
A discussion forum in the Bitcoin blockchain - LookWhatIFound
https://bitaps.com/1K69sEhUwNgiva3xzPnToxS89dzydU7nPm
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throwaway2016a
I don't see what the appeal is on having a permanent message board. Certainly
almost everyone who has spent a lot of time online has said something that
they wish they could take offline.

I think what we really need is more transience in online discussions. If I
said something when I was 14 years old that shouldn't come up when an employer
searches for me. I was a completely different person then. Heck, that's why I
don't use my real name on HN.

This seems like a step in the wrong direction.

However, there are real concerns for censorship.

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jMyles
The fact that today's 14 year old are most certainly creating records which
will be viewed in the future is incontrovertible. The result will be, I think,
that employers (and other decision makers) will learn not to judge someone for
comments made when they were 14.

The fact that our lives are increasingly documented means that we'll all have
to be less judgmental about our shared weaknesses and growing pains, and
that's a good thing.

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cJ0th
That's an optimistic take on it. I could imagine that there will be companies
who score the personality development of a person for HR departments.

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abakker
Thats a pretty decent idea, though, isn't it?

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stagbeetle
Some people aren't comfortable with being rated like that. Others complain
that personality profiling is still largely inaccurate and would rather not
have their futures based on it.

It's a bit like the IQ testing for employment placing.

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alkonaut
Isn't bitcoin and other blockchains validated by "proof-of-work", meaning a
nontrivial amount of energy is required to post something to this discussion
forum?

I mean it's nearly indefensible to even add an energy overhead to financial
transactions, but this...

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clarkmoody
> I mean it's nearly indefensible to even add an energy overhead to financial
> transactions

Come on now. How much energy is devoted to securing the traditional financial
system? I'm talking about buildings, personnel, armored vehicles, weapons,
lawyers, courts, etc.

Other blockchains are secured by different mechanisms than proof-of-work, and
research is ongoing into more efficient ways of achieving distributed
consensus.

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alkonaut
That's a valid point - but it would certainly attractive to not require either
of the two costs. Sounds encouraging that there is research in the field.

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pdgwien
This seems to belong to Locked Post[1], a "free, anonymous, secure,
uncensorable, decentralised and eternal post board".

[1]: [https://lockedpost.com/](https://lockedpost.com/)

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wslh
"You cannot make a post while messages are pending (Post sequence number: 282
is currently pending confirmation in the Bitcoin Blockchain"

Using the Bitcoin blockchain for forums is a really bad decision: high fees,
tiny data buffer, high confirmation times. These are the kind of decisions
that kill your project from the beginning.

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jacquesm
I'm not sure about whether or not that isn't a good thing though.

The quality of the bits tends to go up as they become more scarce. Compare the
telegraph of old with todays internet.

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wslh
> I'm not sure about whether or not that isn't a good thing though.

I am sure because we can quickly analyze this from a computer science
perspective. We are trying to use data structures and algorithms that don't
fit for the problem they are trying to solve (forums).

You can say that future blockchains can be a better fit but we need to see yet
if those future blockchains are something new or just using concepts that we
already had but with a new label.

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KirinDave
Why is this valuable or desirable? I keep trying to figure this out.

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kordless
Having spent a lot of time thinking and talking about this concept, this is
valuable because you can attach cost-of-suffering to entities participating in
an open conversation with an aggregate.

Consider the use of Twitter's platform as (currently) allowing a small subset
of knowledgeable users to leverage viral behaviors to spread their belief
systems into a larger aggregate, without the larger aggregate being able to
defend against it.

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KirinDave
> because you can attach cost-of-suffering to entities participating in an
> open conversation with an aggregate.

In a modern world, isn't this just "you must pay a fee to post here?" It
actually doesn't seem to prove work was done by the author?

> Consider the use of Twitter's platform as (currently) allowing a small
> subset of knowledgeable users to leverage viral behaviors to spread their
> belief systems into a larger aggregate, without the larger aggregate being
> able to defend against it.

I've been considering this problem, but I think these kinds of work proofs are
really just proof of minimum economic status.

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kordless
A blockchain, when applied properly, can provide levels of trust in a way that
is not directly associated with the proof of work they run. Bitcoin uses
SHA256 for POW, which is pretty well understood by now to be secure and hovers
around cost efficiency.

Using the trust embodied in the blockchain allows for the mapping of comment,
author, topic commented on, participants in the topic (a sub-aggregate) and a
general context in which the topic is shared (web link and/or IPFS link). This
can be done without making any of those things part of the POW.

Yes, anonymous comments and topic submissions can be made, but those may have
a lower associated karma attached to them, similar to what we have here in HN.
With a bit more code (Script), one could add voting based on value (i.e. I
could vote you down with $20 if I had over $20 of karma associated with my
account), transparency in voting (you could see it was someone with high karma
commenting on x/y/z articles voting you down), and any other analytics anyone
thought would be valuable in determining trust levels.

BTW, I am not indicating karma is a one-to-one mapping with value injected
into the blockchain by market growth or trades. For example, I couldn't vote
you down with $200 of fiat just because I didn't like what you said. I would
have to "earn" the karma from upvotes from other users over time, which would
be tied to my source address used to pay for voting on other users. When I
actually went to vote, a portion of the revenue would go to the platform
operator (HN equivalent), a portion to the submitter of the topic, and a
portion to the person I voted up (or down).

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KirinDave
So what you're saying is that basically you have verification that the
conversation you see is one that took place and that there are a fixed set of
identities (not people) who had that conversation?

Can't we just schlep a merkle tree over the top of any forum software and get
similar guarantees? And isn't this sort of false due the lack of convergence
of the block chain over long partitioning events?

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kordless
You could totally do that with IPFS today, but I think the problem is that
social commentary occurs in a centralized location. If you play Rust, the
analogy would be being able to talk to someone while within a given zone.

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kleer001
Seems like it might be good for entering minutes or important legal
discussions, things that need to be preserved. But just chit-chat? Nah.

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btczeus
You guys need to know about Steem:
[https://steemit.com/](https://steemit.com/)

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fenwick67
This one is touching:

"Jordan and Jeremy I Love You Forever & Loved Being Your Father."

[https://bitaps.com/66791de561fd235bf1b16924642903af8b8013aa5...](https://bitaps.com/66791de561fd235bf1b16924642903af8b8013aa520d25d93ba5b21202b9c727)

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DougN7
Slightly off topic, but aren't all of these alternative uses for block chains
going to explode their size and cause more storage and bandwidth to be used on
many servers around the world?

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Taek
A good way to deal with that is the transaction fee. If you are willing to pay
for the space + resources, then perhaps you've earned it.

But, this generally means that you will prioritize smaller, more high value
things like large financial transactions (moving $10 million costs 400 bytes,
complaining about the core developers take 2kb). And so in my opinion this
payment model makes a ton of sense.

