bitcoin peer-to-peer network, if the vendor has set it up to do so.

I thought bitcoin was a decentralized currency that didn't use payment processors like VISA / MasterCard...

Bitcoin doesn't require payment processors, but it doesn't prevent people from using them either.

Which is exactly what grandparent said:

> All of those "proof of work" type schemes eventually will dwindle down to the same centralized network they are aiming to replace.

I don't think (s)he was talking about the payment processors, but about the centralization of mining, which is a different issue.

And a payment processor in Bitcoin is closer to a company that runs cash registers than a provider like VISA. The worry is about the companies that want to control both ends, like Coinbase, not payment processors in general that simply take care of accepting BTC on behalf of the payee.

They'll up being the same in the end it's just the logical financial evolution of the scheme.

With ever increasing mining complexity coupled with ever growing demand for more and more mining since the rate of transactions in the system is directly tied to its mining rate when the block rewards will become rarer and rare till they eventually halt you'll pretty much will end up only with the "Banks" doing or controlling the mining since they'll have to ensure at least a minimal mining rate which covers their transaction volume.

the rate of transactions in the system is directly tied to its mining rate

How so? That's not my understanding at all - you could have a rate of transaction at the level of VISA with just a dozen computers or so. The mining difficulty is a consequence of having many miners (which makes the software auto-increase the difficulty of the problem), not of the increased transaction rate.

the block rewards will become rarer and rare till they eventually halt

That's why there are transaction fees, which pay the miners in lieu of the block rewards.

It's an ouroboros turning into a catch 22 you can't have an open system with high level of trust if the computation is trivial.

Ever increasing difficulty raises the bar so high that it centralizes a system due to the hardware requirements (there is no way to effectively mine BC today on standard computing hardware sorry) and their costs.

Look at the BC network now it's either huge centrally controlled mining pools or multi-million dollar mining farms which are controlled by individuals, this isn't decentralization of anything but computing assets as far the the pools are concerned.

There's an intention is to transition ethereum from proof of work, to proof of stake, to avoid some of the mining centralization and waste.

The licensing page lists three buckets of free, open source licenses for various parts of the project. I don't understand.

https://ethereum.org/licensing

I like to think that I understand most open source licenses - but that is just making my head spin.

> The core of Ethereum will be released under the most liberal of licences.

Then why aren't they considering MIT? That's about as liberal as you can get.

> it will come with an amendment allowing it to be linked to be statically linked to software for which source code is not available.

NO NO NO NO STOP NO. Do not attempt to modify open source licenses without consulting with a lawyer. It seems innocent enough - but it could cause problems down the road. There is also some rules that say you cannot call it GPL anymore if you modify it [1].

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL

Wait, the sentence above the second one that you quote is:

"In this way, while we have not arrived at a final licence, we expect to select one of the MIT licence, the MPL licence or the LGPL licence."

They are definitely considering the MIT licence. Did they do a ninja edit?

I definitely agree with you about the amendment thing.

> They are definitely considering the MIT licence. Did they do a ninja edit?

Perhaps my head was spinning from the vagueness of their license decision and I just overlooked it.

Is it MIT or BSD? Thats what I mean ant by profiteering, it doesn't fit with the model of distributed, p2p, anonymous, decentralized and secure architecture it seems to be speaking about while at the same time promoting so business.

My reason is not that profiteering is bad, but in this particular case, I just don't see how you can compromise anonymity with copyright and a business around it.

For this to be truly anonymous, I just don't see how a business can be attached but cause at the end of the day we are still coupled to the original writers.

What's I'd love to see is something like ethereum but without a business or copyright attached to it.

I hope this makes sense, to truly build a decentralized and anonymous networ, can you try to also build a profitable business on top of it? Maybe I've misunderstood.

I'd love to start working with it, however, I realize how his is still have he early day. The future is a completely decentralized, anonymous p2p network that has no overwhelming force from a single agent to censor or corrupt information.

Imagine if facebook, Google, all of it could run on our phones, tsblets, desktop. You can't shut it down. By the n I assume we will have some sort of mesh networking where we don't even need to go through an isp, just a cluster of trusted and self healing network nodes.

The licences mentioned are MIT, MPL, LGPL, Affero, and GPL. All of those are very well-respected OSS licences. And it's easy to find examples of for-profit companies that use (and abide by) any one of those licences. I really don't see anything worth noting here.

Anonymity and decentralization make advertising-based revenue difficult, true, but there are lots of other open source business models; consulting for example.

However, in this case they're clear: they'll be selling etherium. That's completely compatible with even the most strict definition of Open Source (or Free Software, for that matter).

> And it's easy to find examples of for-profit companies that use (and abide by) any one of those licences.

You can also find companies that don't. I am under the impression that nprobe source code is under the GPL [1] but the author sends DMCA requests to those who want to use the source code under the terms of the GPL [2] [3]. Then there was the company who created the entourage edge (an Android powered device) - for the longest time they refused to release the modified kernel source....they eventually did then they went under.

[1] http://linux.exosec.net/mirrors/www.ntop.org/nProbe.html

[2] https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/859890b8aaf4db678dce96...

[3] https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/85c03a289fe56c67636ed6...

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