
“We already store data.  In a database. It works well” - susam
https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1226868636020805632
======
adim86
What I find fascinating is that the person pushing Jimmy to use crypto for
Wikipedia does not seem to fully grasp the technology they are pitching.

1\. He pitches it is great to track people posting illicit content on
Wikipedia, then argues that crypto is pseudonymous, So why would you use that
when web trackers we have today already know what I had for breakfast

2\. Why would anyone want people to post illegal material on a blockchain when
it is immutable? Let's assume the culprit goes to jail, but then you have
billions of people now able to access illegal content, that can never be
removed because it is on a blockchain

What a sales pitch.

~~~
sho
What you have to know is that there are thousands of people out there who made
windfall gains during the rise of bitcoin and the others. Say you bought or
mined 100 bitcoins back when they were a dollar, and somehow didn't sell -
they're worth a million today, on paper.

If you can talk up BTC/blockchain in some public place such that someone
notable agrees it's useful - Wales qualifies - the crypto press would go nuts.
"Wikipedia founder looking into blockchain!!" \- anything to get it back in
the press/public consciousness. If you can get it up just 10%, that's on paper
$100k.

For thousands of people, this is their motivation. Talking up bitcoin is
literally their full time job.

~~~
netsharc
I remember reading an article about Bitcoin where the author pointed out: when
you buy some bitcoins, you're buying because you're hoping it will go up and
you can sell and make profit in the future. So automatically, you're going to
be cheerleading and promoting it, in hopes it rises in value...

~~~
jraedisch
Same with every asset, I would think.

~~~
graeme
Nope. Assets have a sale value and an ownership value.

Suppose a company makes $100,000 per year and this is expected to continue.
How much would you pay for it?

Now, suppose it makes $100,000 per year, but for some reason once you have it,
no one will buy it off you. How much would you pay for it?

You'd pay less in the second case, but not that much less. The company has a
value which it gives to you for having ownership of it.

Meanwhile, bitcoin produces....$0 per year for owning it. The _only_ value is
in sale at a higher price. You have to bet on appreciation.

This is something fundamental people often misunderstand about, say, stocks.
The _price_ is set by supply and demand for the stock, but the value is
determined by the cashflows. Usually price and value move at least somewhat in
sync. But if stock markets went insane and valued everything at $0 for some
reason, you'd still want to own companies.

~~~
dorgo
What about a company which grows every year but never pays dividends and can't
be sold for more than $0? Would you want to buy it for $1? ( I prefer to use
$1 because $0 has the problem of indifference )

Even if this company owns the whole world at the end, is it worth even $1?

~~~
heartbeats
Yes, because then I am entitled to voting rights so that I can force them to
give me the money. Usually, voting rights are a tiny fraction of the stock
value.

If I get non-voting shares that do not pay dividends, then these aren't
shares, they're just useless scraps of paper. If the only utility I can get
from them is being able to point out that I "technically" own the entire
world, it is indeed useless.

Maybe I'm willing to pay a dollar for it but certainly not two.

------
Traster
I can't help but think the next response is "Do you use MongoDB? MongoDB is
webscale".

This is just trolling. No thought has gone into whether Wikipedia has a
problem to solve, nor whether blockchain has the capabilities to solve any
problem. It's just memes.

>Bitcoin can help any system to become more Byzantine fault tolerant

~~~
terminaljunkid
There was a Reddit user u/passwordissame whose nodejs mongodb webscale
copypasta was very funny to read. Is that you?

~~~
no_one_ever
There is a famous youtube video the above poster is referencing. Search
'MongoDB is web scale' or something along those lines.

------
egypturnash
Welcome to the future, where a blue cartoon deer can attempt to convince a
balding man who runs an encyclopedia that he should change his encyclopedia to
run on top of a complicated substrate of unnecessary cryptography, so that the
deer's stake in said unnecessary cryptography will become worth more.

~~~
lordleft
I didn't really expect our cyberpunk future to look quite like this

~~~
egypturnash
seriously how do I get out of this parody of a Bruce Sterling novel

~~~
pavel_lishin
Feels more Strossian to me.

------
kgraves
A stable battle tested database isn’t cool anymore, this is 2020, Jim. /s

Jokes aside, I would rather see a working proof of concept 'Blockchain
Wikipedia' being made from this crowd rather than have them shout suggestive
buzzwords at Jimmy Wales.

That being said, I wonder if Linus is open to making Git commits work on the
bitcoin blockchain, might have to ask him someday.

