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 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.
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...
This is fundamental to trading/speculating on anything.
Buying a stock/bond/asset comes with the intrinsic belief the value will increase. Being more specific, purchasing any speculative asset comes with the belief that the thing I am buying will increase in value relative to the thing I'm buying it.
The reverse is also true for selling a speculative asset.
Now that that is out of the way. Let's continue cherry picking as you've done and consider traders that specialize in short selling companies they deem as bad market actors. What do high profile short sellers do? They go on all sorts of media rants warning about companies/assets ect TO WARN PEOPLE AND INFORM THEM (legitimate or otherwise) for their own gain.
Cherry picking these ideas with respect to crypto is totally naive.
Some people use BTC to pay for VPNs, drugs, or simply to get cash out of their country. There was a lot of speculation that the big spike in BTC a few years back was the Saudi royalty trying to move cash out before MBS cracked down on them.
99% of Crypto is speculation. 0.5% is darknet markets, 0.25% is crypto ransomware, 0.1% is Saudi princes and rich people moving money out of a country. Somewhere in the remaining fraction of a percentage is legit legal usage.
There are much better ways to move money out of a country than one with locked-down fiat gateways in every first-world country with a fully public ledger. It may for a few thousand dollars but when you're talking Saudi prince money there's much better ways. It's not even good for that lol.
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.
Hypothetical indeed. Hypothetically, ownership value should be close to sale value.
At the moment I rather see people buying stuff that they think other people might deem valuable in the future, e.g. motivation behind buying TSLA is similar to buying BTC.
It’s a hypothetical, where the whole world has gone mad except you. Nobody buys. So it has a price you would purchase at, but $0 sale value to you as there are no other buyers. The true value of an asset is separate from the price (which is $0 in this case as you can’t sell it)
A thought experiment to show the difference between price and value. Bitcoin currently has a price. No actual intrinsic value other than the hope of value in the future.
I think it does have intrinsic value - that value lies in allowing some people, in some areas, to circumvent tracking or avoid authorities. To those people, BTC brings value which cannot be had elsewhere. My personal belief is that this is what fuels BTC's value, and the rest is speculation (but then it's similar to stocks).
I don't think that whether it has this property (and value) is in question - the question is how much of BTC's price is fueled by that value.
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?
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.
> You'd pay less in the second case, but not that much less.
Given the huge amounts of money that investors will invest in companies that make negative money every year, I think this is (perhaps unfortunately) not at all true in the real world.
When you buy (e.g.) real estate you can get value out of it without thinking about selling it for a profit later. Especially if it's your primary residence.
Same with most vehicles: they depreciate over time, but there is utilitarian value in the asset. Unless it's Steve McQueen's Mustang or something.
Yes, but most investment vehicles are assets (or are eventually backed by assets).
Real estate, and the various loans and derivatives, all eventually end up at real, productive assets that you might want to own.
Stocks and the various index funds and derivatives, all eventually end up with ownership of a company. A company which, if profitable, can pay dividends back to the owners.
I'd argue that it's a much rarer class of investment vehicle which is purely speculative.
If you have a house you ever intend to sell, you will also try to make the neighborhood it is in sound more attractive, to increase its sale value, regardless of whether you can extract utility from it.
I bought my house to live in, but it has gone up. Many of the stocks I've invested in I purchased because they pay dividends, and I expect they will continue to in the future. As long as that is true, I don't care if the price of the stock increases much. I have a case of fine wine in my basement, most wine doesn't age well, but some do. I expect these will increase in price... But I'm planning to drink more than a few bottles.
I think the term for this is "market depth". https://bitcoincharts.com/markets/bitstampUSD_depth.html The 3rd chart (and the 4th which is the same thing but zoomed in) shows: if I'm willing to accept as little as X USD / Y BTC exchange rate, how much BTC can I sell? The answer is the area under the curve above the price you're accepting.
If you have a lot more BTC to sell than could comfortably move on exchanges, auctions are the way to go. Sometimes the feds seize large amounts of BTC and auction them off in large blocks, and they not only sell but they go for above then-current exchange rates.
I think you can do $50-100m in a 24hour period without spooking the market much; that's on regular exchanges. Not sure about the depth of the market where they trade in blocks via some brokers.
You’ll have to split this amount between 7-10 exchanges. That becomes 5-10m/exchange. Coinbase volume today was $150m. $5m should be feasible over 24hours and btc trades 24/7.
Nobody. You’ll never find an answer and just get mumbles. The truth is crypto trading in actual USD (not tether) is super thin. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.
I actively trade these markets, so I have some insights. While I didn’t do $50m-$100m on a single day, I’m judging by market depth on the different exchanges I trade at.
There many small fish trading with a small ($500k-$1m) capital on a 3-5x leverage. They can do some days 5-10m of volume in usd.
Are you trading in actual dirty government fiat (USD) or fake tether (USDT)? There is a huge difference. And also note that some of the larger exchanges aren’t very upfront about which currency you are actually trading in...
Check out listings on localbitcoins for your region. It's worked well for me in the past (keeping transactions off public exchanges). In my city, it's been trivial to move $20k dollars in a couple hours.
Big amounts, like 25M+ are usually done OTC. Several big companies in the space offer this service and are able to link you with one or multiple buyers to offload 9 digits.
You can easily offload 10M USD worth over 10-20 minutes without having a big effect on the overall market.
Can you link to an exchange that a) has the book depth to handle 10M USD currently and b) has a straightforward way to then move the cash position into a US bank in the same timeframe as an ACH?
It has been years since I looked but that wasn’t available when I did. It would be a positive sign for the maturity of the market.
At this moment, on Coinbase, you can instantly sell approximately 1000 BTC for $9.91M - about 4% under the mid market price against what is on the book. Assuming you are a US person (since you want to move the money to a US bank) and have no problem complying with their KYC policies, you should be able to get the money a day or two if you chose to accept a wire instead of an ACH. Just for comparison, for ACH in particular since you mention it, most traditional trading institutions (etrade, schwab, ameritrade) limit your ACH transfers to 250k/day - coinbase does as well last I checked. So you'd get your money about 10x as fast as if you tried to do it via ACH. Wires are typically unlimited.
Coinbase has a $10k per day withdrawal limit. You have to contact them to get more. They don't specify how difficult or time consuming that process is.
