interolivary@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Blockchains are “just” distributed databases with a guarantee about transaction ordering (doesn’t have to be totally ordered like regular literal chain-of-blocks but eg. some sort of DAG). Then on top of that you have your consensus-forming mechanism like PoW, PoS or PoA (Proof-of-Authority), most of which are designed to work in a network where you don’t trust the participants, except for PoA where nodes that eg. have a cert signed by a specific authority can do validation.
I could see PoA networks being useful for eg. banks, real estate related stuff, DNS (like @jet@jet@hackertalks.com mentioned) etc. Anything where you’d be interested in having all parties agree on some order of transactions, and where validation is only done by trusted actors. DNS-like systems could maybe even be done with public validation, but PoW is out of the question because of the P part, and most PoS-like systems (well, PoW and PoS but still) have lots of problems with validators being incentivized to order transactions in a certain way (“Maximal Extractable Value” et al) that can actually be detrimental to the network (or even consensus) and to the users.
I’m not really super sold on the idea of public blockchain networks where anyone (well, anyone with the means, which is not a small barrier) can be a validator, they mostly seem a bit like a solution looking for a problem. I can easily envision blockchains becoming something like Linux in the sense that they could be used “in the background” in many contexts, but so that us plebs rarely actually have to deal with them (the majority of the Internet runs on some flavor of Linux, but most people don’t “consciously” use it apart from Android which does its damndes to pretend not to be Linux).
jet@hackertalks.com 1 year ago
Your comment pivoted from smart contracts to the foundations of why blockchains are useful. If we’re going down to strictly what a blockchain can be used for, replacing the web of trust for certificate validation.
Monero is a good example of what digital money should look like. Fungible, not an open ledger, usable like cash is.
interolivary@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Yeah my comment was all over the place, but I hope not too much to be totally worthless.
PoA doesn’t mean the validators can change history, at least unless the network is specifically designed for that – which most aren’t, although I’d argue there’s potential use cases for allowing to eg. “undo” transactions, like what your bank does if your credit card number gets stolen.
Re. partitionable chains, it’d be fun to think about how to manage transactions when some nodes are potentially light years away. We already have the “interplanetary file system” after all 😄
jet@hackertalks.com 1 year ago
Well we kind of already have historical examples of partitionable ledgers. It’s all about the merge. So historical documents written in far off offices merge or central offices. And they just kind of ignored conflict effects.
So if you have a very partitionable environment and we are using a distributed blockchain we might have to do something like record authority moving between partitions. That could be really interesting
interolivary@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Eventual consistency would be really eventual, heh.
And if the network is generally partitioned (or DAG-like I guess?), how do you handle eg. someone hopping on a (slower-than-light! I don’t believe in that FTL nonsense) ship and going from eg. Earth to live on Alpha Centauri? Do they have to bring a part of the DAG with them (or some sort of zk proof of it anyhow) in some form, so that it can be “transplanted” into the consensus on the other end when they arrive?