~~~
mrb
Actually, Git is technically a blockchain.

Commit hashes are a hash of the previous commit hash + new data. The structure
(history) is replicated in a decentralized way on every user's node. The only
missing thing is a proof-of-work, but that is optional in the definition of a
blockchain.

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
> Actually, Git is technically a blockchain.

No.

You can say that git reduces to a Merkle tree. And blockchains use Merkle
trees.

But you can't say that git is a blockchain.

[https://gist.github.com/joepie91/e49d2bdc9dfec4adc9da8a8434f...](https://gist.github.com/joepie91/e49d2bdc9dfec4adc9da8a8434fd029b)

[https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-
you-q...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-question-
need-for-blockchain-technology)

~~~
bob1029
I would argue the Merkle tree (or any other recursive signature algorithm) is
the most important quality of a blockchain. To say that git is technically a
blockchain is not entirely inaccurate IMO.

I think you are looking for the other qualities that typically apply to a
blockchain such as the implicit need to "mine" its resources. Git simply
produces these resources incidentally. I think this is the only major
difference.

~~~
meowface
It's still missing important pieces. They both fall under the superset of
"hash chain" / Merkle tree, but cryptocurrency blockchains are designed to
deal with the possibility of bad actors. Git can't ensure trust, unless you
PGP sign commits.

Git + PGP + some computationally expensive mechanism to broadcast verified PGP
key attributions + a consensus algorithm might be a little bit like a
blockchain, but I can't think of a good use case for that. Git repos generally
aren't intended to be pushed to by the whole world.

~~~
hannasanarion
A blockchain doesn't ensure trust either. The blockchain "trusts" whoever has
the most powerful hash cracking array.

~~~
meowface
I should've said "attempt to ensure trust".

------
Carpetsmoker
This follow-up thread is hilarious:
[https://twitter.com/DanielKrawisz/status/1226904340029460480](https://twitter.com/DanielKrawisz/status/1226904340029460480)

~~~
rsynnott
> He has all the world's knowledge in his system yet it doesn't tell him why
> Bitcoin is useful.

That should perhaps be a sign.

------
willvarfar
Its hard to tell if this user is a troll, or if they just don't get tech, but
surely Jimmy would be better off not replying?

Surely he gets bombarded with rewrite suggestions and pointless distractions
all the time, and he is pretty practiced at just ignoring them?

~~~
gerikson
Wales was invited to speak at the Coingeek conference, an event funded by
Calvin Ayres who is one of the main movers behind the Bitcoin SV ("Satoshi's
Vision") fork.

After some dismay from people opposed to this (both people who are "anti-
Bitcoin", and the Bitcoin proponents who are anti-SV), he stated that he
intends to speak his mind and tell the conference that BSV won't help
Wikipedia in any way.

Wales is no stranger to social media or publicity. The fact that this thread
has been posted to HN shows that.

~~~
ortusdux
Something tells me that this twitter interaction will make it into his
presentation.

~~~
gerikson
I really hope it will be available online after the conference.

------
m-i-l
If you really need WORM, e.g. for compliance with SEC Rule 17a-4, it is
sufficient to copy your data to non-eraseable media, not _master_ your data on
non-eraseable media. And you don't need blockchain.

------
zozbot234
Some people would take issue with the "It works well" part.
[https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2020-February...](https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2020-February/013793.html)
Turns out that scaling up a general-purpose triple store beyond 10B triples is
really, really hard, and that few or no people in the FLOSS community
(important due to Wiki's reproducibility and freedom-to-fork requirements) are
paying attention to the problem.

~~~
jonathanpierre
It does work well though. As a user, I can't remember significant Wikipedia or
Wikidata outages.

And I'm really not sure if whatever blockchain solution that person on twitter
wants Wikimedia to use is even able to get to that scale, yet alone perform
better an it than what Wikimedia currently has.

~~~
diegoperini
Here in Turkey, we had Wikipedia banned for 4 years. Luckily, the ban has been
lifted last month.

I'm not arguing blockchain would be a good mitigation for a future incident
though.

~~~
JshWright
Was that the fault of Wikipedia's database?

~~~
samatman
In a limited sense, yes, it was.

Because Wikipedia's database is centralized, and lives at a particular (range
of) IP addresses, it's trivial for a state actor to censor it.

