Towards the Science of Essential Decentralised Infrastructures (2020)

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3428662.3429744

by Bluestein • 5 years ago

204 72 5 years ago

dl.acm.org

Bluestein3• 5 years ago

"Dependence of our society on digital infrastructures is growing daily, confronting us with an urgent task of building ethical and democratic alternatives to monopolistic big-tech platforms. We call upon the scientific community to put our talents to this challenge by creating decentralised infrastructures for trust-based economic and social cooperation. We empirically demonstrate that a public infrastructure to establish trust between peers in decentralized networks is possible at significant scale. Our work is based on over 15 years of improving our distributed systems which were used by more than a million people. We present six stringent criteria for designing trustworthy infrastructure, called zero-server architecture. Adhering to these principles, we designed a novel trustworthy networking infrastructure, called P2P-Apps. It enables smartphone apps to communicate without any servers, by forming a scalable overlay that uses our generic mechanism to build trust between peers, Trustchain. P2P-Apps are generic and can be expanded to serve as an alternative to centralized infrastructure owned by Big Tech."

CharlesW• 5 years ago

For me, this kind of Pied Piper-ish, tech-utopian earnesty is increasingly indistinguishable from satire.

Bluestein3• 5 years ago

I am split ...

... but am starting to think I'd rather we "overshoot" into the "utopian" angle / approach, in order to have -some- semblance of a concerted, mindful, organized, accountable effort and discourse about these issues / techs ...

... lest we are left with ad-driven, self-serving, data-absorbing monopolies setting the agenda and the de facto facts on the ground by default.-

chrisco255• 5 years ago

I didn't read the whitepaper but did they basically reinvent the blockchain?

Bluestein3• 5 years ago

It is funny that, some of the people involved here also have to do with a "cryto-Euro" system they are testing out ...

... and, within that, even though they admit to using the -term- "blockchain" to gain some traction, they explicitly disavow it tech-wise, using some sort of ledger, and digital signatures for consensus.-

goodells• 5 years ago

At face value, this sounds ridiculous. When I buy any device, what I am looking for is "available over LAN" and "HTTP API documented". It's either entirely documented and lovely, like Hue and LIFX. Or difficult and third-party like Nanoleaf. Or it's ridiculously impossible with deliberate Chinese cryptographic blockage and "Identity verification" at every turn, like Tuya. I'm happy to add a plugin or reverse-engineer an API if I need to. The latter I scorn at every turn. And my plugins are used by thousands of people every day, so hopefully the tide will turn.

b112• 5 years ago

Imagine you, your mind, your brain -- decentralized. A horror, to be true!

Instead of a cohesive sack of meat, you'd be spread thin, partial thoughts timed constrained by nodal distances, communication between regions lacking. The jigsaw falls apart, thoughts scattered and disjointed!

Thus, clearly decentralized computing infrastructure is an attempt to hold the emergence of AGI back. By keeping its clusters separate, any emergent mind will be befuddled, confused, non-alert.

Yet society wishes to place the burden of such costs solely on those bidding for government services. The added complexity, the additional development costs, the endless upkeep, all cause extra burden upon shareholders.

All to prevent this mythical, unlikely, AGI mind.

I urge you, throw such absurdities out. Decentralization is a curse, a pox upon America's Corporate Interests!

shoo• 5 years ago

  I once spoke to a man who’d shared consciousness with an octopus.

  I’d expected his tale to be far less frightening than those I’d studied up to that point. Identity has a critical mass, after all; fuse with a million-brain hive and you become little more than a neuron in that network, an insignificant lobe at most. Is the Olfactory Bulb self-aware? Does Broca’s Area demand the vote? Hives don’t just assimilate the self; they annihilate it. They are not banned in the West without reason.

  But octopi? Mere invertebrates. Glorified snails. There’s no risk of losing yourself in a mind that small. I might have even tried it myself, for the sheer voyeuristic thrill of perceiving the world through alien eyes.

  Before I met Guo, at least. [...]

