
Blockstack: A New Decentralized Internet [pdf] - ahiknsr
https://blockstack.org/whitepaper.pdf
======
jpalomaki
Bitcoin network hashrate is currently around 550.000TH/s[1]. An asic miner
with 4.73TH/s claimed capacity can be bought for $500 [2]. With a budget of
less than $100M you could have similar capacity as current bitcoin network.

One thing that bothers me a bit is that it is hard to tell how decentralized
these technologies really are. Especially when you go into direction where
commodity hardware becomes useless and you need specialty equipment to do
meaningful mining, there's a risk that the power falls into few hands.

This is probably not an issue for bitcoin, where the incentive to cheat would
be to just gain monetary profits. In some other blockchains, serving different
purposes things might be different. Governments with their deep pockets might
be interested in building up capacity to be able to perform covert ops.

[1]
[https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty](https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty)
[2] [https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-
hardware/](https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware/)

~~~
nugget
Run the math for Ethereum and it's even crazier. Something like $15m in cloud
computing resources and you can control the eth network valued at >$30
billion. For this reason I can't imagine "shorting" these cryptocurrencies
will be possible any time soon as the incentives for attack would be too
great. The price asymmetry could resolve in a number of different ways and it
will be interesting to watch how it unfolds.

~~~
haakon
> I can't imagine "shorting" these cryptocurrencies will be possible any time
> soon

You can short Bitcoin, Ethereum and many other cryptocurrencies on a number of
exchanges right now.

------
rufusroflpunch
Thanks to the power of middle-out compression.

~~~
asragab
Indeed, that and the delta in mean device efficiency thanks to the ubiquity of
smartphones.

------
isubkhankulov
can someone explain why anyone would need this? just like bitcoin, the time
you really need it is to avoid government oversight or censorship. if
successful, wouldnt we all see the black market thrive while all regular use
cases for the internet would continue on the regular distributed internet?

~~~
acover
Imagine if Facebook was decentralized.

You could own your data.

There would be competition to provide the best ui. The best experience.

Anti-features wouldn't exist.

One company wouldn't control how a billion people communicate with each other.

~~~
WJW
Imagine if Facebook was decentralized:

Your grandmother would have to run her own node!

Your bandwidth at home would determine if your profile was reachable. If
something you post goes viral, just imagine the fun your family will have as
their available bandwidth slows to almost nothing!

There might be competition on providing a nice "experience" but you would
either pay for it, have it be ad-supported or it'd turn in to a Linux-desktop
shitshow.

Imagine how much more fun spam filtering could be if it didn't have a
dedicated team but it would just be you (or your grandmother) going up against
the legions of determined spammers.

~~~
jpalomaki
Email is decentralized, yet I don't need to run my own SMTP server (but if I
wanted I could do that).

~~~
WJW
Indeed, and so can I. However, there is a huge crowd outside of HN that is
neither capable of running their own servers, nor are they remotely interested
in learning to do so.

Also, I would argue that in practice email is very much centralized, with a
few large providers that manage all the complexity for their users (such as
spam blocking and maintaining servers).

~~~
nugget
The point is that social networking could become a decentralized protocol
similar to email. Imagine browsing something that looks just like Facebook but
underneath each friend's profile it would say "Hosted by Facebook" or "Hosted
by Microsoft" or "Hosted by [Startup]". It's feasible technically although
Facebook's closed network effect is extremely strong.

~~~
cookiecaper
As long as our legal structure allows walled gardens and enforced
incompatibility, that's what we'll get.

We need to look at websites as service providers/data carriers akin to telcos.
The government has issued a slew of regulations to prevent artificially strong
network lock-in with telcos, mandating wireless number portability and certain
levels of device compatibility.

We need to recognize that Facebook is not a content creator as such, but a
neutral carrier who transmits the data generated by its users, and that the
users need their freedom and mobility to be respected if we're going to have a
free and competitive market in cyberspace. There is no good reason that
Facebook or Google should have such excessive unnatural ownership and access
blockage rights.

n.b.: I say this as someone who is very conservative politically. Intellectual
property is a government-granted monopoly that we have let run far afield.

I don't resent property ownership in the slightest, nor do I resent profit-
making. I _do_ resent an oligopoly exploiting regulatory capture and public
technical ignorance (cf. Clarke's Law) to pass laws that allow them to
arbitrarily and brutally crush innovative and competitive entrepreneurs.

