Hexayurt

Specifically: a globally visible distributed database is a fantastic resource for managing namespaces, as demonstrated by DNS and SSL Certificate Authorities.

But when we start essentially doing _transactions_ by writing into such a database, it starts to look like buying a domain name every time you want to make a credit card payment.

There is an architectural problem here.

Waterken was the same kind of logic, applied at web API scale.

https://shiftleft.com/mirrors/www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/201...

The failure of this system and the HP ESpeak system are what left the gap which the blockchain smart contract model filled.

I have complex thoughts about that.

Tape. SQL databases emerged when data was stored on tape.

join table1, table2 where table1.id = table2.customer_id

type operations would have a tape for table1 in one drive, and a tape for table2 in the other drive. Things like fixed length records emerged to make it possible to fast forward the tape a specific number of inches to the point where the next record would begin, facilitating non-linear access.

Once that model was completely baked into the tooling, it didn't go away when the data moved to HDs then SSDs. The paradigms have outlived the hardware.

It's a bit like the save icon still being a floppy disk.

A lot of the problem is that when the lefties arrived, it went from artistic and creative to a really shoddy, greyed out political shadow of itself.

It was promising for a while.

I've read a variety of reports. I've come to the conclusion that a bunch of weird shit went down, but that he did not have sex with anybody. The weird shit is well documented, and not that far from his claim of "testing his celibacy."

Bad there. 1000 times worse in India, relative to both Christianity and Islam, and with the great aggravating force of Yogi Adityanath pouring salt into those wounds.

I know of no framework to look at that question which isn't basically just a bunch more questions: in Scandinavia there are old pagan branches coming back up, Latvia too - but was the original tradition lost and they're neopagans, or was it alive on the farms and it's now coming back above the surface. It's like financial reparations: once you begin, where do you end?

I grew up in the West. I'm glad it's not my fight, I'd sweat hard finding a position!

Good question.

Thanks to whoever posted this. I am the author of the text. Any questions?

It's been built in Haiti, Africa, Sri Lanka - test units, results positive. Getting over the hump on a deployment with refugees living in one (rather than the odd aid worker / volunteer) is taking time.

There's also this: http://files.howtolivewiki.com/somalia_or_sudan.mp4 I found the video on a search, and have not discovered who made it or what the story is, but it's clearly the kind of diffusion we've always hoped for!

PS: we've got at least five or seven companies doing short run commercial hexayurts for Burning Man, and one start up in the UK doing different markets.

I bless all of 'em, without wanting to get too involved (for fear people will think I'm picking favorites - my political neutrality (ironically) is important!)

This is a Hard Problem.

I could have taken the politics out in one of 99 ways, but I did not, and I'm willing to sacrifice 5 or even 10 years of hexayurt growth to keep the politics in.

The reason is simple: I want to politically organize the people who grow up in hexayurt refugee camps, getting their education over wifi and dreaming of a better, fairer world. So if I sell out my core values now to reach the refugees faster, I'm going to have a vastly less powerful offer of aid when I finally arrive there.

It's a very dark calculus, but the years of active sabotage that I've faced from aid organizations like UNHCR and Red Cross blocking the hexayurt's participation in testing programmes and similar bureaucratic interference have convinced me that the only way out of this mess is to disintermediate UNHCR and the Red Cross - to route around them as dark legacy - and to have refugees directly raise funds themselves over (say) YouTube and Bitcoin (or, hey, Ethereum) rather than hope for political change in the big orgs.

The big orgs need to lie that the status of refugee is temporary, and not tied to deeper political problems. But the average refugee is in the field for 15 years, and lying about their status being temporary is great for fund raising and locating host governments who are willing to have them, but absolutely horrible for the refugees: endless years in boiling hot / freezing cold tents, no services for education and long term health care, and so on. It's just garbage: if it was you in one of those camps, you'd think you were in a prison camp.

So we stand in defiant opposition to those lies: refugee is a generation-long or longer condition in most cases, and we insist on cycle-of-life support for the people who will be spending an entire phase of life in these camps.

In the short run, this insistence on truth costs me the short term support of the (hugely corrupt) NGOs. In the long run, I hope it buys me recognition and credibility among the refugees and former refugees that I hope will be the backbone of hexayurt deployments in the fullness of time.

I have to speak the truth as I recognize it today, in order to be recognized as not having been full of nonsense by the refugees when they are assessing where to put their support later.

Hard calls all round. Thank you for your thoughtful comment!

Ah, you want to take a look at https://angel.co/houslets which is looking at multi-story stuff with much the same design philosophy as the hexayurt (use whole panels, get modern materials deployed in sensible ways, keep the building process simple and so on) but pointed at urban densities.

I like this project a lot.

(and of course the hexayurt is those hexagonal pod things you see all over Burning Man - I'm sure quite a few of you have camped in them and will be camping in one again in a couple of weeks, having the time of your lives!)

Hi, I'm Vinay, the hexayurt guy, a Hacker News regular, also the release coordinator for Ethereum. You might remember me from a post I did about Ethereum recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977146

I'll be around if you have any questions.

Hashes in the blockchain, when necessary, and then markets which will sell you a file when presented with the hash. Storage technology can be whatever.