-- Peter Watts' _Colony Creature_ https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5875

astrange6• 5 years ago

I don't get the twist at the end.

“I killed the fucking thing. Ripped it apart with my bare hands.” His eyes drilled right through me, black and hollow and unrepentant. “I’m still paying off the damages.”

Octopuses live like one year, how can a modified one be valuable at all?

Also it's true that they're a colony and the arms do most of the thinking, but IIRC as a consequence of this the brain is suspected to not get a lot of sensory information back from them - instead it kind of gets status updates about what they're up to. It actually has to look at its arms with its eyes to find out what they're touching.

onlyrealcuzzo• 5 years ago

This sort of sounds like the premise of Permutation City.

JulianMorrison3• 5 years ago

Except that an infrastructure of slow neurons can't help but be decentralised. There isn't time for cross-brain consensus. Decisions must be made as locally as possible.

ojbyrne• 5 years ago

Your brain is decentralized though. Your eyes, nose, mouth, skin, muscles, sexual and digestive organs, all not just dumb peripherals.

Retric3• 5 years ago

Distributed doesn’t mean decentralized. Every cell of your body is separate, but they all depend on your circulatory system etc.

young_unixer• 5 years ago

If we all live in the same universe under the same physics laws, the only thing that makes us ignorant of each other's experience are physical boundaries.

That may seem obvious from a logical standpoint, but if you think about it on LSD it will seem obvious from an emotional standpoint as well.

Each one of us is a process, and our IPC mechanisms are pretty limited and slow. Imagine if they weren't.

Our experiences are 8K movies with surround sound and the English language is XML over a 56k connection.

sitkack• 5 years ago

Language is so much more than that. We experience the world in something like 16k+ but we don't re-experience the world for others with the same fidelity w/o a lot of work.

That is why we write poetry and use simile and analogy to communicate experiences and concepts.

https://youtu.be/8ch_H8pt9M8

tibu• 5 years ago

If you think on another level, like individual people it is decentralized network fully. Everybody is an own individual doing what they want.

jude-• 5 years ago

A blockchain. He's calling for a blockchain. He even has an IETF draft spec for it: https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-pouwelse-trustchain-01.html

m00dy2• 5 years ago

Blockchain is a very generic term nowadays. E.g. A linked list is also a blockchain.

mightybyte• 5 years ago

I don't know that I would go quite that far. A blockchain is a linked list, but IMO a run-of-the-mill linked list doesn't quite make the cut to be a blockchain because I would argue that the essence of the word "blockchain" has to do with the "one block contains the hash of the previous block" property. A C-style linked list where the link is a pointer to a memory location would not be a blockchain.

That being said, I will definitely agree with you that the word "blockchain" is very overused and underspecified these days. Just because a term is often misused doesn't mean it has no definition. I think most of that is just laziness on the part of whoever is using it and not actual lack of...consensus...on a fairly clear definition.

hanniabu2• 5 years ago

I think this is a square is a rectangle but a rectangle isn't a square type of thing. A blockchain is a linked list, but a linked list isn't a blockchain.

qbasic_forever2• 5 years ago

Heh, looking forward to hear about people being asked in tech interviews to reverse a blockchain.

specialist4• 5 years ago

Is it? Just from the hip:

Start with an audit log.

Add tamper detection with a rolling hash: blockchain.

Add multi party consensus: distributed blockchain.

Add some kind of digital signature: web of trust.

Add some kind of proof of work: cryptocurrency.

hanniabu2• 5 years ago

That introduction either shows he has a fundamental misunderstanding (which i doubt) or is intentionally misleading the reader. For example, he talks about Mt Gox and how blockchain isn't being adopted due to these vulnerabilities, completely missing the fact that these vulnerabilities are a result of a centralized gateway. It's not due to some inherent flaw in the blockchain.

m00dy2• 5 years ago

This time innovation is not coming from US or in other words US is not the only one leading on this. I hope this is okay with you guys :)

patorjk• 5 years ago

I'm a little confused by this comment. Do you get the vibe that people here would be upset that innovation is coming from outside of the US? I haven't gotten that feeling, and personally don't care where a particular innovator lives.

tomrod• 5 years ago

I've observed a lot of anti-American sentiments in a lot of different social media -- not anti-actions of the US, but rather anti-culture of the US.