OTC desks are different than exchanges, and you won't be able to see their books. There are also trading algos meant to push things through the market without being noticed. Of course it comes at a cost, you'll usually pay a discount (up to 5% or so ) to unload a large amount of crypto.
Crypto is an unregulated wild west, so these OTC desks typically don't have BD licenses, might do prop trading and be the counterparty to your transaction and take your position on their books (and then try to unload it themselves at a profit), or might match trades with their own customer lists. It's typically a pretty low-tech operation running on chat rooms.
Market selling that much Bitcoin in one place isn't quite possible right now, but you could do this in a day on Coinbase and get real dollars in your bank account. If you split it up and sold some on other exchanges like Kraken you could reduce the time required to sell it. You could also trade the BTC for other popular assets like ETH on exchanges without fiat markets then sell that off on exchanges that do.
CMC reports around $37B in global BTC volume right now, but the real figure is probably $2.5 - 3B, and of that it's fragmented in different fiat currencies with different restrictions on where those exchanges are able to send money. So while it's certainly not nothing and it's better than years ago, it's like a quarter of the average daily volume of shares in a single company like Apple.
Oh right. The mysterious “OTC market” that somehow lets people unload their massive gains without affecting the market. Yeah right. $10 million of actual US currency is going to have a massive effect on the BTC market regardless of how it was traded.
If you could somehow unload massive amounts of BTC without affecting the market it would be arbitraged away almost instantly.
People who suggest that it is possible to unload BTC without impacting the market don’t understand finance at all. Not understanding finance, economics, math, computer science, politics and monetary theory is par for course for most BTC supporters.
It’s an illiquid market, I remember during the peak I needed to unload amounts several orders of magnitude lower than the amounts being discussed here. It was not as easy or straightforward as some would have you believe on here. What kind of a fool would trade real world fiat currency for an asset as volatile as Bitcoin? That’s the real question that should be asked.
A lot of places can't do more than 10k a day. So you either try and sell at the peak and eat the risk of them going under, or you sell continuously and leave a lot of money on the table because price fluctuates week to week.
And all of that made logical sense to me, but it wasn't until I took a job in the crypto space that I appreciated, viscerally, the extent to which it was happening. Dozens of Twitter accounts deriding other projects in the space as shitcoins 24/7. "Bitcoin is 100% not a scam and every other crypto project is 100% a scam" is somehow a position that's taken seriously by sheer memetic force of will. It's wild.
Such a scam that more than %90 of it's entire price history made profit for anyone that bought it. Such a scam that you don't need any permission to sell or buy and gives you a returns that are not possible in any asset for public. It might not be the best store of value all the time or similar but in certain time frames, it's risk/reward ratio is beyond anything that's exist in investment world. Especially for public.
While I agree about the concept, I think Bitcoin has jumped the shark on this one. It's hopeless to get it to bounce 10% with just that. It still works with alts that their market cap is small and are fairly non-liquid.
That's very frustrating when arguing against blockchain/cryptocurrencies on the internet (and even in places like HN). For every blockchain enthusiast that has a good understanding of the technology and interesting arguments you have a dozen of people who have barely any understanding of how it works and what it can really do and will spew all sorts nonsense, sometimes even self-contradicting themselves in the process. I suppose that some of them argue in bad faith because they're invested in the technology and want to get rich.
This particular issue of the privacy of the blockchain is one of the best examples, I very commonly see discussions in CC circles where it's both argued that blockchain respects its user's privacy and at the same time that we shouldn't be worried about bad actors abusing an anonymous, unregulated system to fuel corruption or highly illegal stuff because "everything is public on the blockchain, it's completely transparent". I guess that's why many of them have this obsession about quantum resistance, there's clearly a state superposition at play in there somewhere.
An other favorite of mine is "what do you mean cryptocurrency is unpractical? I use it to pay everyday using <centrally operated credit card service provided by a centrally operated cryptocurrency exchange using an off-chain ledger that may or may not eventually be settled in bulk on the blockchain>". Sounds like Visa with extra steps to me.
> I suppose that some of them argue in bad faith because they're invested in the technology and want to get rich.
And some of them argue in what they would call good faith, for they have drunk the koolaide, want to believe, for this allows them to believe that they hold a valuable asset, were clever in getting in early, etc.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Yes, the people arguing that blockchain has it figured out for regular transactions are fools. Blockchain has a long way to go and many serious challenges to overcome before it can compete with payment networks like Visa.
It does a disservice to say the technology is already there, because it suggests that the current version is as good as it gets. To me, blockchain or something that incorporates its best features (decentralization, immutability) will need to process transactions for:
- Fractions of a cent
- Confirm in seconds
So far that is not possible, and there is no clear way to achieve it, but with blockchain as a base there is no doubt that it will eventually be done. At that point, if you have not sacrificed decentralization or immutability, you have something truly amazing.
Really, for me, before I could ever consider using Bitcoin for regular transactions, it would need to become many orders of magnitude more stable. There's no way I could ever use something as a currency replacement when its value still swings up and down by as much as 10% in a week.
I don't think I could ever use Bitcoin for regular transactions, even if it became as stable as USD. As soon as someone gets your bitcoin address they can see your full transaction history and basically your net worth, there's no way anyone wants that!
Arguably you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, i.e., you'd split it up across many wallets. But I agree with this sentiment. Banks exist for a reason folks, holding your entire net worth in btc across a few thumb drives isn't much different than storing all your retirement funds in a shoebox IMO.
> Arguably you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, i.e., you'd split it up across many wallets.
Has anybody brought up how user friendly bitcoin is?
I too enjoy having to print bitcoin private keys on archival paper, wrap them in ten ziplock bags, shove that into a watertight container and bury it under the backyard bird feeder. Otherwise somebody would get my keys and take ownership of my entire net worth, leaving me destined for the poor house.
Because with bitcoin, whoever has the key owns the bitcoin.
You’re describing the Lightning Network. There’s still a lot of room for improvement before it’s suitable for non-enthusiasts, but it works and has been live for well over a year now.
Ah yes, LN will has been poised to save bitcoin for the last decade now. The one little secret to bitcoin investors don’t want you to know! Want bitcoin to be a success? Don’t use it!
I think this is representative of a general case of many internet subcultures with a fanatical following. In many of these communities you are deeply into thing X, all problems are always solved by more thing X. Hostility arises to any suggestion that thing X is not a solution to any given problem. Obviously this has nothing to do with how cool, interesting, or beneficial thing X may be. They just lose sight of the fact that there is not really a thing that literally solves all problems and never has any downsides.
