For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?

  • dragontamer@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Merkel Trees are fine, and are how things like “Git” keep track of different files (and how distributed hash tables and file-sharing often work).

    Merkel Trees are trees-of-hashes, which the cryptocoin world wants us to believe go by the new name of ‘Blockchain’, but people familiar with comp. sci history know that they’re just flailing about making shit up.

    Blockchain is an application of Merkel Trees. Merkel Trees have lots of good uses, but Blockchain doesn’t seem to have much use after 10+ years of experimentation.

    • dog@suppo.fiEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      I mean look at big corpo/government servers. They’re running an OS from 1980 and software that hasn’t been updated since 1960’s.

      We’ll get there. Eventually. Maybe.

      • dragontamer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        My Android phone’s marketplace, Google Play, is literally newer than Bitcoin and I have government services + banking applications on it.

        I think you’re blind to how slow and inconsequential cryptocoin’s entire world is at innovation. They’ve wasted 15 years. Literally wasted, the world has changed and they haven’t noticed.

    • Terevos@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      ETH has DNS. I would think the fediverse would like to see adoption of DNS that governments and big companies can’t mess with or take over with lots of cash.

      • Valmond4@lemmy.mindoki.comEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        As fast as money talks, you’ll be losing.

        IMO. We should make global random networks and base our connections on top of them instead of clinging onto the hope of niceties because someone have the site google.com for example.

        • Terevos@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          That kind of thing is actually possible with Ethereum DNS and hosting. It’s not mature enough to be viable yet, but the possibility is there.

          • Valmond4@lemmy.mindoki.comEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            A good start, but using crypto to just have a website seems overkill.

            I have built a shared hosting protocol (and implementation) where you use link-files instead of website+DNS (nor crypto). Simple and lightweight, but with my communication skills it isn’t really taking off 😅

      • dragontamer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        ETH staking is looking like its literally illegal in the USA, you know that right?

        Coinbase Earn is quite possibly trading in unsecured, unregulated securities and is being sued over it.

    • Valmond4@lemmy.mindoki.comEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Yo!

      You seems to know what you’re talking about, have you heard of Juliana trees? Like trees based only on the keys, so searching for a key takes len(key) time.

      Bet there is an other name for it but I so remember like that and no web search says anything about it so I’m trying my luck here :-)

      Same for robin hood hash trees :-D

      Cheers