
Distributed Ledger without the Blockchain - jchanimal
https://fauna.com/blog/distributed-ledger-without-the-blockchain
======
moxious
Blockchain seems like a brilliant solution when multiple anonymous
untrustworthy parties need to get together and agree.

But to the point of this article, most situations aren't like that. You have
identities, contracts, and trust at least as much as can be enforced with the
legal system.

I have also seen a lot of over-application of blockchain to "standard" banking
problems. I guess it's real value will depend on whether or not it's
successful in "decentralizing all of the things". If that doesn't happen, then
it may just be a very cumbersome way of doing something we already knew how to
do.

~~~
geekpowa
Blockchain is a terrible solution.

Firstly Proof of Work is incredibly energy inefficient, to extent that
electricity consumed to append to public blockchains is comparable to
electricity used by nation states.

Secondly POW by its inherent design recentralises trust. When mining evolves
to deploying on ASIC and deploying it where electricity is cheap you are
recentralising trust to a tiny few who are willing and able to fulfil the ever
higher and steadily increasing bar that POW, by design, demands. The trust
model at this point has evolved from technical difficulty of fabricating &
maintaining long duration forked chains to one where key block creators are
too financially invested in success of the chain overall to allow fraud to
happen. At this point, when your trust model is essentially too much to loose
to cheat, there are scant distinguishing features between a blockchain ledger
and a traditional centralised clearing house.

To steal a line from a good book I read recently about blockchains: "The good
bits of blockchain are not original, and the original bits of blockchain turn
out to be much good."

[Edit: grammar / readability]

~~~
zodiac
While your criticisms are valid, you're criticizing just one implementation of
"a blockchain", namely chains secured by CPU-bound PoW. There's plenty of
other implementations with different trade offs. You could design your PoW
algorithm to be more ASIC-resistent, eg
[https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/29890/memory-
hard...](https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/29890/memory-hard-proof-
of-work-are-they-asic-resistant). You could switch to proof of stake. You
could use whatever algorithm XRP is using.

Also, by saying "blockchain is a terrible solution", I assume you mean "there
are other better solutions [to the problem of creating a decentralized ledger,
or whatever]". What are those better solutions?

~~~
geekpowa
I agree that bitcoin's use of sha256 nonce seeking is a very easy target for
critique. My broader assertion though is that proof of work, by design, will
always centralise into a few, one way or another. Other theoretical schemes
may be more resistant to centralisation though my instinct is that unless you
find some sort of PoW mechanism that strongly anchors to some universal and
impossible to simultae physical constraint of the universe we inhabit, POW
mechanisms of any economic value will all race towards centralisation
shrinking number of signing peers.

Proof of stake at this time is purely theoretical. It lacks strong proof that
it solves the problem it sets out to solve. I personally doubt it is a viable
solution and my belief it is a dead end avenue of research. Notable there are
no large scale implementations yet, even eth rolled back the clock on POS.

Never heard of XRP before. Very briefly scanning, looks like a distributed
consensus type protocol, which isn't anything new doesn't attempt to solve the
core concern about decentralised trust. Realise am being a bit flippant here,
I need to study more which I will, but this is my initial impression.

>> I assume you mean "there are other better solutions [to the problem of
creating a decentralized ledger, or whatever]". What are those better
solutions?

No I am not saying this at all. Why is it incumbent on me to solve this
problem merely because I advance a critique of the current solution? Does my
failure to bring an alternative to the table make my critique invalid? I don't
think so. I have been puzzling over this problem space and exploring some
ideas for alternatives. The problem is hard and honestly I am probably not
smart enough to solve it. But the problems are interesting so I'll keep
turning it over.

In terms of my thinking right now, I am not even confident that problems
solved blockchains are even problems worth solving, that blockchains provide
us, as a society, anything of value at all. Too much is given up: notably for
example dispute resolution. Look at all the long parade of thefts and errors
that have happened on Eth, the legacy to date of the idea of "the code is law"
is problematic at best. To date I can only think of one real use case that has
made me think blockchain/bitcoin is actually even useful : when US DoJ leaning
on Visa/Mastercard to cutoff funding to Wikileaks, bitcoin provided good
stopgap technical solution to this grotesque legal excess.

~~~
espadrine
> _Never heard of XRP before. Very briefly scanning, looks like a distributed
> consensus type protocol, which isn 't anything new doesn't attempt to solve
> the core concern about decentralised trust._

To save you some googling, it _does_ try to solve decentralized trust. It goes
for a more traditional scheme, a variant of Byzantine agreement.