Seen it pretty commonly on reddit for various topics.
I'd never connected the dots, but I think you're right. Most developer crypto zealots I know are also zealots about things like: micro services, static typing, the brave browser, and <front-end frameworks du jour>.
I've been on the internet for so long that I genuinely don't know whether this person is serious or trolling hard.
Also that person chiming in calling Jimmy anti-capitalist cracked me up.
Oh an OT: WTF is a cashtag? I'm not using Twitter, the linkified $BSV in the very first message was new to me, and on hover the URL reveals it's a cashtag. I'm feeling old.
Based on the decade of cult-like blockchain advocacy I’ve seen, I’m going with “dead serious”. There are a few - maybe as high as 1-2% - people in that community who genuinely understand the technology and its relevance but it’s dominated by get-rich-quick types. Once you’ve “invested” the only way you make money is by convincing other people to buy in and that usually means turning into a marketing bot pushing it for every problem — basically the nerd equivalent of joining an MLM.
Something that cryptocurrencies changed about the internet is that you can be talking to someone who has $2 invested and is now spending their time shilling a product in bad faith.
The Brave browser suffers from this as well since they went with their own cryptocurrency BAT crap. Every "use brave" you see in the wild had a good chance of the 14-year-old hoping to get rich from their $2 investment. Yet they have all the time in the world to argue with people on the internet. There's no difference between the posts of someone who is excited about the Brave platform vs someone who holds $5 of BAT on Coinbase and thinks it will one day buy them a lambo if they put in the e-time.
meanwhile professors in academia teaching students (who came there to learn from an authoritative source) that blockchain is the future and an important skill in the industry. IMO academia doesn't do enough and is very much complicit in peddling this horse manure.
I've been surprised by the number of blockchain articles in Communications of the ACM and the more practical publication ACM Queue. I expect blockchain is a flash-in-the-pan topic that will get a lot of papers for a few years working on increasingly esoteric details, and then everyone will forget all about it in 5 years.
Being involved in audit/security for quite a while, I do appreciate the benefits of blockchain. Would I tell a large corporation to drop their DBs and switch to BC? Not this decade. As Jimmy Wales wrote "It works well.", and if it ain't broken, don't fix it.
I can imagine a general ledger audit to be 'bullet proof'. Of course there are other issues in a DB's user access management. But we can achieve the same results right here, right now, without having to invest $m to change our software/infrastructure/SIEM, etc. in order to achieve in 5 years, what we are already doing now.
Change will come (as always), but in the right time. Where "right" in this case is benefit largely outweigh costs (build/maintain/support/train/etc.)
What kind of usecase do you imagine for blockchain in audit/security, given that sensitive information can't be put on a public blockchain and the security provided by proof-of-work consensus doesn't work in a smaller private blockchain?
Personally I had guessed a warped and shallow idea of capitalism from the start - regardless of trolling or sincerity. A "everyone should be greedy as possible and running a free encyclopedia superpasser is anti-capitalist due to not trying to make money from it". Which is wrong / a poor approximation as part of the bloody point of capitalism is to have your spending in both money and effort advocate your views.
Anyway even before checking that sort of view in generic ironically fits both the anti-capitalist and the speculator "Gordon Gecko" types.
Don't generalize from such a sample please. BSV is a cryptocurrency forked from Bitcoin by supporters of a businessman called Craig Wright[1] who is widely considered as a fraud, even within crypto.
Just like with any nascent, hyped-up field, you will have people who are in it purely for the money. The fact that cryptocurrency makes it trivial to operate and participate in Ponzis exacerbates the issue, but if you went to a random ML/AI conference a few years ago you'd also have been pitched dozens of Ponzis (in the form of nonsensical startups) by opportunists who understand nothing about the technology.
There’s a key difference: ML was solving real problems from day one - not everything, not as well as some boosters claimed but real products did useful work. Bitcoin a decade in has … ?
What are you implying exactly: that there are no problems with present day currencies, or that Bitcoin doesn't solve any of those problems?
> ML was solving real problems from day one
No, machine learning developped slowly over decades before it could be fit into practical applications.
Bitcoin's launch was more than the launch of a product, it was the first time the ideas in its paper were actually put together. If we put cryptocurrency on the ML R&D timeline, we'd be in 1970 right now.
Of course, in the present day it solves more niche problems than ML which everybody uses through Google, but the fact that it's already used by real people at all is remarkable.
My point was that Bitcoin could disappear tomorrow and nobody other than speculators would have any impact on their lives.
Note that the ML comparison was specific to the last decade mentioned by the person I replied to, not a history of the field. It’s possible that in the future we’ll look back at this period similarly to the first AI winter but I think even that would be disappointing to most participants because whatever succeeds won’t make them rich the way everyone in the space is hoping.
What I really hate about digital currencies is that people call it "crypto" all the time, especially in your context someone can misread it as "cryptography" instead of crypto-money... this is often highly misleading and casts a bad shadow on cryptography (for people who aren't knowledgable in these fields.
This bugs the shit out of me, too, but it is in some sense correct.
Cryptocurrency enjoys a much, much higher mindshare among humans than cryptography. I guess because it's money. And also because it's been this weird but actual bubble, not to mention countless ponzi schemes and debased ICOs and Floyd Mayweather in a private jet and whatever.
I've resigned myself to saying all the syllables and typing all the characters of "cryptography" when I discuss it because I don't think you and I are going to win this one.
Unfortunately I think this fight was officially lost when noted cryptographer Matt Blaze gave in and sold the crypto.com domain to a blockchain company. (I don't blame him for doing so, I just think it's a noteworthy event.)
What I mean is: I agree with you, but I think the crypto ship has sailed.
For what it's worth I started backpacking in the 1990s and back then "crypto" to me meant cryptosporidium, the 2nd biggest concern about drinking backcountry water (after giardia).
What kills me is that it's not just 'crypto'currency vs 'crypto'graphy and a matter of which term is more popular in the public mind and therefore gets to keep the shorter phrase.
Crypto is ALREADY short for cryptography, as in, cryptographic-currency => crypto-currency.
I'm kinda surprised nobody has posted illegal pornography onto the bitcoin block chain, and then issued legal proceedings against anyone they can identify running a node.
Would be a good way to shut down a competing coin.
