FPC on Web3

[carl_caulkett]

I’m curious about who invented blockchain and it’s sponsors..

** its sponsors **

<g,d+r>

[carl_caulkett]

When I first read Don Tapscott's book about Blockchains, a few years ago, I was genuinely excited about this emerging technology. Since then, with the emergence of Bitcoin and all of the other related phenomena, and the profusion of self-appointed experts, who talk a lot, but ultimately say little, I am forced to conclude that "Bollockchains" have become a victim of their own hype 

[Warfley]

Well, I honestly laughed when I imagined the scalability and speed of your server's operations compared to blockchain while maintaining the same level of security, data integrity, and network consensus mechanism (any automated one). 

Servers scale great, there is this thing called the internet, it's hostet completely on servers, you should try it some time. Whats the biggest plattform hosted solely on blockchain? The internet hosts Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.
If blockchain was so much more efficient, than why do these multi billion dollar companies for whom an efficiency gain of a fraction of a percent would mean billions more in revenue, not chose that option?

Because it's not. Blockchain computers like ICP are so incredibly inefficient in computational resources per price, and this can never change, due to the fact that with consensus all operations need to be performed multiple times for verification purposes.
Blockchain computations can never be cheaper than doing the exact same operations off chain

And same level of security... Yeah... nothing screams "security" like having all your code be publicly available and patches taking time and costing money... I already mentioned the DAO, where a vulnerability just evaporated like half of all the funds of the global ETH economy.

Or how many people have lost their precious NFTs because people just sent them malware tokens. Or all the scams on crypto because there is no governance infrastructure. etc.

Crypto is a security nightmare. Case in point: https://www.immunebytes.com/blog/list-of-largest-crypto-hacks-in-2024/ This list is way to long for the fact that there aren't that many people using crypto

run the dApp I described earlier, OpenChat (some brave people from this forum have already done such a test. Greetings to them!). Send a text message using this messenger (yes, sending a text message in blockchain is also a transaction), and then write here to everyone how much you paid for this transaction.

Lol, thats like saying I don't pay for shipping because Amazon has free shipping... Just because Amazon pays for the costs, it doesn't mean that there are no costs. I still pay indirectly for those costs through the price margin amazon takes from the sellers.

Similarly, sure I do not pay for using OpenChat (directly), but as they handily mention on their website:

Immediately after the decentralization sale the SNS will have an ICP ledger account with the ICP raised in the sale and a CHAT ledger account with 52M tokens.

[...]

OpenChat has a "cycles dispenser" canister which keeps all the other OpenChat canisters topped up with cycles. It has a treasury of cycles and ICP. When it is runnning low on cycles it will automatically burn some ICP for more cycles using the NNS cycles minting canister. There will be infrequent proposals to transfer a portion of ICP from the SNS treasury to the "cycles dispenser".

So sure you don't pay directly per message, similarly as you don't pay directly for shipping with amazon. But by buying CHAT tokens you pay for the chat messages.

[Warfley]

When I first read Don Tapscott's book about Blockchains, a few years ago, I was genuinely excited about this emerging technology. Since then, with the emergence of Bitcoin and all of the other related phenomena, and the profusion of self-appointed experts, who talk a lot, but ultimately say little, I am forced to conclude that "Bollockchains" have become a victim of their own hype 

Blockchain is a solution without a problem, and the past few hypecycles were just people trying to find problems Blockchain can solve. And as I said multiple times, if anyone can show me such a use case that cannot be solved better with classical trust anchors, I'd be very happy to see that, so far there wasn't a single one

[Blacha]

SNS

Do you know what SNS means and what function it performs?

P.S. I am glad that you started reading what I am sending here.

[Blacha]

I'd be very happy to see that, so far there wasn't a single one

Problem:
"Under the Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) Regulation, EU Member States may, on a voluntary basis, notify and recognise, national electronic identification schemes in their Member States. The recognition of notified electronic identification became mandatory in 2018. Yet, there is no requirement for Member States to develop a national electronic identification and to make it interoperable with those in other Member States. This has led to discrepancies between countries."
Suggested solution:
https://identity.ic0.app/

[Warfley]

Problem:
"Under the Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) Regulation [...]"

If you are following the eIDAS regulation you might know that the use of Blockchain Technology was rejected as basis for the EU Digital Identity Ecosystem, because it does not provide any benefit compared to classical and hierachical structures.

So try again :)

[Warfley]

Do you know what SNS means and what function it performs?

P.S. I am glad that you started reading what I am sending here.

Yes and I know it doesn't matter for the point at hand. These operations are paid for from a fund which get's it's funding from the sales of tokens. Meaning by paing for the tokens you pay for the operations. You asked where people pay for OpenChat, and I answered.