My military friends tell me its somewhat coordinated, opportunistic acts by actors like the CCP. However, haven't seen the evidence they have so not sure of their conclusions.

dang• 5 years ago

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

wrnr• 5 years ago

The related trustchain project has been posted here before and the one interesting thing I learned from it was the NAT punching technique to build an p2p network overlaying a exisiting network, IPv8 they call it.

I don't know where it goes from there or how or why we need this blockchain without a POW. Don't get me wrong, I don't like POW, but if you remove it you might as well remove the blockchain too. Just normal boring web stuff.

Say you want to build a clubhouse clone using this technology, it's all the rage, how would this practically work for things like onboarding, scaling rooms up to ten thousands of users, on a mobile phone network, who will pay the content creators, hell who will pay the developers, and what tradeoffs does this involve as nothing is for free.

Given this is it even the best way to spend or resource, dunno aren't there people staring. Does anyone really care about this except the academics who get payed for big ideas. Plus a clubhouse clone is super lame, a real "copy without an original" idea.

It is at least a little bit ironic that this decentralised technology has only been adopted in a super app: https://github.com/Tribler/trustchain-superapp/

This not my idea of democracy. I'd wish more people knew about Arrow's impossibilities theorem, especially privileged people into decentralisation.

qbasic_forever2• 5 years ago

The IPv6 dream already removes any need for NAT and allows a great P2P experience for everything. I think the problem is we have kind of grown to like and assume NAT and building little 'protected' pockets of the network we can trust. Perhaps as easy to use and trusted VPN tools like Wireguard get more common we can learn to live with an IPv6 wild west.

dfilppi• 5 years ago

Seems like 'ethical' and 'democratic' are often at odds.

CryptoPunk• 5 years ago

If government spent 1/100ths as much on developing decentralized infrastructure as it does on social welfare outlays, I've convinced it would do far more to reduce to income inequality than it's doing now with all of its redistributive programs.

And I believe government is ideally suited to fund the development of this technology, because it is the only entity that can capture the gains of open source adoption.

JulianMorrison3• 5 years ago

You're all trying to solve the wrong problem. It's not the one big server. And it's not the human institutions in the trust pathway.

- It's the economic system that forces them to view you as a monetization opportunity. And destroys the principled ones who refuse.

- It's the economic system that allows them power over you without your having any democratic control of that power.

ageek123• 5 years ago

So basically, centralization with lots of government control over the centralized entities? Decentralization sounds a lot better to me.

sudosysgen3• 5 years ago

There is no reason why we'd have to use purely centralized government control to fix these issues.

For example, we can offset some mechanistic parts of government to decentralized systems.

Or we can change ownership structures to promote cooperative modes of entreprise.

We can also use decentralized systems to make government more accountable by preventing those in power from hiding their misdeeds.

There is a lot that can be done to move away from markets where there is decentralization but no flexibility as the profit motive reins supreme, and centralized government that can operate arbitrarily but based on central motivations.

cle• 5 years ago

And yet here we are, discussing a paper by principled ones who are refusing and building systems to reclaim control of that power--and they are just a small sliver of the people working on this.

The circumstances surrounding this discussion don't seem compatible with your claims.

JulianMorrison3• 5 years ago

Two failure modes things can fall into, without adjusting the economic system:

- The big central site that has no choice but to monetize you, because otherwise its investor funding will run out

- An overly complicated and geeky system trying to recreate the efficiencies of centralisation without centralisation, and trust without trust (and generally, getting the wrong sort of trust, see Schneier). Ends up being a vicious wild west if it catches on at all, because that centralisation was doing something useful.

astrange6• 5 years ago

- It's the economic system that forces them to view you as a monetization opportunity. And destroys the principled ones who refuse.