Does a sprinkling of magic blockchain solve this problem? Not really. But
something more specific to the problem might; being able to torrent the full
data dump is a step in the right direction.

~~~
dharma1
You can torrent a full snapshot

[https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages](https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages)

And also download snapshots from IPFS

[https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-
wikipedia/](https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/)

I guess the issue with snapshots of large datasets is that they go out of
date, and downloading the whole data set regularly is a bit painful

~~~
samatman
Well, yes, that's why I indicated that being able to torrent a fully snapshot
is a step in the right direction.

------
vermontdevil
Another crypto post here:

Wikipedia has grown to the point where it's really so important that the
database is going to need to be WORM compliant so records can't be changed and
editors can be encouraged to be more responsible. This would make inserting
false info more expensive & increase trust.

Jimmy replied:

It is really important that records can be changed. Removing that feature
would be bad.

~~~
amckenna
This is where I diverge from Jimmy, as he is misinterpreting what the
commenter is saying. The commenter is talking about _audit logs_ of changes to
Wikipedia being kept in WORM compliant record, which is a good idea - audit
logs should be immutable. Jimmy seems to be interpreting the comment as saying
the pages of Wikipedia should be immutable, which obviously should not be the
case.

------
lasky
“Please use this technology I find interesting, because I want it to be
useful”

~~~
duskwuff
Not cynical enough. Try:

"Please use this technology I'm financially invested in, because I want its
value to rise."

------
Ragnarork
I can't help but feel the person pushing for the idea has something to gain
personally from one of the most well-known website out there actually using
blockchain for... "something", whatever that something is.

And that makes the whole exchange pretty surreal.

------
rsynnott
I feel like, after a few years decline, there's been a _sharp_ rise in
incidence of "have you heard the good news about our lord and savior magical
internet money" lately. Not sure what's driving this.

~~~
broodje
I'd wager the start of a new multi year bullrun, fuelled by developments in
different technologies.

~~~
tehlike
I'd wager it's tether, and the market manipulation that comes with it.

------
rubyfan
Blockchain is overdone. It’s good for crypto currency but really doesn’t solve
the myriad of things its being pushed on. There are a dozen consultants trying
to sell corporations on what blockchain can do. While it’s true that if you
spend money modernizing some legacy way of doing things it’ll probably be
better but doing it on blockchain is not the secret sauce. It’s buzzword
market and a buzzword solution that isn’t worth the complexity.

~~~
acdha
It’s still unproven that it’s good for a currency, too: a decade in, the only
significant uses are speculation and money laundering. There are a few users
trying to do normal daily life purchases but that volume is a tiny rounding
error in the global financial system, which is why backers have lately been
trying to retcon it into some sort of reserve currency store of value after
having failed at the primary purpose.

~~~
qertoip
Sovereign store of value is the primary use case.

~~~
acdha
No. Just because that’s the community’s preferred PR answer after failing to
become a useful currency doesn’t mean the rest of us forgot the previous
decade of breathless claims that Bitcoin would replace the USD and Visa,
PayPal, etc. in daily usage. People used to write these glowing stories about
routinely buying coffee and paying for Ubers with it.

------
abraxas
As always the shitty communication medium that is twitter prevents one from
discerning any context within which the post was made.

~~~
varjag
You scroll up for context.

------
gfodor
In finance, this is called "talking your book." The prevalence of this in the
crypto space should be embarrassing.

------
ronenlh
People new to blockchain and tech in general seem to think that blockchain
invented the database and public key cryptography. All the ideas they propose
are solved by them.

~~~
acdha
It comes back to money: a pure fiat currency like Bitcoin is only worth what
its users believe it to be worth — otherwise you’ve just paid a lot for some
random bits. That means that everyone who has spent real money in that space
has a vested interest in getting other people to buy in. They’re not going to
benefit from your use of a database or PKI and thus won’t consider those as
possible solutions.

This works as well as any other system designed by the sales team.

------
PedroBatista
Are these crypto nuts or just kids who found a ‘new thing’?

Either way it’s a solution looking for a problem and the solution it’s always
these people being the ones in charge.

------
kerng
I find it interesting that Jimmy is even engaging in the discussion, because
the other party clearly does not understand Blockchain or Cryptocurrency.

------
henryackerman
Which colour do you want that blockchain?

~~~
lsb
I think mauve has the most RAM

------
thesausageking
Better Tweet from Jimmy in that thread:

"That isn't how blockchain works. That suggestion - to force people to
strongly identify and pay for the privilege of editing Wikipedia - is a bad
idea independently. And [it] would be easy and cheap to implement without
blockchain."