~~~
vectorpush
Facebook is not mandatory, you don't have to use it, the government doesn't
need to get involved.

~~~
cookiecaper
The government _is_ involved. The CFAA and similar laws allow Facebook et al
to crush anyone who attempts to break their stranglehold. That's exactly the
problem. Alternatives to Facebook that may have otherwise been wildly
successful were sued out of existence this way.

The government has given Facebook offensive weapons against competitors. They
either need to respond by giving the consumer defensive weapons against
corporations whose zeal for intellectual property seeks to block or subsume
the consumer's access to the marketplace, or they need to remove their
interference all together.

------
tudorconstantin
To address a couple of concerns:

\- "running your own blockchain based messaging/mai server would be a
nightmare because of spam". I think spam can actually be solved by using
blockchains: given the low conversion rates in spamming, putting a small cost
for sending a message can discourage spammers. Take this even further: put a
variable cost to it - a higher cost for the first messages which would drop
exponentially when the recipient engages in the discussion, taking it toward
0. I've never heard of this before, maybe I'll make an ICO to implement this.
If you're doing it before me, I'll gladly accept some of your issued coins (my
non blockchain email is in my profile)

\- "blockchain apps are not scalable". Indeed, given the current algorithms
they're not scalable. But it's about web scale scalable. How many apps need to
be web scale level scalable and what about the rest 99% of the others? Also
when we'll have a functional implementation of lightning network this might be
a solved problem.

~~~
runeks
> Also when we'll have a functional implementation of lightning network this
> might be a solved problem.

This is unrealistic. With 1MB blocks, around 2 million people can
deposit/withdraw into payment channels once per week. Even using the best-
performing/most-insecure layer 2 protocol ("deposit your bitcoins with me and
I'll send them anywhere"), no more than 2M users would be able to join/leave
the payment network per week. The Lightning Network is _much_ more restrictive
than this, since they aim for trustlessness, which further decreases
performance (particularly for merchants, who want to receive large sums from a
lot of people).

Unless LN aims to create a separate cryptocurrency (where you can deposit into
the network but not withdraw), there's no way their trustless model can
perform better than a trustful one. And if they aim to create an altcurrency,
then it's not a Bitcoin payment network, and there's little reason to do it on
top of a blockchain in the first place. In that case it will be like a Bitcoin
side-chain that you can't withdraw from, so you're basically converting your
bitcoins into this other coin, without being able to go back.

Fundamentally, the Lightning Network doesn't scale because it models global
payments as anyone-to-anyone (like Bitcoin), when in fact payments flow from
billions of consumers to millions of retail merchants to tens of millions of
producers who pay out wages to their employees (consumers), after which the
cycle repeats. Any payment network on top of Bitcoin needs to take this into
account, in order to scale, since Bitcoin's throughput is so limited to begin
with.

As an example, imagine you're a merchant with a $100k monthly turnover. Using
the Lightning Network you, as the merchant, would need to deposit $100k into a
payment channel at the beginning of the month, in order to be able to receive
this amount, and this is only if the LN is highly centralized (one hop between
you and the payer). For every additional node between you and the payer, an
additional $100k would need to be deposited, sitting in a payment channel
ready to send. This just doesn't scale.

LN is a decentralized network whose performance _decreases_ for every node
that joins it. For every additional hop your payment crosses, someone needs to
deposit bitcoins into a payment channel, which both costs capital and
increases the risk that this channel is exhausted and you need to touch the
blockchain (expensive). A 10M-node LN would be able to send around a total of
2.1 bitcoins (remember, all nodes need to deposit bitcoins into a payment
channel, and there will only ever be 21M bitcoins), and crossing 10 hops would
require, on average, touching the blockchain every time 0.21 bitcoins are
sent.