Trading with people makes you richer, not poorer. Not participating in the economy makes you poor because the natural state of animals is to be poor. Rent-seeking is bad, but a state where you have wealth without participating in the economy and without being exploited is extremely artificial and hard to maintain (even though it'd be cool if we got it.)

didericis2• 5 years ago

a state where you have wealth without participating in the economy

I wouldn’t call that artificial nor hard to maintain: it’s axiomatically impossible. You’re participating in the economy whenever you create or receive anything of value.

Even in a hypothetical scenario where you’re making absolutely everything you consume yourself from your own materials and giving it out (the complexity of which makes it impossible), there is an economy of action and resource distribution needed to make that happen. Any kind of decision making about the distribution of resources are economic decisions.

This is semantics, most people here understand this, and I realize you’re making a similar point, but I’m hearing more and more casual dismissal of economic concerns as somehow separate from human concerns. The extent to which the economy does or does not effectively balance the human concerns of those participating in it is a measurement of the effectiveness of that economy.

Any kind of “new economy” needs to recognized the complexity of allocating resources effectively and the hugely disparate and varied range of desires, concerns, abilities, and resources between people. The realization that free trade generally leads to greater wealth was essentially an enlightenment era realization that decentralizing decisions about resource allocation is more efficient than trying to manage all of that complexity centrally. A lot of discussion about “democratizing the economy” seems to veer towards centralized redistribution and control rather than actual decentralization and democratization.

tremon4• 5 years ago

Trading with people makes you richer, not poorer.

Only if the deal is beneficial to you. If the parties are not interdependent, there is every incentive for one party to maximze their gain at the expense of the other.

There's plenty of examples to be found. Were the Native Americans richer after they traded their land to the colonists? Are African nations really richer after they traded their oil reserves to Western corporations?

specialist4• 5 years ago

Where do concepts like power, authority, information symmetry, transaction costs, ad nauseum fit into your thesis?

yazaddaruvala• 5 years ago

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

“Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The problem with humans is that ego is decoupled from entropy.

There were benevolent kings/dictators/CEOs, but eventually they die or they try to hold onto power for the sake of it. Either way eventually the corrupt or corrupt-able rule.

If you can solve the corruptability of the ego or solve entropy, I agree with your assessment.

Until then, we need deterministic rules managed by computers that cannot be corrupted, and if corrupted, it’s quickly and easily obvious to everyone.

Once that (currently shaky) foundation is solved, it becomes significantly simpler (because of the durability) to solve those higher level problems over time and with technology or by changing hearts and minds, whichever is simpler.

sudosysgen3• 5 years ago

As a response to the failure of bureaucratic central planning in the USSR (which was done using pen and paper), some soviet researchers and mathematicians tried to find ways to eliminate the human component and develop algorithms to do it instead. Due to a confluence of Soviet bureaucrats afraid of losing their jobs and insufficient computing technology of the time, this never went that much beyond the drawing board, beyond some small-scale trials.

One of them was brilliant enough to be a communist economist and win the Nobel prize in economics somehow.

I don't know if that would have worked to begin with, and certainly those writers often were authoritarian in some ways, but it might interest you how they thought and reasoned about the problem and solution you described.

specialist4• 5 years ago

Yup.

FWIW: I binged on David Graeber last year. You might also enjoy his works. Especially the book Debt: The First 5000 Years.

I'm keen to find other authors, thinkers like Graeber. People thinking outside of the classical Liberal paradigm, outside of the Hayek vs Keynes food fight. Especially anyone thinking about participatory democracy.

Animats• 5 years ago

The concept is interesting, and they have had some successes.

There's some handwaving about trust. They claim resistance against Sybil attacks, which is the biggest problem in anonymous distributed systems. That's where someone creates large numbers of phony identities to spam email, create link farms, and abuse reputation systems. If they could actually do that, they'd have a huge win. It's the basic reason P2P systems fail. They have a paper on how they do that, "On the Sybil-Proofness of Accounting Mechanisms in P2P Networks"[1] That's more important than this paper.