What I found interesting, though predictable, was that we saw the same wave of "Oh but it's just a set of bits, it's only illegal data if you go looking for the decoder to compile the pieces together". Which could be said about a lot of data formats.
I remember seeing these same justifications 15+ years ago when laws were being tightened up around possession and distribution of child abuse imagery, that it's just a stream of bits, you can't criminalise that... You can, and you should.
(The extent to which it can be pursued, and to which those who are simply running cryptocurrency nodes should have any culpability for propagating said data is very much open to legal argument, of course.)
I think the idea that π contains all possible decimal strings in its expansion [which is highly probable but not proven AIUI] provides a little push back.
If I present the idea "circle", then hypothetically all (!!) you need is a decoder (substring location within π, and video processor) and you've got every illegal image ever made compiled into a handy video stream.
So logically (and I'm fully aware law isn't logic [and probably shouldn't be?]) there seems like you would need something else other than just possession of a number to make that possession illegal. (I'm not arguing that's the current law in any country, fwiw).
tl;dr -- at some point it is just a concatenation of bits.
First off, that has not been proven about pi, but it is heavily theorized. Second, you need the substring index, which, for a large file is guaranteed to exceed the original's file size to begin with. Transmitting that substring index is likely equivalent to compressing the file.
Courts aren't robots and people are judged by other people. Nobody will go to jail for holding a file with all possible files in it. But using that file with a specific substring index to extract something illicit, with intent, will almost certainly not make the courts happy. IANAL.
>But using that file with a specific substring index to extract something illicit, [...] //
The question at hand though, is if you don't extract the illicit thing [from the Blockchain] is possession of the Blockchain enough.
FWIW I think possession has to be the measure used for child pornography and similar content, at present. But what is meant precisely by possession may need some interpretation (does one "possess" a file if one has the magnet link?) and may evolve in the future if such Blockchain attacks become of interest to the legislature.
>you would need something else other than just possession of a number to make that possession illegal.
Yes, the index, which would itself be the encoding of the file. It's just Huffman coding optimising for the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter.
It provides no pushback at all when a picture has been taken, jpeg encoded and then sliced into pieces and inserted onto the blockchain as extra data on a number of transactions, in a way easily recognised and easily re-extracts.
Sure, those numbers could have come about some other way, but they didn't.
Your hypothetical decoder is actually going to contain a very large amount of very specific data as well, so much so that the 'circle' part of it is more or less irrelevant. You've just defined a (very poor) data encoding scheme.
If that is the case, then the information will be contained in the "decoder", not in pi itself. So that particular "decoder" should be banned, not pi. Other "decoders" that point to other parts of pi would not be banned.
How about if you have it but never used it, so you have the index but never expanded Pi that far, or doing the expansion would take longer than the age of the Universe, say?
So, how about if you never viewed the 'file' from the Blockchain, aren't we creeping gradually towards saying that would be fine too. Of course the law has elements necessary for practical enforcement too which we generally ignore when waxing philosophical.
Yeah really it is pointing out that the law is stupidly written conceptually as pi technically contains all of the child pornography in the world once you go out enough digits. In the real world it requires a judge to put a stop to utterly stupid abuses like arresting someone for having enough sources of noise on them which through a series of operations could be transformed into child pornography while not dismissing a 1s complimented video file of the defendant presenting their driver's license to a camera before molesting a child as tampered evidence.
Personally I believe the law is long overdue for refactoring but that it would be a twofold nightmare to first actually do it and second getting it approved through the mechanisms of legislation.
No. Posession of any data should never be criminal. Just like you wouldn't send someone to prison how having a book, you shouldn't send someone to prison for simply having a picture, no matter what it is a picture of.
I don't think I have to say that obviously child rapists are the worst scum of the earth and they should rot in prison forever. But the idea that you can send someone to prison for simply having a picture(or in some countries, a drawing!!!), is just simply idiotic.
> No. Posession of any data should never be criminal.
Nonsense, if that data is national secrets, if it's child abuse photographs, if it's people's stolen credit card numbers, or any number of other types of data, mere possession is a problem.
> Just like you wouldn't send someone to prison how having a book
I would if it was a book full of child abuse photos.
I'm sorry, what is idiotic for you is common sense in most of the western world, you'll have to do more than call the idea stupid to argue a case like that.
Damn this subject is extremely touchy. I remember recently on the r/dataset subreddit, there was an image set that was essentially a set of pornography images. I remember thinking okay there could be a useful image type classification project in here. Then I started noticing some CLEAR ambiguities in the age of the subjects, I made a post on the thread and was told to basically shut the fuck up and I was making something of nothing.
Apparently I also don't take this shit lightly, because immediately reported that shit. All of this to say, prior to this experience I was under the impression that people should be allowed to study / research datasets of questionable morality / ethics but was completely naive and idealistic around researchers being completely benevolent.
I respect much more the ethical hoops required to study/research this type of material and I think other researchers ought to also respect them.
As for drawings, I agree with you. As for actual pictures, I very much disagree. Child porn serves as a violation of the subject's privacy, and its demand encourages more supply. There's a lot of scientific work on how child porn markets online operate.
There's also the argument that it's hard to prove someone has paid for it (either with money, or with another currency - some online CP forums work by trading images rather than money), so the next best alternative is to illegalise simple possession. Granted, this also runs into some problems; the same justification can be used to illegalise child pornographic drawings, which are frequently used to groom children. Because it's very hard to prove grooming of a victim who has already been groomed, the justification would argue that the next best way to ensure child rapists are caught would be to illegalise possession of the drawings.
Therefore, many countries use the strong probability of second-order effects to illegalise both drawings and photos/videos.
In my view, criminalizing the imagination (any imagination) is a severe misstep in itself, if not morally, then on the basis of most Western societies - the harm principle. Real child porn is not a product of the imagination, it is a documentation of real abuse to victims.
>>Real child porn is not a product of the imagination, it is a documentation of real abuse to victims.
Except that obviously some countries take it too far and people have been convicted for production of child pornography for having a picture of themselves on their own phone(say an 18 year old who took a picture of themselves when they were underage). That's not purely theoretical "this could happen, but probably won't because people apply common sense". That does actually happen in real world. And there is no abuse involved, maybe except for the abuse of he justice system. This wouldn't happen if just simply having a picture wasn't criminal in itself.
>>the justification would argue that the next best way to ensure child rapists are caught would be to illegalise possession of the drawings.