This is the key problem with most DLT applications. Any blockchain that's used
for audit and verification needs some way to connect what happens in the real
world (the person uploading content) to the digital one. Putting the digital
side onto a blockchain doesn't help if you can fake the data you're putting
in. Garbage in, garbage out.

------
leothekim
> But what specifically are you proposing?

> That you think more deeply about why Bitcoin is a good idea.

This pretty much sums up every conversation I have had with a blockchain
proponent.

------
rjmunro
[https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-
projects](https://stats.wikimedia.org/v2/#/all-projects) says there have been
44 million edits and 21 million user edits on Wikimedia sites, so 24 edits /
second. That's about the fastest bitcoin could possibly go.

------
hedora
Wikipedia is almost already a blockchain. All they need to do to become one is
to add a cryptographic hash of the previous database backup to a page included
in the backups. (This is what git does when it inserts the parent hash(es)
into the commit metadata, and it is a generalization of block chains —it’s
“chain” is actually a set of directed acyclic graphs)

Anyway, wikimedia posts backup copies of the database at dumps.wikimedia.com,
and those pages include sha and md5 hashes. I even found a page of magnet
links for english wikipedia on the meta wikipedia.

Magnet links contain the hash of the target, but it’s unclear if
meta.m.wikipedia is included in the english language dump file, or if it
includes magnet links pointing to itself.

I’d love to find the missing links. I’m sure Jimmy Wales would love credit for
accidentally reinventing the blockchain before the term was coined.

------
forgotpwd16
Is BSV supposedly the new cool altcoin?

Edit: Searching it seems to be a Bitcoin fork made by a fraud claiming to be
Satoshi.

------
nothrabannosir
Big fan of the follow up tweet:

>> Why are you anti-capitalist?

> I’m not anti-capitalist, are you on drugs?

[https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1226873569508044808](https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/1226873569508044808)

Ahh, Twitter.

~~~
m_fayer
Seriously. I think this was my "peak twitter" moment for the month.

------
exdsq
HN is very anti-blockchain which is surprising. I’m not agreeing with the
twitter user saying Wiki should be on a blockchain but projects like Visa B2B
Connect, which wants to use a DTL for interbank transactions, or multi-party
supply chains are valid use cases. They’re also technically interesting.

They have specific use cases sure, and some people who made a load of money in
2017 do chat a lot of rubbish, but it has become a bit of a meme topic around
here which is a shame.

I don’t feel I could post a genuinely interesting paper on decentralised
consensus without it being downvoted because blockchains won’t work as the
data store of some web app.

~~~
macspoofing
> which wants to use a DTL for interbank transactions, or multi-party supply
> chains are valid use cases.

I've been hearing about these use-cases for blockchain for years now ... and
still waiting for actual production use.

I'm also skeptical that a regular server-based approach wouldn't be better to
solve those issues. If banks and suppliers can get together and agree to use
blockchain to track their transactions, they can get together and set up a
centralized server to do the same.

Blockchain is a 'technically interesting' architecture in search of a problem
to solve.

~~~
mopsi
> _I 've been hearing about these use-cases for blockchain for years now ...
> and still waiting for actual production use._

Preserving the integrity of log files and other records is a very obvious and
huge use case. Enterprise products have been on the market for years and have
been put into use by companies like Ericsson and Lockheed Martin.

[https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-
releases/2014/9/ericsson-a...](https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-
releases/2014/9/ericsson-and-guardtime-create-secure-cloud-and-big-data)

[https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2017-04-27-Lockheed-
Martin-C...](https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2017-04-27-Lockheed-Martin-
Contracts-Guardtime-Federal-for-Innovative-Cyber-Technology)

[https://www.rsyslog.com/doc/v8-stable/configuration/modules/...](https://www.rsyslog.com/doc/v8-stable/configuration/modules/sigprov_ksi12.html)

[https://github.com/GuardTime/ksi-tool](https://github.com/GuardTime/ksi-tool)

~~~
macspoofing
Did these projects actually go anywhere? Those press releases look very
aspirational ... and are already a few years old.

------
major505
I used to have a small black board in my table with the phrase "we don`t need
blockchain!" Every time a boss would came and propose that we use blockchain
tech, I would just wave it.

~~~
aflag
Where did you work? What was your job title? Who were all these bosses
preaching blockchains to you? So many questions!

~~~
major505
I used to work in a small startup. We buid .a system that collects sound of
water passing in public water distribution network, to identify water leaks.