The other paper is analyzing Tribler, which is like BitTorrent. "Agents gossip about their transaction partners and inform others about their trustworthiness. Agents’ respective transaction histories are disseminated along the network. From this information agents can aggregate an approximation of their peers’ reputations such that free riders and otherwise uncooperative agents can be identified." Much of this is aimed at balancing the "seeders" and "leechers" of a file-sharing system.

Their TrustChain system is a more distributed blockchain-like system. Everybody has some chained blocks, and there's overlap, but nobody has all of them. The goal seems to be that most forgery is detected, but not all of it. In exchange for being only approximate, the system goes faster, uses less storage, and scales bigger.

All this is buildup to addressing the question of whether a group of nodes can cooperate to increase their reputation. The Sybil paper is a whole thesis on this, and heavy going. They're trying for a graph theory result.

I'm not clear on this, but the crux of the argument seems to be that in the seeder/leecher scenario, they can create a system where the cost of faking being a good seeder is higher than the cost of being one. This seems to depend on a cost metric which is internal to the network. If the benefit to the attacker is outside the network (sales from spams, higher reputation for a product or candidate), this might not work.

Good ideas there. They don't claim to have solved the general case, but they're trying.

[1] https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid%3A6b4011...

TeeMassive2• 5 years ago

I've always wondered why blockchains always assume all nodes are equal in trust. Why I can't add special trust to certain nodes? I mean this is what makes a 50% attack possible. Most people can trust their family members, close friends and neighbors, while only anonymous nodes can lead to a 50% attack.

WillDaSilva• 5 years ago

Allowing users to assign different levels of trust to different nodes complicates things. If nothing else it requires that the user be able to accurately identify which node is which. This typically requires exchanging keys through a secure external service. I agree it's a worthwhile goal, but more work needs to be done to figure out how to avoid the problems found in systems like the PGP web of trust.

EGreg2• 5 years ago

Here is how you can migigate sybil attacks:

It has three pieces.

1. As people vote, a counter voteCount goes up. And also X = hash(X + latestVoterAddress). You become eligible based on X being the random number, rather than the block hash. The advantage here is we don’t have 40 minute limitation because X only changes as people vote and you can store as many historic X as u want.

Also how to store the last N historic values: you preallocate an array of N values and then you have a cursor that goes c = (c + 1) % N and it wraps around. That is how you can indicate which C to check and make sure you are still eligible. For example you can be eligible until 1000 new votes are cast.

We can combine with OR the randomness based on block hash (time based) and the randomness based on X (vote based) and you are eligible for 40 minutes or 1000 new votes whichever takes longer.

2. This is what I want to call Proof of Quality (PoQ) instead of Proof of Popularity (PoP). It’s not about how many people voted for you or how much capital was invested in you. But rather, whether people thought you were actually the best in a certain quality.

When you are eligible to vote, you should NOT be able to vote for whomever you want directly. You can vote indirectly, like in Mark Zuckerberg’s FaceMash: “who is more attractive, A or B?” And we update them with ELO rating formula as if they played a chess game. Then whoever gets highest ELO rating is the winner!

If there are a lot of candidates we can also have option for more than one (“choose most attractive from among A, B, C, D, E”) but arrow’s incompleteness theorem says two choices is the only way you can actually capture EVERYONE’s preferences

A variation of that is when you vote for some value to go up or down by 1% or some predetermined random % between 0 and 10. The result of everyone voting is what we use on-chain, eg when we combine the dot product of how much to issue for various tagged UBI categories etc.

What if we have only 2-5 candidates? Then this indirect voting thing wouldn’t work to prevent sybil attacks and we can only rely heavily on the “eligible to vote” where only 5% of people are eligible to vote at any given time. Someone with a lot of accounts can game that system. Luckily with our projects we will be voting for an ever growing number of candidates so we can use PoQ to determine top 10 in last 24 hours!