Would it? Because I feel that if any one of us came across child porn accidentally the right solution is to burn the machine down and never ever tell anyone about it, since mere fact of having looked at it(downloaded it to your browser) is a jail sentence in most civilized nations. If it was legal I would have absolutely no problem reporting it the police, which I am sure would help actually catching rapists. Which actually brings me to my next point - as far as I know, as long as minors are not involved, posession of pictures of pretty much any illegal act is not in itself illegal. You can go and google a video of couple guys killing another with a screwdriver - perfectly legal to watch. You can probably go on some snuff websites and watch videos of actual rape - not illegal to watch as far as I know. What's the difference? Because someone might masturbate to one of these but not the others? Now I don't believe that for a second, and it's not like the demand argument doesn't apply here either.
But to your point, there are hangers-on in the technology space advocating every day for the use of things they don’t understand. It becomes wearisome trying to deal with them. They can never truly explain, beyond market-speak, what they propose. It’s really only troublesome when they’ve sold their snake oil to someone with clout in your company ...
All the while throwing out phrases like "byzantine fault tolerant" to add a sprinkle of esotericism to his proposal. The blockchain is cool technology, but it's odd how many people try to force-fit it into domains where it just doesn't belong. I have to wonder if the "investor" side of equation is causing this kind of desperation regarding technical use cases.
In all fairness, the OP seems young -- I remember when I was naive and idealistic too and that the technology I had invested time in learning was so obviously going to be the backbone of everything to come. It's a classic case of starting with technology and trying to shoehorn a use case into it rather than starting from a use case and molding the technology to fit.
Jimmy's reply is basically "you don't understand the use case"; which the OP does not because he's trying to find a use for the cool tech he learned. What I don't understand is why Jimmy is publicly arguing with someone as green as the OP...
Has anybody here ever actually met a human being who has used cryptocurrency in a way other than: (a) speculating (including trying to hype and pump "blockchain technology" on every discussion corner of the internet), or (b) buying drugs on the internet?
Cryptocurrency has basically single-handedly created and enabled the ransomware industry which has touched the lives of millions of people. Almost every single week someone is using cryptocurrency to pay off a ransom and reclaim their data. This industry wouldn't be possible without cryptocurrency.
I used it once to buy a pizza. It felt like the future and this was the time when BTC was a little less than a dollar and hadn't moved much. And the ledger was 4-5GB. It was fascinating tech and there was some smoke there. What I didn't anticipate was the dark web stuff and speculators vastly exceeding the ledgers capabilities.
To me its weird that immutability is what is focused on. Yes immutability is not really great for Wikipedia; sometimes people accidentally post private info and its nice to be able to redact it. However it seems like the least of the problems of applying a bitcoin fork to hosting wikipedia. Like I can imagine immutable wikipedia being possible even if not desireable. I can't imagine using blockchain as backend database of wikipedia even remotely scaling to something like that.
Heck, the entire pitch for bitcoin sv seems to be we will make bitcoin scale by removing all the limits that give normal bitcoin the slightest chance of scaling. It seems pretty rediculous even by bitcoin standards.
#2 is the weirdest for me. You want a fully immutable, distributed widely by design, system for exploiting children? wtf? I'm much more concerned about the damage done to kids than about providing an additional, likely ineffective, way to identify a distributor.
They're also not seeing the flip-side of paying-to-edit and tracking all editors: it's trivial for a government to then use it do identify anyone they consider a dissident.
"the person pushing...to use crypto... does not seem to fully grasp the technology they are pitching"
This is a summary of 99% of "blockchain will solve your problem" pitches. Nor they understand the existing state of the art in DBs and other information storage systems. (Technology that's been around since the 70s)
It wouldn't even make sense, the Bitcoin blockchain is intended to be used almost exclusively as a distributed transaction ledger. If you want decentralized storage look at the IPFS or Storj projects
>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.
Makes sense to me. It hampers government censorship by making something illegal. While I'm sure people have exceptions they think should be illegal and inaccessible, the end result with technology is you either have a technology that is resistant to censorship for everything or nothing, and I prefer everything.
It is the same thing with encryption. You can give the government a backdoor just for the super illegal stuff you really want to stop, but the backdoor will exist for all material and thus compromise encryption in general, even if the government super duper pinky promises to only use it on the original illegal stuff.
Too much of this is all or nothing and I think the powers that wish for censorship keep pushing for 'just one exception' for a specific kind of illegal material to get public support for compromising the system for just that one thing, betting on the average individual not realizing that the compromise compromises the whole systems resistance against government censorship at any level.
That's not necessarily a good thing for Wikipedia, run by a well-respected organization that very much wants to remain legally operating and retain the ability to deal with infringing or illegal data and remove it. Just because you want this does not mean Wikipedia does. If that now means you need to convince Wikipedia that, no, they actually want to be associated with this content for eternity, that is the worst sales pitch ever made.
I get that organizations want to avoid the association because of the current social view of the technology. I wanted to give a different view of what the sales pitch could be (for that particular item, my response isn't for the other issue called out).
I don't see why it is considered such an inherently bad sales pitch. It is a sales pitch that involves taking a stand. Just because the cost benefit aren't in line with current organization goals does not make it the worst sales pitch ever. Is it any worse than trying to convince a group to run a tor node, giving all the sorts of illegal things that happen over tor?
There are social and legal ramifications, but that is also true of using tor, and if certain government officials get their way, of using encryption without the government being given a backdoor. Currently data stores that can't forget have a worse view, but I don't really see why people treat it as such a difference of kinds instead of just a difference of degrees.
> 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
I guess that's the whole point of it: illegal doesn't mean it's immoral, and no content could be silenced. But then another issue is who is going to pay for storing terabytes of copies of communist manifesto in-between legitimate edits to articles.
> 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
Obviously he was proposing storing metadata, not the content itself. Typically this kind of system works by storing a checksum of the content, or a link to the resource in an external decentralized-but-mutable store like IPFS. The illegal files would be dropped but there would still be an undeniable record on the blockchain.
I'm not defending the nonsensical use case (decentralizing the attribution part in an otherwise centrally controlled system wouldn't benefit anyone), but you might want to look more into crypto yourself if you care to learn.
EDIT: As expected, anything that's not bashing crypto (preferably with unrelated arguments) rakes in downvotes. Aah the lovely HN hivemind.
> EDIT: As expected, anything that's not bashing crypto (preferably with unrelated arguments) rakes in downvotes. Aah the lovely HN hivemind.