The company had a few owners, and most of them non computer science people
(administration, markting, eletronic engineering backgrounds), and would
always sugest the use of blockchains, to store the sound samples, and
metadata, just because was the cool term at the time.

Since it would not add anything to our business model, and would come full of
techical hurdles, I would always opose, wath lead to the creation of the sign.

~~~
52-6F-62
I've been in businesses like this, too.

Though the keyword was AI or Machine Learning.

The mission was always "how can we implement a machine learning solution?" not
"what are our needs and how can we most effectively meet them?"

Someone is looking to pad the resume.

"Oversaw implementation of $TRENDY_TECH solution that $MEANINGLESS_METRICS"

------
sergiotapia
> furry

> bitcoin

> blockchain

> proposing /g/ memetech without even understanding it

yeah the memes write themselves.

------
dmitryminkovsky
Any time I come across these scene I am reminded of this story:

[https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/tomi-
ma...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/tomi-masters-down-
the-rabbit-hole-i-go).

HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19087505)

------
wesl3y
The other person in the debate is trolling, have a look at their youtube
channel:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC43D9FHfQc4uj7HZAhX97Rg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC43D9FHfQc4uj7HZAhX97Rg)

Hackernews fell for it hook, line and sinker. We've got to stop taking life so
seriously!

------
GaryNumanVevo
One Commenter put it best: _Bitcoins are to be owned for 35 min while you
place the order for drugs and that is all._

------
nottorp
A solution looking for a problem is resorting to 'think of the children'
marketing. Neeeext!

------
known
"If the only tool you have is a hammer, treat everything as if it were a nail"
\--Maslow

------
sub7
I can't wait until there's a run on the exchanges and they all go
insolvent/cease trading. This house of cards has created the most undeserving
kings ever.

------
boublepop
“ Blockbuster: “We already have a DVD rental service, and it has worked for
many years. No issues. We do not need to move to online streaming services.”

Netflix...”

I absolutely love this sentiment. I hope this user launches a blockchain based
Wikipedia competitor, and announces it on Show HN, so I can have monthly
updates on the technobabble fulled madness of a platform built by people who
don’t understand the technology or the space they are trying to solve, but
think it will all be ok as long as they can issue an ICO of their wiki-coin
before the feds shut them down.

I’m thinking it will pan out like a breaking bad/Silicon Valley cross over.

------
macspoofing
This is the problem with the blockchain. Any non-currency use-case for
blockchain can be done faster and more efficiently by a central server.

------
smitty1e
Wales is a Hayek fan?

That is not something I would have guessed.

------
gowld
TT;DR: a random nobody made a nonsense comment, and Jimmy Wales made a boring
reply, and gawkers and gossips are wasting everyone's time.

------
chadlavi
An incredibly sick burn

------
jjordan
Why did this drop completely from the front page?

------
known
BlockChain = AuditTrail + PKI

------
ultim8k
And needs thousands of donations to run...

~~~
kevingadd
Who's gonna run the frontends to make the contents of the wikipedia blockchain
accessible to billions of people on commodity web browsers? Does a blockchain
make that free somehow? The cost of the database servers is the only thing
you're potentially optimizing out here, except unless every frontend stores
the entire wikipedia blockchain locally you will need database servers still
anyway, they'll just be blockchain "frontends" instead of database frontends.

------
M-R-X
Why is that even a discussion?

Ain't it obvious that this is a good idea?

------
jmartrican
One potential use for blockchain (or chain of hashes) might be for authorizing
video by putting each of the frames in a blockchain. That way the raw video
can be authorized to not have been tampered with.

~~~
CerebralCerb
You could just hash the video file.

~~~
kiallmacinnes
Yes, and in the process 1) not spend CPU cycles extracting frames... 2) not
have a permanent+widely distributed copy of `$illegal` thing someone tried to
upload. 3) have a technology that works regardless of content type! amazing!
It supports new video codecs right out of the box ;)

------
Annatar
Guys you are all going down some block chain tangent. The point is that a
relational database is designed for storing data, and that works well. The
moral of Jimmy's response was _if you need to store and retrieve data a
relational database is the tool to do that_.

------
jstewartmobile
This reminds me to take a Wikipedia snapshot. It seems like it has become more
of an ideological battleground lately, and I'm not sure how long their editors
will be able to hold the line against various manifestations of astroturfer.

Lots of libertarian/anarchist types putting all their bets on blockchain
without really knowing much about it. Jimmy's response was gentle considering
the circumstances.