Now you are just shifting the points because you know you can't argue costs, because any dapp will be orders of magnitude more expensive than a classical server infrastructure

[Blacha]

So try again

They rejected it in because they were researching ETH instead of ICP.

Do you think it was written for the good of citizens or to have more control over them by having access to their data?

[Blacha]

You asked where people pay for OpenChat, and I answered.

It means you don't know what SNS is...
I agree with you. The costs of a single blockchain node exceed a regular server. But the blockchain infrastructure does not need to be expanded as much as it is done in traditional network topologies (assuming the same level of reliability, data security and any consensus mechanism implemented).

[Thaddy]

A "server" is an abstract concept. Even before "the cloud". It is how the client looks at some manifestations as one, because they are presented as one.
Think about that....

Nothing new since the mid-sixties, probably earlier.
Meaning not a fundamental change of concept, but more advances in implementation of that concept.
( with the provision that morsecode is not thread safe if send on the same frequency    )

[Blacha]

A "server" is an abstract concept. Even before the clould. It is how the client looks at some manifestations as one, because they are presented as one.

You're right.
Except that it doesn't change much, because whether it's a server (in the abstract sense), a cloud service, or a VM, the same one switch eliminates it from network existence.

[Warfley]

They rejected it in because they were researching ETH instead of ICP.

No the decision was technologically agnostic, neither mentioning ETH, ICP or any other blockchain technology. The decision was made because Blockchain as a concept is unfit as a trust anchor for a governmental identity system.

Here is a publication by the federal office for information security, germanies national security agency, about usage of DLT for SSI systems: https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/BSI/Crypto/guideline_self-sovereign_identities.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=2

Note the following:

According to the current state of research and recommendations, the distributed ledger
technology on its own is not capable of building up sufficient trust that would ensure for each
application an authentication on a suitable security level. Additional measures, such as a public key
infrastructure (PKI), must be put in place if applications need to reach an advanced security level, for
example when requiring an eIDAS-compliant authentication. In such a case, incorporating a centralised
PKI may serve as a secure trust anchor for the authentication process. Since this does not have an
immediate effect on the storage and the management of the credentials, they can still remain under the
users’ control.

If you use a chain as a trust anchor it cannot provide sufficient trust by it's own so you need to amend it with a PKI. And if you have a PKI you can just use that without the chain.

Do you think it was written for the good of citizens or to have more control over them by having access to their data?

Definitely benefit of the citizens. Thats why privacy is of upmost important in the regulation. And privacy was also one of the decision points against blockchain, because the blockchain cannot function anonymously, the best you get is pseudonymously using e.g. DIDs (or wallet addresses) as pseudonyms.

I agree with you. The costs of a single blockchain node exceed a regular server. But the blockchain infrastructure does not need to be expanded as much as it is done in traditional network topologies (assuming the same level of reliability, data security and any consensus mechanism implemented).

[Citation Needed]
Feel free to show me any business that switched from classical hosting to Blockchain and had lower costs. Again if it was so much cheaper, Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. would switch immediately. Hosting costs are their highest expenses if they could save on that they'd be making billions

[Blacha]

Feel free to show me any business that switched from classical hosting to Blockchain and had lower costs. Again if it was so much cheaper, Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. would switch immediately. Hosting costs are their highest expenses if they could save on that they'd be making billions

Here I have to admit you're right. ICP as a classic cloud service is in its infancy and requires a special approach/skills, but as a dApp carrier it is a very mature environment. Besides, the essence of Web3 is/will be dApps.
However, whatever we come up with here, for now I will place websites in the ICP blockchain, because the costs of this are incomparably lower and the maintenance of these websites does not absorb my attention. "dfx deploy" and I forget for years. This is from a practical point of view. In time, it will be possible to manage some data through these websites by adding a backend and closing the whole thing as a dApp. It would be ideal if I could do it in my favorite FPC/Lazarus environment. Maybe someday?...

[Blacha]

Here is a publication by the federal office for information security, germanies national security agency, about usage of DLT for SSI systems: https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/BSI/Crypto/guideline_self-sovereign_identities.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=2

I REALLY like these assumptions. Apart from the fact that they were created in 2021 (when Internet Identity was launched on ICP), in my opinion they do not eliminate blockchain as a trusted identity medium. On the contrary - they take into account the role of the distributed ledger and suggest its deeper analysis.

You may have access to the publications mentioned in the document:
Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), Blockchain sicher gestalten – Eckpunkte des BSI, Bonn,
2018 (in German) and Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), Towards Secure Blockchains.
Concepts, Requirements, Assessment, Bonn, 2019 ?

These are old documents (2018, 2019), but I would be happy to read them. Unless there is something newer, then please.