[goldbrick]

What part isn't true, specifically? We are dependent on blockchain miners, because without them our transactions don't get accepted. Moreover we have a couple established big players that control the market and no clear way for them to get disrupted, save abandoning Bitcoin entirely.

Blockchains are much more than receipt paper. Receipt paper is a superfluous byproduct. The blockchain is the system of record.

[jon_richards]

One idea I had was if it is possible to somehow have all the miners "guessing" where the next block is going to be signed. A correct guess would net a bit of the transaction fee. Huge server farms concentrated in an area would therefore lose out, because everyone would guess that location.

The biggest difficulty would be accurately identifying where the signature came from, but with clever timing mechanisms, it might be possible given the latency of light. I haven't thought about it much, but maybe require the current time be included in what gets hashed. Anyone cheating by using a future time could be caught by looking for missing transactions in that time space.

[erikpukinskis]

I believe Ethereum does something like this:

"The Casper protocol is intended to offer stronger finality guarantees than proof of work. First, there is a standard definition of “total economic finality”: it takes place when 2/3 of all validators make maximum-odds bets that a given block or state will be finalized. This condition offers very strong incentives for validators to never try to collude to revert the block: once validators make such maximum-odds bets, in any blockchain where that block or state is not present, the validators lose their entire deposits. As Vlad Zamfir put it, imagine a version of proof of work where if you participate in a 51% attack your mining hardware burns down."

https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/05/09/on-settlement-finality/

[natrius]

This is untrue: "Because blockchain is consensual, after a certain point of centralization, the rules of the system depend on very few users."

If a blockchain has rules that don't meet my needs, I can choose a different blockchain. If I adopt a blockchain that changes its rules to be undesirable, I can take the history I care about and move it to another blockchain.

This argument depends on proof-of-stake. Some people think proof-of-work blockchains are the only useful ones, but I disagree. It's also a boring debate to have, so I won't be doing that here.

[int_19h]

You can fork the blockchain, sure. But unless the majority of users do so, as well, the resulting fork is useless if you actually want to be able to send and receive money.

Now, banks and such will be some of the biggest users; and your average Joe won't even understand what the problem is with trusting them with the blockchain. So... good luck with getting that consensus.

[drdaeman]

> If a blockchain has rules that don't meet my needs, I can choose a different blockchain.

Had this happened with Bitcoin? I think I heard there are some quite major disagreements (something about block sizes and stuff) and there are a lot of users that aren't happy. I don't remember hearing them just "well, whatever" and forking off.

[natrius]

Bitcoin is a special case because it's only really intended to be used as a ledger for bitcoins. Currencies are a collective delusion: they're valuable because other people think they are valuable. Any dispute over what the source of truth is for a currency's ledger strains that delusion, possibly to the breaking point. The value of the currency would suffer, which would defeat the purpose of a fork.

Ethereum is a general purpose blockchain. Forking it could hurt the value of ether, but for many applications, the value of ether doesn't matter. Moving a blockchain-based Twitter from one fork to another is relatively easy and consequence-free.

[tome]

> Currencies are a collective delusion: they're valuable because other people think they are valuable.

This is not true of most currencies. Most currencies are valuable because governments force you to pay them on threat of imprisonment. Bitcoin does not have this feature and therefore, yes, it's hard to see what its fundamental value is.

[drdaeman]

> Moving a blockchain-based Twitter from one fork to another is relatively easy and consequence-free.

I'm not sure it's really consequence-free. It's essentially a netsplit, where the forking party lose connectivity with everyone who's left. Consider the case where Twitter (the centralized one) is suddenly falling apart over some issue into two distinct non-interoperating services. Technically - sure - it's a no-brainer, but socially it feels quite complicated to me.

(I guess, this would work if the app would be designed to use multiple blockchains. I need to give it some thought.)

[natrius]

You got it. Push a new client that supports both chains to users with enough time before the switch for people to upgrade.

[shiro]

Technical curiosity---if I use such a client, and two block chains disagree (on, say, some history that affects the current operation), then won't I end up choosing and sticking one?

[jflatow]

What's the benefit of being 'completely decentralized', if the individual joining the network still needs to decide which network and set of rules to trust? Answer: none, you've just pushed the question of trust / centralization to that of choosing the particular fork you want to use.

[dilemma]

If you're not happy with Facebook you can create your own social network.