Comment by still_grokking
1 year ago
Did I just witness the invention of a kind of "software package blockchain"?
If would be btw. a proper but sustainable prove of work blockchain. As you would need in most cases to pay developers to "mint new blocks".
OK, maybe let's forget about the blockchain. It's a loaded term. But the idea of software signature TOFU sounds indeed good!
Anyone that combats something based on the name alone isn't really worth listening to. There can be great use cases for Blockchain just like this, wherein the proof of work is less taxing, or optional. Of course, HN has a rabid response towards the term alone, but these technologies actually can provide some great solutions to a more robust form of git lfs, dockerhub, or huggingface model centralization that will inevitably fail at some point.
> There can be great use cases for Blockchain just like this, wherein the proof of work is less taxing, or optional.
The prove of work part was more of a joke, I admit. Developers "mining" "software package blocks" is not really "prove of work" (even it is in some sense of course). :-)
> but these technologies actually can provide some great solutions to a more robust form of git lfs, dockerhub, or huggingface model centralization
Well, that's the Merkle trees part of the tech. You don't need any "blockchain" for that. Something like IPFS ( https://ipfs.tech/ ) is for example a nice demonstration of that.
But yes, there are useful applications of blockchains. Like https://www.namecoin.org/
But those are really rare.
You're right that Merkle trees are useful here, but adding proof of work to, e.g. run the code to produce some lfs data (database, NN weights, physical parameters, etc), which is checked by a checksum, could be a fantastic addition for ensuring reproducibility in science. IPFS could be great for reproducibility if the commit hash was linked directly to the data checksum. Blockchain may not be necessary, but it could be an easier implementation of this feature.