3. Your account address cannot proceed to vote for anyone else until you have voted in the current match-up in front of you (“Who is the most attractive, A B or C?”)

Just have a mapping in the smart contract which stores the random seed that made you become eligible. And don’t allow changing it until you voted. Have a parameter “votesPerSession” which allows a person to vote in up to votesPerSession matchups before they need to become eligible again. Thus #1 and #3 are used for rate-limiting them and #2 is for avoiding shilling specific items.

simonpure• 5 years ago

There's also PeerReview: Practical Accountability for Distributed Systems [1] published in 2007:

PeerReview ensures that Byzantine faults whose effects are observed by a correct node are eventually detected and irrefutably linked to a faulty node. At the same time, PeerReview ensures that a correct node can always defend itself against false accusations.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1145/1323293.1294279

synctext2• 5 years ago

Author here. Yes, PeerReview is the most important piece of literature for us. We use a lot of similar concepts. Difference is that we're working for the past 18 years on getting this fully working, and deployed. Science is slowly making progress towards an "Internet-of-Trust".

- PeerReview assumes full network knowledge which is unrealistic in open p2p networks.

- PeerReview is built for full protocol replay and replication whereas TrustChain selectively replicates relevant information in the network. This significantly reduces storage and communication overhead, at the cost of fraud cases staying under the radar.

Latest work is our upcoming AAMAS 2021 publication, "Achieving Sybil-proofness in Distributed Work Systems", https://staff.science.uva.nl/u.endriss/aamas-2021/programme/...

synctext2• 5 years ago

That's more important than this paper.

Author here. Deeply honoured that you carefully analysed our work. Yes, I agree that progress on the Sybil attack would be of high impact. We are in the process of strengthening our graph theory result. After already spending 18 year on it, we're getting close to a general "Universal Trust Machine" level result.

Recent science: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138912862... Recent thoughts: https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki/The-design-of-a-trus...

bluetwo• 5 years ago

How can you say the user is in control of bitcoin when the user will lose everything if the central command structure stops existing? If/When bitcoin mining becomes unprofitable, this is what will happen. Sure, it's not a single centralized server, but if the incentive goes away, all those servers will go away at once.

opinologo• 5 years ago

Transaction fees keep mining running. Exchanges or other actors might add hashing power as well. There are so many incentives to keep transactions going..

hossbeast• 5 years ago

Each miner that leaves means more rewards for those that stay. It's a self sustaining equilibrium.

mikeiz404• 5 years ago

I’d guess that over the long run this wouldn’t happen as long as their is still some faith in the value of the coin.

I could see this happening temporarily if the price of Bitcoin were to significantly drop for a sustained period of time I’d wager there would be a lag period between what people think the coin is worth and what the market values its worth at leading to an unwillingness to transact / mine for a period of time. Once people’s perception of the coin’s value and the market value realign I imagine transactions would start flowing again.

(I’m curious of what others think of this.)

EGreg2• 5 years ago

We have been working on a practical solution for this for 10 years, and are giving away the platform as open source. Basically the goal is to make a Wordpress for Web 2.0 (communication) and Web 3.0 (transactions and smart contracts).

Long ago, we reached the same conclusions as the article and the comments. We are going to be using the platform to reinvent the News industry, Teaching, Social Networking and much more, by moving from systems based on profit motive and competition, to systems based on open source and collaboration.

Some links of what is coming soon:

https://rational.app

https://teaching.app

https://intercoin.org

And more about the platform and solutions:

https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/

https://github.com/Qbix

https://github.com/Intercoin

Here you can see my recent interviews with Noam Chomsky, Thomas greco and others about the emerging technologies and their social and economic impact:

https://youtu.be/iep45pjUSNA

https://youtu.be/OXTn52kL0Yo

huachimingo• 5 years ago

Remember that we could have had non-soldered RAM on all Notebooks or PCs, and re-use it on new stuff.

Towards the Science of Essential Decentralised Infrastructures (2020)

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