I’m guessing you’re getting downvoted because
1) you’re assuming a lot about what this guy intended and giving him a lot of credit when he clearly didn’t understand the topic, and
2) you end with “you might want to look more into crypto yourself if you care to learn” which almost seems like trolling because it’s essentially what this guy told Wales.
> 1) you’re assuming a lot about what this guy intended and giving him a lot of credit when he clearly didn’t understand the topic
I'll quote Daniel Krawisz's tweets with added emphasis on the points which indicate he wasn't proposing storing content on a blockchain:
> It would be so cheap to record [enough information] about all @Wikipedia interactions on the $BSV blockchain [...]
Key word "enough", suggesting "not all".
> My point is just that because because Bitcoin transactions always leave records, someone who uploaded illegal content would leave you with more [contextual information] that you could track on the blockchain than you would have if there weren't payments associated with their interactions.
"contextual information" == "metadata"
> 2) you end with “you might want to look more into crypto yourself if you care to learn” which almost seems like trolling because it’s essentially what this guy told Wales.
That was more about noticing the irony in GP chastising the tweeter for their ignorance and then showing seemingly greater ignorance about the same topic.
GP perhaps misunderstood the proposal. That doesn’t mean their ignorance is greater. I think the misunderstanding is quite reasonable given that the tweet was proposing a completely nonsensical plan. I think your reading of the intent is correct, but I also think this proposal was so poorly thought through that it doesn’t matter.
Also, don’t use brackets for emphasis. Brackets are used editorially to replace content or leave an editorial note. Using them for emphasis makes it look like you actually changed the core of the quote. And they make it harder to read.
There's no dedicated place to discuss meta-topics in here, and I feel the virulent anti-blockchain sentiment on HN is more detrimental to the quality of discussion than my small one-liner complaint at the end of an on-topic explanatory comment.
Oh I suspect the end game here isn't to preserve wikipedia as it is but instead create a system by which they have a wikipedia with facts they approve of and a means to track down anyone who dares correct them.
Pretty much the goal of all these fact checking systems that keep getting offered up. We need protecting, facts need protecting, provided it is all approved facts and people and a means to track down those who are not approved or have ideas that are not approved
> then you have billions of people now able to access illegal content, that can never be removed because it is on a blockchain
It's software. A blockchain can be programmed to accommodate your use case. It can also accommodate preventing bias all powerful editors from destroying or manipulating information without the approval of the community, which wikipedia does not.
I can give you one implementation off the top of my head. You could, in the blockchain, elect some editors that could remove things, but the effect would be subject to a time delay, such as a month for example. So things removed would still be on the blockchain but would be marked with some sort of quarantine bit that is set later in the chain.
When it comes time to remove the offending data, the software that verifies the blockchain would accept in lieu of the actual data, a set of signatures of the elected editors. All nodes would replace the block with banned data with the replaced one.
Jesus Christ, I'm not the poster child for this, ok? Just because you can find something you think is a problem with an implementation I came up with on the fly, doesn't mean the whole concept is bad.
Fine, make it instant. People can compare the old data with the new, and notice, and vote out an editor who is abusing their power.
The whole concept is bad, because the goals are paradoxical and mutually exclusive. Providing a way to instantaneously edit past transactions in a blockchain with the proper credentials sacrifices the only useful property that distinguishes blockchains from traditional databases (decentralized verification of/consensus about state).
The concept is bad because you don't want that property; you want a mutable data store with privileged and unprivileged access.
> Providing a way to instantaneously edit past transactions in a blockchain with the proper credentials sacrifices the only useful property that distinguishes blockchains from traditional databases (decentralized verification of/consensus about state).
There are different categories of data. Data which refers to the the chain itself must be immutable, I agree. But data that represents the content of articles posted there does not.
> The concept is bad because you don't want that property; you want a mutable data store with privileged and unprivileged access.
You do want that property for some categories of data. You don't want unaccountability in who can update articles and what changes they can make, but you do want the articles to be changeable.
What this provides is to prevent an organization from being corruptable. A government or powerful corporate entity could pressure wikipedia into changing an article to suit their purposes, and wikipedia could stone wall and refuse to comment on any changes they made for that purpose.
If it was on a blockchain, and an editor was pressured into making such a change, the community would be able to directly vote that editor out and get the original content restored.
If the content isn't on the chain itself then the entire exercise is pointless since the content is the thing that people care about (whether they want the content to stay or go)
When did I say it isn't? The idea is that some blocks can be accepted in lieu of the original if signed by certain entities that have been voted in by the community. In this way you can change previous blocks in the chain.
So you haven't actually achieved anything there, then. You still have certain people that the community elects or appoints by whatever means, that can make retrospective edits unilaterally.
What you're really talking about here is a change of governance model to allow editors to be removed more easily.
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
Unfortunately, the original poster appears to genuinely believe in the power of blockchain. Cryptocurrencies seem to attract a certain crowd which is extremely technical but also surprisingly naive about the way humans work. The result is you have a lot of idealistic techies who propose blockchain as the solution to literally every hard societal problem you can think of.
Problems that can be solved with blockchain must have a certain value if they get solved, and since blockchains are a good value store, perhaps we could make a blockchain where blocks are mined based on solving blockchain related issues, and the miners who solve these issues then get the rewards. I’m a bit fuzzy on the technical details, so perhaps the first draft can use written contracts and fiat exchanges as placeholder for the blockchain tech, and focus on problems that can be solved using the same. But there’s definitely a great startup idea here if only we can get the billions in investment needed to make this dream a reality!
There are no real problems with Byzantine faults in Wikipedia unless you start adding systems like blockchains. So they're proposing that it will fix a problem that it will cause. Interesting reasoning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's significant difference in opinion of what part of the Bitcoin protocol is the "blockchain". Usually, people talk about the persistent stuff being the blockchain. In that case, bits sitting in storage don't implement a protocol, therefore don't have a consensus mechanism.
In other words, the blockchain is just the data structure, the consensus sits outside of that as a distributed protocol.
Of course, parts of that data structure enable the protocol to work, which is the most interesting property of the blockchain, but that's just blocks, merkle trees, and chained signatures.
If you're focusing on the construction of the term "blockchain", you're already lost. The name is a red herring. It's very clear that the innovative aspect of the technology, the part that enabled all the interesting applications, is the protocol layered on top of the merkle tree. That's the part that needed a new name, and deserved a better one than it got.