However, there was a dispute wherein David Mazières (of Kademlia fame) claims
that Ripple's design has a flaw, that he fixed in SCP (Stellar Consensus
Protocol), by designing FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) as described in
his paper: [https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-
protocol.pd...](https://www.stellar.org/papers/stellar-consensus-protocol.pdf)
(which features a comparative description with Ripple and Bitcoin).

------
placeybordeaux
Given the amount of people that suggest blockchains in a trusted environment
it seems perfectly reasonable to reiterate that you don't need a blockchain to
have distributed consensus.

I was hoping for something different given the title though.

~~~
dcdanko
I think a benefit of blockchains is that a single(ish) protocol can support
many different distributed applications.

It's sort of like apps that run on Electron, performance might be bad but it's
easy on the developer.

~~~
mrguyorama
Except blockchains are incredibly complicated, and as the hacks have shown,
programming on the blockchain is a great way to create a bug bounty that also
shuts down your company

~~~
dcdanko
Definitely, blockchains aren't secure in the way that many Ethereum apps seem
to think they are.

But for certain types of lower stakes applications (say a log running on a
mesh network of sensors) blockchains can provide a simple way to do something
that could otherwise be fairly complicated. Certain blockchain implementations
(I like MultiChain) are really easy to use.

------
bawana
There is no such thing as trust anymore at our level of information and 'evil'
density. Yes 'evil density' meaning the amount of unemployed outsiders working
from a different mission statement than their target. Trust is a relic of
small communities and shared goals. As we break down barriers, go global,
increase information density - we tempt fate by assuming all new members will
function honestly. Or that established members will remain honest

~~~
matt4077
It's a good thing that we've long found something better than blind trust
then: the rule of law.

~~~
nine_k
Trusting the lawmakers, and elected / appointed agents in general, to do the
right thing is another interesting problem. It does not seem completely solved
yet, too.

~~~
adrianratnapala
"Law and order" might arguably about trusting such agents; but _rule of law_
is more the opposite. It's about putting those agents in a situation where
they tend to enforce rules that they cannot easily manipulate.

You are right that is a hard thing to do, and no society has ever done it
perfectly. But western democracies do it surprisingly well, and do so using a
playbook of principles that has been understood and written about since the
18th century.

------
l8again
I think the inclusion of blockchain is misleading. I had to wrap my brains
around the straw-man first to understand what the article is trying to show-
case. It should simply say FaunaDB supports distributed transaction.

Separately, distributed transaction is not the primary motivation for using
blockchain. For ledger/financial use cases its the verification and auditing
confidence it provides.

------
optimuspaul
just a sales pitch for Fauna, nothing interesting to see there.

------
cocktailpeanuts
it's kind of annoying how people abuse the term "blockchain" nowadays whenever
there's something remotely close to distributed systems.

"Distributed Ledger without the Blockchain" is just a distributed database,
which has been possible forever. Check out couchdb/pouchdb, etc.

The innovation of Bitcoin's blockchain was that it introduced distributed
ledger that didn't require centralized trust. If you take that way, you're
just a database no matter how you try to spin it.

This is like saying "We've built orange juice without the orange!" Yeah,
you've built bottled water.

~~~
jchanimal
FaunaDB’s consistency model is very different than CouchDB. (Disclosure, I’m
one of the early contributors to CouchDB and work at Fauna.)

More about the FaunaDB consistency model here.
[https://fauna.com/blog/consistent-transactions-in-a-
globally...](https://fauna.com/blog/consistent-transactions-in-a-globally-
distributed-database)

~~~
cocktailpeanuts
Does it matter in the context of this comment thread? I'm sure you guys have
built a damn good bottled water, but it ain't orange juice.

~~~
jchanimal
Yes. The point of the post is that with global ACID, distributed ledgers among
trusted parties are just regular applications. You can’t do this with
eventually consistent databases. What I’m describing is a genuine solution our
customers are choosing FaunaDB for. For their distributed ledger requirements,
a blockchain is overkill.

~~~
eternalban
And the point of the GP was that that does not address the OP point that it is
"just a distributed database"

~~~
jchanimal
A distributed database with global consistency, which is a new category.
FaunaDB (and similar databases) allows a distributed ledger among trusted
parties to be “just a database application.”

~~~
hossbeast
Great. Just take the word blockchain out of the article, it adds nothing but
confusion.

~~~
epistasis
I disagree, with the number of people pushing blockchain when they just want a
distributed ledger, an article like this is quite helpful.

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asasidh
Consider enterprise B2B transactions - There will always be an old school
legal contract in place and hence trust in the existing system. The overhead
of the blockchain can be avoided in such cases.

------
mamcx
The use-case here interest (run a ledger with invoices) me but wonder if exist
a way to do this on mobile? (not JS)?

~~~
jchanimal
FaunaDB has drivers for Java and Swift, so this schema can easily support
mobile apps.

