
Towards a design philosophy for interoperable blockchain systems - godelmachine
https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/05/30/towards-a-design-philosophy-for-interoperable-blockchain-systems/
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skywhopper
This has gone beyond silly and into irresponsible territory. Not only is this
a tremendous amount of overhead to build on top of already extremely wasteful
blockchain systems, but building a legal-trust-based distributed-transaction
network on top of multiple blockchain systems would just immediately discard
what actual benefits there are to using a blockchain. And if you do work hard
and come up with a metablockchain system to record your cross-blockchain
transactions, you still have to interact with the real world at some point,
and that will always be the weak link. Building layers on layers of provable
tech doesn't solve the real world problem of "how do you trust your business
partners?" We have centuries of governmental and legal infrastructure built to
solve that problem, and you will never be able to replace that layer so long
as humans and human concerns are involved.

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ThomPete
Not sure I understand your point.

The resilience, usefulness, and value of a system often isn' its elegance but
its adaption. A decentralized trust system IS immensely valuable if it can be
done because it allows for a lot of transactions that right now falls between
chairs in the digital space.

A lot of the critique of the blockchain is based on the belief that digital
allows for abundance (copy paste) and that that is the value of digital. But
the reality is that there is plenty of value in scarcity ESPECIALLY in the
digital space as it opens up for establishing a unique digital footprint which
itself has a lot of value.

As an example, you can't easily exchange a piece of music with a game asset.
Or an ebook with a digital pokemon card as there is no medium for the
transaction. In other words, a decentralized trust-based system allows, for
example, for a second-hand market for among other things digital assets. Or
put another way a decentralized blockchain based trust system allows for more
fluidity in the market and allow for an ever-increasing level of sophisticated
trades.

Our legal infrastructure is built for a non-digital reality, even governments
would be interested in adopting the blockchain to allow them to implement
regulation in the digital space too.

So I don't think it's silly at all, in fact, it feels a little bit like we are
reliving the birth of the internet again when it comes to peoples opinions
about it.

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admax88q
> In other words, a decentralized trust-based system allows, for example, for
> a second-hand market for among other things digital assets.

This sounds like you're trying to use blockchain to invent artificial scarcity
for "digital goods." The only possible benefit I see from that is letting
copyright owners preserve their current business models rather than adapt to
the reality that bits are freely and easily copyable.

Why would we want that?

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ThomPete
Because it allow for value creation in s digital space. If i spend two months
in a game getting some asset i would like that to be recognized so that i
could sell or buy that unique item.

Its not about copyright as much as its about trust in the transaction between
two seemingly unrelated digital assets. It allows me to trust that i am
getting what i actually paid for and not a knockoff.

Watching something like fortnite makes it obvious that there is value in
digital scarcity.

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superflyguy
Won't this mean that if you poison one Blockchain with child porn (or
whatever) you'll poison all of them?

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Animats
The use case for this is what?

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godelmachine
I believe anything that uses blockchain. Use cases can range from record
keeping to tracking data or flow of transactions. It can also span across
multiple and diverse industries like healthcare, transportation and logistics,
government welfare benefits distribution et al maybe even voting.

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SideburnsOfDoom
> Use cases can range from record keeping

I am told that an old-style SQL database can do that just fine. With a lot
less overhead.

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godelmachine
Blockchain is an open distributed ledger protocol. I don't see how that fits
with SQL?

Am I missing something?

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pavlov
The "open distributed" part comes at a tremendous cost. A Bitcoin-style
blockchain is a distributed database where you can't trust any of the other
nodes, so you need a consensus mechanism that provides hard financial
incentives for the majority to agree quickly. Proof-of-work systems like
Bitcoin and Ethereum solve this by having miner nodes consuming energy and
transaction parties paying them for validating transactions. Because the
miners must get paid increasingly much as competition amongst them increases,
transactions won't be getting any cheaper.

Some types of data are valuable enough to pay miners to validate and store the
transactions, but usually it doesn't. To take one of your examples: why should
government welfare benefits data be stored on a blockchain? Does it make any
sense for a local government to reward foreign miners for storing their data
on a global blockchain? In this instance, a replicated SQL database seems much
more sensible.

(You might say that a blockchain without proof-of-work mining can also solve
this -- but then you have to ask what is the essential difference between a
blockchain where you implicitly trust some parties, and a traditional
distributed database? Why do it the hard way when you've already compromised
on the decentralized part?)

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jchrisa
I gave a talk in November at GOTO Berlin about why a globally consistent
transactional database is a better fit for most distributed ledger
applications than a blockchain.

If you are interested in the relational database approach, the middle of the
talk (and the associated example code) might be a fun place to start.
[https://blog.fauna.com/talk-video-build-a-serverless-
distrib...](https://blog.fauna.com/talk-video-build-a-serverless-distributed-
ledger-without-the-blockchain)

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erdevs
Interledger and other such protocols are designed to facilitate exchanges
across distributed ledger networks. The underlying whitepaper this article is
based on mentions Interledger in a few places as a promising direction for
some components of inter-ledger-transactions. In my view, Interledger/ILP is
an elegant and simple protocol. I didn't glean (from only a cursory skim) what
the paper finds is lacking in ILP?

