
But what about blockchain apps? - xj9
https://www.heropunch.io/xj9/2018/but-what-about-blockchain-apps
======
dvt
Blockchain apps aren't going to happen, just how BitTorrent apps never
happened. There's a bunch of reasons, but most of them come down to the fact
that decentralization isn't _really_ a boon. Consider a new social network I
want to build. Making a simple prototype and hosting it on AWS is easy.
Getting people to use it is hard. Getting people to use it _and_ make them
self-host some kind of "node" in this decentralized universe -- that's
exponentially harder. Diaspora clearly showed that no one wants to set up and
host their own nodes. And then you have to solve all kinds of really hard
problems: double spending, consensus, 51%+ attacks, and so on. Some of these
problems are simply unsolvable and we have to compromise. SSBT, for example,
has no consensus, so everything is subjective[1] (which makes it almost
impossible to do anything useful with).

The people still fighting this war of decentralization remind me of the
Japanese soldiers[2] who didn't realize WW2 was over. You lost. No one cares
about decentralization. Google won. Amazon won. Facebook won. The great
majority of people invest in BTC and ETH because they think it'll make them
wealthy, not because of some noble desire to fight "the man." Besides, BTC
isn't really decentralized anyway, the million-dollar-VC-backed miners
basically control that ecosystem.

[1] [https://github.com/ssbc/secure-
scuttlebutt/issues/86](https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt/issues/86)

[2] [http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/17/world/asia/japan-
philippines-w...](http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/17/world/asia/japan-philippines-
ww2-soldier-dies/index.html)

~~~
gsich
Email is decentralized and is probably the most used and most compatible
system there is.

~~~
nkrisc
And yet what percentage of email lives on the servers of a handful of giant
corporations?

~~~
jstanley
But you _can_ host your own emails. You can't host your own Facebook page.

~~~
freehunter
>But you can host your own emails.

Sure, as long as you don't actually want to email someone else. AWS,
DigitalOcean, Linode, anywhere you might want to host your email server,
they're likely already blocked by all the spam filters so you're never going
to get through.

>You can't host your own Facebook page.

You can't host your own Gmail either, but you can host something awfully
similar to Facebook while not being exactly Facebook.

~~~
jstanley
I've been hosting my own emails for 8 years and haven't had any problems.

If you host something "awfully similar to Facebook" you can't communicate with
Facebook users. If you host your own emails, you can still communicate with
Gmail users. Surely you weren't intending that retort as a serious argument?

~~~
freehunter
The second argument follows the first. If the first isn't true, then the
second also isn't true and it seems you've been fortunate in that regard. But
if the first is true (that spam lists block addresses from shared hosting
providers), then you can email but not to Gmail. Sort of like hosting Facebook
without communicating to Facebook users.

~~~
gsich
Seems like a solveable problem.

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swatkat
I am seeing this:

 _Surge protection

<strong>Warning:</strong><p>You triggered the wiki's surge protection by doing
too many requests in a short time.</p><p>Please make a short break reading the
stuff you already got.</p><p>When you restart doing requests AFTER that, slow
down or you might get locked out for a longer time!</p>_

Google cache:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qGQvzK...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qGQvzKU5kBEJ:https://www.heropunch.io/xj9/2018/but-
what-about-blockchain-apps+)

~~~
xj9
i'm being hugged to death! maybe i should add come caching to my nginx config

------
CoffeeDregs
AFAICT, with current blockchain technology, in order to process PayPal level
volumes, every single participant in the network would need to process PayPay
level volumes... 1,000 transactions per second is not a problem for a single
payments company; it seems like a giant problem for each of the 100,000 nodes
on the network also to process 1,000 transactions per second.

Certainly I am missing something obvious?

~~~
xwvvvvwx
This is one of the biggest problems with Blockchains right now. If it cannot
be solved then their utility is extremely limited. There are two main
approaches that seem likely to work:

\- "Layer 2" networks: Most transaction volume happens off-chain. POW
blockchain remains as a settlement layer. Quite a few proposed protocols.
Lightning network [1] is the most well known. First mainnet lightning
transactions were sent in December [2]

\- Sharding: Split the blockchain into lots of different blockchains with a
subset of miners validating transactions on each sub-chain. Miners are
randomly assigned a new sub-chain on a regular basis to stop collusion. Each
sub-chain has it's own address space. Sub-chains can communicate using
asynchronus message passing. Ethereum has a draft specification [3][4] and is
starting to implement some test clients [5].

[1] [https://lightning.network/](https://lightning.network/)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/946175898029395968](https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/946175898029395968)

[3]
[https://github.com/ethereum/sharding/blob/develop/docs/doc.m...](https://github.com/ethereum/sharding/blob/develop/docs/doc.md)

[4] [https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-
FAQ](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ)

[5] [https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/01/02/ethereum-scalability-
re...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2018/01/02/ethereum-scalability-research-
development-subsidy-programs/)

------
tw1010
I had a real hard time reading this post without being disoriented by the lack
of capitalization.

~~~
freehunter
Yes, this is a stylistic choice some bloggers are using these days and it's
pretty annoying. I'm all in favor of learning how to break the rules but in
this case it just makes it harder to read without adding any benefit.

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jasondc
I agree with some of the authors points. One item that is missing is the
incentive structure.

Let's take mesh networks for example (as mentioned in the article). Substratum
pays users in coins to share their network, which creates an incentive to grow
the network (as long as the coins are worth something). If the coins are
worthless, the model doesn't work.

It would take a lot of money to create the incentives without the coins.

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fsiefken
DAG (Directed acyclic graph) based currencies don't need a blockchain;
Byteball/Dagcoin, IOTA, Rayblocks (Nano) and others.

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BinaryIdiot
Not sure I entirely understand where this post is going. What does
centralization versus decentralization have to do with a blockchain? Just
because Bitcoin and others are using it as a centralized data store for a
decentralized currency doesn't mean the blockchain has to be tied to any of
that.

I feel like people keep getting really far away from what a blockchain really
is (a fancy linked list that can ensure integrity from start to end) and are
confusing it for how Bitcoin uses it.

~~~
fabianhjr
I read it as:

Blockchains(PoW/PoS/etc) are not the solution for decentralized applications
because blockchains are a global state and most decentralized application
don't _need_ a global state. (Specially non-fintech ones that don't have a
double-spend problem like social/websites/photos/etc)

It briefly mentions Secure Scuttlebutt, a gossip protocol that works over
meshnets without global internet access as an example of a decentralized
technology without a global state.

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eecks
Surge protection warning