I know Git and Blockchains are said to be examples for (usage of) Merkle trees, but I fail to see how they're actually (using) a merkle tree.
Using the hash of a parent node as input to a nodes hash alongside the nodes data creates a link, but it doesn't create a merkle tree. In a Merkle tree the parent node is the hash of the hashes of its child nodes and only leafes have data. These are entirely different definitions and also serve completely different purposes (linking to a parent node vs efficient lookup of membership of some data in a larger dataset).
Could someone clear up my confusion and explain to me where Git/Blockchain use a Merkle tree in their fundamental functionality? Or is the term Merkle tree simply misreferenced a lot?
Could you please elaborate how that ends up as a Merkle tree?
In a merkle tree the leaves are not linked and they have a tree structure of parent hashes on top. Git and Blockchain nodes are linked and the fundamental architecture doesn't need a tree structure of hashes on top. While this tree structure on top might be useful, it would be an optimization, but not part of the fundamental architecture. Again, what am I missing?
This might be complicated by the fact that "merkle trees" and git/blockchain invert the parent/child relationship. The root of the git/blockchain trees changes every time a commit/block is added, and the child nodes are called "parent commits" in git. Also the shape isn't going to have a wide base or be balanced like a binary search tree or similar.
When you say that "git and blockchain nodes are linked", I think you might be not abstracting the concepts from the form the data usually takes. For instance in git you might be thinking of a commit as a single package with all its source changes, headers, parent details and hash, but it terms of it being a merkle tree the leaf node would be non-hash parts (source code, non-hash headers etc) and the "tree on top" would be the hashes. This tree structure of hashes are absolutely part of the fundamental architecture of git/blockchain.
Although Git also uses a chain of hashes, just like a blockchain, I'm not sure using this definition of blockchain (i.e. optional consensus protocol) is very useful, because then we need another word for the kind of thing that Bitcoin is. (On the other hand, perhaps the uselessness of the definition suits the uselessness of the concept itself.)
If Git is like using a hammer to hammer nails, blockchain (with consensus protocol) enables you to write without a pen by using the hammer to hit your thumb until it bleeds. And Wikipedia already has a pen that works.
> I'm not sure using this definition of blockchain (i.e. optional consensus protocol) is very useful
Honestly, "blockchain" as a word feels ill-defined and badly understood at the best of times. You could argue that "blockchain" deconstructs to nothing more than a "chain" of "blocks". What "blocks" actually are is up to the imagination, proof-of-work or other algorithms aside.
I get frustrated when people hail "blockchains" as the solution to everything because the term is so vague in everyday use that it's effectively meaningless.
I always thought it was clear: it was the combination of Merkle chains with a proof of investment (work, stake, etc), since that combination was the real novelty, worthy of a new name. It was quite confusing to see people calling "blockchain" to one of the pre-existing concepts. It's like calling any wheel a "bicycle".
Proof of work is just some mechanism for a 3rd party to verify you actually invested “value” into the chain. That’s a PR.
Are there any traditional block chains where the proof of work is actually an investment into the chain? Such that the structure of the chain represents something of actual value (not a series of rare hashes), and additions to the chain add to that value? A la git. One potential example would be neural networks on a chain, where the work is training the network, and the value is intrinsic in the well-fitted resultant model.
Saito (saito.tech) pays for routing work rather than hashing work. Requires solution to 50 percent attack but means that all fees pay for the work of running the network rather than unrelated activities like hashing or staking.
No, it’s not. The two technologies solve two different problems.
A blockchain is basically a single, global Git repository, where each commit is a “block” and the data inside that block/“commit” are transactions.
The defining difference between Git and a blockchain is that blockchains define which branch (commit history) is the correct one — the branch that you should put your commit on top of.
Blockchain provides a means to arrive at a consensus on which commit history (branch) is correct, while Git does not.
Off topic but it is considered difficult for NLP models to do sarcasm detection (because it’s a really hard problem, no widely available datasets, some context awareness is required, etc.)
For better or worse, in the last few years we have been generating a dataset on social forums by using “/s” at the end of sarcastic statements.
I’ll try and mine the “/s” statements on HN at least and see if I get somewhere.
Humans have problems detecting written sarcasm. Not surprising that NLP models struggle with it too.
It's difficult because even if you have the context, the original poster can change classification after being called out by replying "oh, I was just kidding/I was being sarcastic". The same comment may and may not be sarcastic at the same time, Schrödinger's cat style.
That being said, it's an interesting problem. Hope you find something good.
"Blockchain Wikipedia" exists and the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, was involved for a while. It's called Everipedia and it uses the EOS blockchain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everipedia
I think we should read about blockchains and understand it first. Then only we can actually decide whether it can actually be helpful for a particular problem.
A general rule of thumb is: Don't use blockchain if a database maintained by a single organization (person / company / government ) is sufficient.
If multiple people interact, or multiple organizations interact and together want to maintain some data where they all collaborate and take decisions on how the data is changed then only we need blockchain.
So when I think about it, wiki can definitely be helped by blockchains.
Wikipedia does have a database that is in its sole control though. The fact that people outside the organisation interact with that database (as is the case in most uses of databases) is irrelevant; the interaction is controlled and mediated by Wikipedia.
Existing businesses have coped with that for hundreds of years.
You can have joint-ventures, where all participants send emissaries to, you can negotiate rights to view the books or other ways to create transparency. You can have contracts, backed by a legal system and state courts.
You can do many things. Blockchains are only one of those possibilities.
Most important question when somebody tries to sell you a blockchain: "What's the traditional way to do it?"
Correct answer: "People usually do X, but our blockchain proposal has advantages Y and Z."
Incorrect answer: "Nobody has ever solved that problem before!"
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.
Yeah i dont get it too. Using a blockchain to defend wikpedia from uploading child pornography. Defending it by uploading it to an immutable undeletable „datastore“?
I think someone now saw the blockchain hype and want to propose it without understanding, like a few years ago when it was really a new hype.
There's a lot of value in publicly, and decisively, slapping down nonsense from time to time. It's the kind of thing that we really need people to do more of.
Yikes. It’s full of people doing the same thing. Claiming that it would solve “problems” and confusion as to why others “can’t see that” but making no effort to actually explaining the problem or how a blockchain would solve it.
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.
Some people would take issue with the "It works well" part. https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2020-February... 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.
