What do you all think about Eris?

I quite like the stack exchange inspired vision of reputation and the general concept of a DAO. Would be quite interested to see how the software would work in practice.

Sounds like it might be appropriately named, but I'm keen to see how it turns out.

A distributed block chain is a fine thing but we have seen people overuse it in some cases. For something as 'important' as a replacement for the bitcoin federation perhaps it makes sense, but for something that is going to be, in any event, by it's nature centralized there is no need to jump through massive hoops to decentralize everything. Case in point - Hull City council launched a 'local currency' that is also a crypto currency because it uses a block chain. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-humber-26841238 However by it's nature a local currency backed by Hull City council is already a proposition with a central hub and that's OK. IMHO in that case they got distracted by the idea of a block chain (ooh shiny!) and spent too much time on that - possibly at the expense of other important things.

As to Eris I agree with someone who pointed out that when it comes to projects like 'this' the social / collective aspects (and the UX) are just as important (if not more than) the crypto aspects. The real question will be how well those other aspects are handled. Guess I have to dig more to see how well they handle those things in Eris..

Given they are using Ethereum, I think @tav's comments on that are relevant here too:

Hey fellas,

I like the Ethereum guys for being one of the few groups in the last decade who're actually exploring the more interesting aspects of decentralised systems.

Having said that, their fixation on the blockchain is fairly flawed. I finally got round to writing up some of the reasons for this earlier today, so if you'll forgive my copy/paste/edit, here are those reasons:

1. You cannot store all the data in the world in a blockchain. Well you could theoretically, but because of how blockchains work that's equivalent to saying that all the data in the world could fit on one hard drive, i.e. impossible in practice.

2. You could argue that data doesn't need to be stored in the blockchain. Instead the blockchain could simply store the cryptographic hash of the data and the actual data could be stored in a secondary network. In fact, this is what the Ethereum guys suggest.

One of the main issues here is that the blockchain doesn't provide instant confirmation. But a lot of computation does need to be in real-time. When you take actions like executing a search or sending a text message, you want those things to happen as quickly as possible and not after waiting minutes/hours for a blockchain confirmation.

3. Since everything is stored publicly, storing even just the hashes of files on the blockchain provides an increased attack surface against one's privacy. Once someone has been able to figure out my identity, it would be feasible for them to brute-force the reversal of certain messages.

All of a sudden my text messages to my mistress are out in the public domain. Eeek! Whilst it would be possible to architect a system that increases the cost of such incidents, it could have been avoided altogether if that data had been sitting on trusted servers instead of on a public blockchain.

4. Querying data is a primary requirement for most useful computation. Unfortunately the blockchain doesn't lend itself to storing the indexes that would be required to do efficient queries. In fact, given that every node needs to store the entire blockchain, even storing just the indexes would be impossible in practice.

5. DACs require arbitrarily complex computations. Unfortunately, a general solution to the Entscheidungsproblem is impossible:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entscheidungsproblem

We therefore have no way of short-circuiting the validation of most computations. Therefore, multiple nodes would have to execute the same code in order to verify whether they arrive at the same answer. Since we're wasting resources doing this, we might as well just execute the same code on multiple nodes and update our trust evaluations if they respond with differing answers.

6. The blockchain is a spectacular waste of energy that could instead be used to improve the quality of life for millions of people around the world. Imposing further computational complexity on it will only increase the level of waste.

So, in summary:

• Like the guys.
• Like the ideas they are exploring.
• But they are too obsessed with the blockchain right now to be of much use.

Hope that helps!

There's abit more detail on Ethereum plan to implement storage and messaging. http://www.slideshare.net/ethereum/the-ethereum-experience

tldr: with separate apps "Swarm" and "Whisper"

@tav and all, what do you think of Paxos variants for distributed transactions instead of blockchains?
Especially this variation, which I just ran into:
https://blog.treode.com/single-decree-paxos/
http://blog.treode.com/minitransaction/