Jed, I agree with your position here, even cynicism. What is unusual about block-chain is it is an algorithm who people talk about. Its entered the common parlance but almost 99% of people who use its name have very little understanding of most elements of the algorithm, thus a lot of talk about it is somewhat useless. Whilst more often they are talking about specific features that the block chain algorithm offers. Features which are the product of a range of other algorithms as well. As is so often the Case in computing we need to ask "what do you/they want achieved" and we will find the algorithms to achieve it, do not ask us to provide a specific solution/algorithm such as block chain, when they have not even clearly defined what they want from it.
For example Novel Netware's Distributed eDirectory is a fully replicated database build on transactions, and objects, which has being capable of many of block chains distributed nature for more than a decade. But I don't here this in common parlance. Regards Tony On Tuesday, December 19, 2017 at 3:14:56 AM UTC+11, Jed Carty wrote: > > Saying that beaker browser is too complex in a conversation where adding a > novel implementation of a blockchain is being discussed is a bit odd. > Beaker browser is beta software that would let us create a distributed > federated network, blockchains are a vague and poorly defined technology. > More often than not the technology used to support the blockchain is what > people mean when they talk about them. > > The distributed censorship resistant social media already exists in the > federated social network (Mastodon is the most famous way to access it, but > it has been around for over a decade). A distributed method of connecting > nodes together without a central authority exists in the form of > distributed hash tables. Bittorrent has been using one for years. > > The blockchain part is just a distributed database that is close to > unfalsifiable. But it is still centralised! Everyone involved in a specific > blockchain has the same database, that is the entire point. > So if your goal is to track the provenance of a tiddler than you can use a > blockchain. But that doesn't prevent copying and plagiarism, it just makes > it impossible to impersonate someone else or to claim that you did > something to the chain that you didn't do. > > We can make things unfalsifiable with normal cryptographic signing and not > worry about the overhead of the blockchain. The only thing we will be > missing is the history which I think is of very limited use and not all > chains even save the entire history. > > Sorry if this is a bit more than the conversation here requires, but I > have been around far too many VC types whose eyes glaze over at the mention > of blockchain without having any idea what they are talking about. They > just see bitcoin speculation and think that means any blockchain > implementation will make them rich. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/04bb8e59-2a5f-4974-b72a-f768606682ec%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