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.
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.
Yes, in a strictly semantic sense, it is a limitation. However, in general such access would be not only a bad idea due to the loss of abstraction and additional work to implement (duplicate) access controls, it would also not be very useful for users over the multiple possibilities for access that already exist.
And all this is really a red herring, both in relation to the unspecified use of blockchain and in relation to resistance to state censorship.
No, it's not a red herring. The point is that Wikipedia could use a database that didn't rely on a limited number of access endpoints, which would make it harder to censor. And you don't need duplicate access controls if the database implemented them fully.
This is not restricted to the blockchain, of course. Something like e.g. SSB fits the bill.
Since not all information in the database is public, yes, you'd need to duplicate the work. You'd also need to put a lot of work into securing the now open service against attack and denial of service.
It would still be just as easy to censor. If a censor goes beyond simple DNS manipulation and drops packages to specific IPs, he can just as easily add the few hundred IPs of database servers to that list as he can add the few hundred IPs of the frontend web servers.
Now, your example of SSB shows very well why this is a red herring. Even if Mediawiki put in the huge work to use SSB as a storage backend, nothing would change at all regarding censorship. What you really want is, I assume, a federated version of Wikimedia's architecture.
Feel free to develop such a system but I don't think anything but a complete rewrite of Mediawiki would allow for that, and even then, I doubt it would be much more censorship resistant, unless you also take on such features like using TOR hidden services or invite-only networks, which are both perfectly possible right now (and are in fact available right now).
And as I said, there is a multitude of options to access the data right now. For example, to build mirrors of Wikipedia for citizens of countries where Wikipedia is blocked. However, it's not necessarily trivial and it doesn't get easier simply by sprinkling some cryptography over the storage layer of all places.
I want nothing. I merely stated a fact, with which for some reason you seem to take issue.
The choice of database, much like the choices of the rest of the architecture, limit it in some ways. That's it. It's not a "red herring". And of course, other choices would have limited in different ways, no doubt.
By the way, the use case I was thinking of was updating pages over sneakernet, which is how information is disseminated in countries where Internet assess is not just censored, but also quite limited. TOR and other tunneling systems are no help at all with this. But like I said, I do not want Wikipedia to be changed. I just want to note that it's a limitation it has.
MediaWiki is federated already, due to the interwiki links mechanism. Any large public wiki can have an editable list of shortcuts to other such wikis, and then a link such as [[otherwiki:Some Article]] will work just as well as a local one to [[Some Article]]. This is the exact same federation model as, e.g. email.
This is a shame, because I genuinely find SPARQL over Wikidata one of the most insanely magical things on the internet. It is literally like being able to just query the universe directly and there's almost no end of fun that can be had formulating new questions you can answer and then finding out it's actually possible.
Of course I now feel bad for occasionally hitting it with my frivolous queries, and would be very sad to see it limited.
There have been various forays into Semantic Web technologies. Previously people have done things like parse the infoboxes on Wikipedia pages and then import that into a triple store.
It seems that now the Wikimedia Foundation is finally interested in moving in this direction. But the software isn't there yet, certainly not at the scale Wikipedia needs.
The website you link to states that the support for non-MySQL-derived db's (PostgreSQL and SQLite) is buggy and that not many people are working on it. It seems that legacy constraints are essentially forcing them to stay with their old flaky PHP codebase and MariaDB database. So much for that blockchain thing!
Where does it say that? My reading of the linked page suggests that MSSQL and Oracle are being deprecated, but SQLite and Postgres are supported and maintained.
In fact, SQLite is the first database listed on the detailed install instructions page[1]!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a very quickly growing use case of decentralised finance, abbreviated to DeFi. Within the Ethereum chain alone, close to $1b has been locked up in different DeFi projects.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The context for the blockchain is distributed public log allowing anyone to replay and revalidate transactions from the inception at any given time with no need for approval of any other parties. As soon as any of those characteristics ( distributed, public, revalidatable) are not met ( !distributed, has access controls, not revalidatable from inception ) it became a weird ass database. Probably a rather lousy database.
Visa B2B Connect is a database, which is why Visa is needed and which is why customers need to be onboarded. Blockchain there is a marketing gimmick.
Completely disagree. Any discussion about the technical limitations or economic limitations of blockchain or cryptocurrency is immediately downvoted.
Blockchain and cryptocurrency have a high amount of hype and irrational believers who see any form of criticism as a direct attack. The technologies (and economics) are much more limited than the irrational believers realize, and they (irrational believers) shoot the messenger instead of taking the time to learn basic economics and distributed computing.
It's a direct reaction to the hype. The Twitter thread posted is a perfect example of why: people are sick of receiving pitches that are utterly irrelevant to what they do, promoting blockchain just because.
Look: if blockchain is as good as its proponents say it is then negativity on HN isn't about to stop it (remember the initial comments on Dropbox when it was posted on here?). But if blockchain can't withstand even mild scrutiny from a community of online grouches then maybe there actually is a problem?
HN adopted an anti-blockchain stance for the same reason it adopted a stance against memes, political ideologues trying to "red pill" people, culture war flame wars, etc.: to save itself. If it hadn't it would have devolved during the 2017 cryptocurrency mania into one of those abandoned forums full of nothing but spammy looking posts shilling cOinZ.
This is still a somewhat interesting place because topics that attract hordes of spammers and shills and low-effort memers are either outright banned or downvoted instantly to oblivion.
> 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.
> 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.
Distributed consensus is not as special as blockchain enthusiasts like to say. Blockchain solves distributed consensus in exactly the same way that Ancient Athenians did: pick a random person to decide [what truth will be/what the state will do] for a period of time.
Blockchains don't "work" for anything except cryptocurrencies. Private blockchains are a grift, if you have a central authority dictating who has read and write access to the chain then the entire endeavor is moot since you've already established a central authority.
What did you expect from a substance-free rant? Try posting a thoughtful comment or that hypothetical paper, talking about a real solution to a problem. I guarantee you’ll get a better discussion than complaining about downvotes.
It was commentary on the fact a tweet about someone (probably) uneducated in that area of tech suggesting someone else should use it and being told no had reached front page.
You should really read the thread again and note how singularly incapable the blockchain salesguys were of explaining any tangible benefits from adoption. When proponents can’t support it, it’s not the target’s job to do their homework - and it’s pretty obvious that Wales understands it better than they do.
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.
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.
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.
“ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.