
How Bitcoin’s Blockchain Could Power an Alternate Internet - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-bitcoins-blockchain-could-power-an-alternate-internet-bb501855af67
======
palunon
If they really mean the internet, I just dont see how the bitcoin blockchain
can exist without the Internet. It's not a way to transmit information without
IP (or an equivalent protocol)

If they mean the Web, well, there already is something working that solve the
same problems, it's call Freenet and near to no one use it (at least "normal"
people. Cryptoanarchists and techies don't count)

The biggest problem with the blockchain is that every (at least veryfing) node
need a full copy of it. Storing data in it mean duplicating it for every node,
and it has enormous costs. Try storing 1GB of data (for example, a movie) in
it...

~~~
nullc
Bitcoin works right without "the internet" or even an IP network, you can
sneaker net around the Blockchain, if you like.

But indeed, Bitcoin-- and the technology in it-- doesn't generally solve the
hard problems the web presents (just like the prior distributed system
technology before Bitcoin didn't solve Bitcoin's issues). There is a lot of
seriously misplaced hype in this space.

A bit of pedantry on your last comment: "The biggest problem with the
blockchain is that every (at least veryfing) node need a full copy of it" \--
this isn't true. Please see section 7 of the original Bitcoin whitepaper
"Reclaiming disk space".

It's still not a suitable mechanism to store arbitrary data, however.

------
nly
I personally feel DNSSEC and DANE are just a grave misplacement of trust, and
hope something similar to Namecoin is pivotal in what comes after DNS. I'd
rather this was the legacy of Bitcoin than a mildly interesting poke at the
Fed where you don't even get the privacy afforded to you by a credit card
transaction over TLS... oh dang, sorry, my jaded cynicism slipped in again.

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rabbyte
The blockchain is to the web as the web is to television and radio. It's an
infrastructural component and any time we have new infrastructure we
redistribute our resources to gain the most benefit but we never replace old
infrastructure we just change our utilization of it. The blockchain is ideal
for directories and metadata; data that _needs_ to be public, immutable, and
verifiable. Anything that does not directly benefit from the features of the
blockchain _should_ be handled by other protocols such as torrent or web or
other.

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viksit
A good part-overview and part-prediction on the blockchain.

The author however has a rather dismissive tone when he says that __" The
blockchain literature is packed with graduate dissertations from the Rube
Goldberg school of systems design" __. Perhaps I misread the tone, but IMO,
the most important achievements come exactly when such dots are connected
together.

That said, there's not a single mention of one of the most important issues in
the adoption of the blockchain today - what are the things that prevent the
creation of a high throughput blockchain where each individual transaction
completes much faster, in order to realistically scale to the kind of
workloads that the author's uses cases are likely to throw at it?

~~~
wmf
[https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/11/toward-a-12-second-
bloc...](https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/11/toward-a-12-second-block-time/)

~~~
RemoteWorker
Ethereum is a scam. Its author received millions of USD in funding, and after
a year the only things he has delivered are blog posts that are mostly just
PoS propaganda. PoS is a flawed concept, but its proponents dismiss all
criticism by saying "we added all these patches and unnecessary complexity and
fixed it! Look, no one has hacked it yet!".

~~~
drcode
As someone using the ethereum alpha software regularly, I have to disagree-
They have produced a lot of great code so far, and it seems likely now that
ethereum will be live and in operation in early March (though admittedly it'll
still have some shortcomings at that point)

As for PoS vs PoW, yes PoS gives you less objectivity on "truth" in block
determination- If you define "flawed" as anything less objective than "PoW"
then it would certainly meet your definition. The question is how many people
feel the way you do on this matter, and what impact this will have on the
success of ethereum as a product.

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danbruc
A proof of work based system does not scale. One needs something else to make
this ideas viable.

~~~
drcode
Well, certainly "Proof of stake" has been getting more popular in the
cryptocurrency community... this system has a lot less overhead than PoW,
though it's still controversial for technical reasons that are hard to
describe in a brief comment.

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politician
Isn't bitcoin already owned by a mining pool (ownership defined as an entity
that can express 51% of the mining power)? Why is anyone even playing with
this system anymore - the growth of the blockchain is controllable by a single
entity! Isn't preventing that the whole point?!

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/07/bitcoin-pool-
ghash-i...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/07/bitcoin-pool-ghash-io-
commits-to-40-hashrate-limit-after-its-51-breach/)

When a protocol depends on the "Evil Bit" being set to 0 to function
correctly, that protocol is _broken_.

------
davidgerard
GUYS GUYS I GOT IT

HACKER NEWS, BUT __ON THE BLOCKCHAIN __

ALL I NEED IS VC AND SOME DEVS

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Animats
The Bitcoin blockchain provides a tamper-resistant ledger to which anyone can
add, but no one can delete. That's useful for a narrow range of use cases, but
not revolutionary.

Bitcoin itself is in a screaming dive right now, at $215 and dropping.
$214.77. $213.41. ...

~~~
Animats
Bitcoin bottomed at $152. Back up to the low $180s now. No idea what happened.
Bitcoin is roughly back to before the China bubble now.