That's the smart plan, I think. I really want to take a crack at those storage markets in-browser, use a distributed hash table and WebRTC to pay people for leaving a browser open and allowing us to store stuff on their hard drives!

Agreed. Right now it's a single shared processor emulated with cryptography and massive replication - but that's not an architecture that will get you supercomputer performance.

The work on that thread - getting Ethereum to supercomputer status - is called CASPAR and you can read more about the efforts to get a formal proof for it here:

http://blog.synereo.com/2015/07/23/Ethereum-+-Synereo/

A desire for a funded entity to continue development work.

Effectively funding FOSS projects is HARD. We wound up with GPG and OpenSSL maintained by tiny teams going broke because we hadn't figured out how to get people paid for the jobs they were doing.

We took an approach to that, and we've produced the code. I don't see that as a problem. My permanent project, http://hexayurt.com is a fully FOSS refugee building solution that hasn't taken people's money (not a charity, and we don't accept cash donations) and there are good reasons for that, but not all public works can be produced by volunteers. Sometimes you need 100% of a professional for years, and unless they're going to live on the streets, their rent needs to be paid.

We should not require FOSS programmers to self-fund.

Thanks. I think it's a much less troubling problem than power consumption for mining, frankly. Serenity, serenity, serenity.

We really do hope that there will be mass adoption, and that we can continue to build out Metropolis (a web-browser that extends the security of the block chain right the way through rich user apps) and Serenity (parallel supercomputer performance from blockchains.)

But only the people can decide.

Thanks, I've passed that on to our web guys.

A very good question about a very hard problem.

We've discussed a variety of approaches. The one I like best is that "contract interpreters" offer a professional service, which is that they read a contract and tell you what it will do. You pay them for this service, and they have a public bond of sufficient size that if they screw up, a claim against their public bond will make the person affected whole.

This assumes a few things: dispute resolution services, flexible escrow agreements, and a lot of human judgement in a relatively corruption-free environment. My guess is that this is going to be expensive to provide, and might well rest up against existing contracting infrastructure (i.e. KPMG type agencies might offer a blockchain auditing service with insurance in some imagined futures.)

Hence I'd expect a long tail from high value, deeply audited contracts with insurance and bonds to back them up, through to collaborative pools that just note when they've been ripped off, down to "it worked for me!" reviews on forums.

I'm not sure there's a better solution than this, but it's a topic of ongoing research and discussion.

Programmers generally have to be hired and paid.

We do not know what Satoshi's financial arrangements were, and we do not know if he mined early on in the network using accounts which are not publicly associated with him.

I do not think your position is stable under close examination.

Actually, storage on blockchains has two different solutions.

1) Disk space halves in price roughly every year and a half. Currently 2tb costs $100 USD. So odds-are the price of running a full node continues to stay about static, unless transactions increase faster than 2x every year and a half.

2) clients can calculate the current state of play for every account, and then shed the past transactions past a certain point, or amortize the cost of the storage pools by each keeping a fragment of the total transactions.

Remember, transactions can't be forged, only omitted, so it's possible in all cases for a set of clients to collaborate and ensure that between them they have a complete history.

And these are just the naive approaches. See https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/26/state-tree-pruning/ for a more sophisticated approach (by Vitalik Buterin.)

I think we have just delivered quite a lot: the network is up and running, transactions enabled Monday or Tuesday, and the code is all FOSS and available for download.

We have shipped.

We still have a substantial reserve of bitcoin and fiat currency, plus the pre-mined Ether which the Ethereum Foundation holds for further development. I can't speak on this officially, but Vitalik Buterin has mentioned it in the past https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/2zoawi/ethereum_f...

Hi, I'm the author of the piece, and the release coordinator for Ethereum. If you have any questions about the launch, please ask me. You can watch the new network stats here https://stats.ethdev.com/ or download a client at https://ethereum.org/ and get involved!

"by the end of this article, you’re going to understand blockchains well enough to decide what they mean to your life."

I very deliberately didn't explain mining or blocks or consensus protocols because, really, that's technical gubbins that fits between "BEGIN TRANSACTION" and "COMMIT TRANSACTION" in an SQL database.

Unless your technical concerns are between those two statements, you don't need to care about mining. That's where we've been going wrong explaining blockchains so far.

Hi. I'm Vinay Gupta, the release coordinator for Ethereum.

I'll tell you exactly what Ethereum is: a blockchain for storing code. Bitcoin stores transactions, Ethereum stores programs. Those programs have persistent state on the blockchain and are capable of moving value around the system, hence you can build games, financial instruments and so on. These things are called "smart contracts" for historical reasons - nobody would call them that if they were invented now!

How's that? Clearer?

I'm the release coordinator for Ethereum (although I'm best known for open hardware http://hexayurt.com I do software too from time to time.)

We're certainly getting close. As you may know, we have a "never set dates" approach to our release schedule. Pushing for a date threatens a burned out developer cutting corners which later turn into security issues, and we'd kick ourselves if we shipped with issues we could have avoided with a realistic schedule.

I say this because the pressure is always to say "two weeks" and, of course, the answer has to be when it is ready.

But, soon.

My own description of ethereum: it's a shared database that is shaped like the network, and you can store and run code in it, using a standard virtual machine.

Everybody describes it slightly differently.

I'm Hindu clergy.