Is a replication-factor of 100 sane?

[The-A-Man]

@thedavidmeister

within about 6 hops

Well, I once read (somewhere) that every web page is just 19 clicks away from every other web page! Knowing that there are trillions of web pages (and only 10 billion people), then yeah, you’re right here…

@thedavidmeister

expressing ‘friend’ in our digital life (without big zucker in the middle

Haha! Your sense of humour is off the charts!

@thedavidmeister

you can implement PoW as a membrane in holochain if you want, as documented in the HDK

Yeah, read it some time ago.

@thedavidmeister

you don’t need to include membranes, you can still build systems that are open, but try not to talk down as though doing so is somehow ‘bad’ for other people to do, or there is some idealistic reason to avoid them

Sure. I just meant that for things that have to ‘scale’ (horizontally to millions or even billions of users), those restrictive membranes (like captcha, fingerprint-verification (yeah, I once read on the forum that some guy did indeed implement something as silly as that!), facilitator-middle-men, social-security number verification, video-call style verification, etc) are all bogus ideas! For people building closed-communities, sure do implement them (but at your own peril; since such solutions become obsolete within 5 years in service (thanks to AI, etc)).

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@thedavidmeister

it’s not ‘lucky’ to have friends

Oh, you have no idea…

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Still, I’m gonna rely upon the cool verification stuff you described above (how one can perform entry-validation at get() and issue warrants for bad nodes on-the-fly), and how reverse-engineering hashes (and maintaining absolute control over the neighboorhood(s; as described by @guillemcordoba) forever is impossible), voucher-for-friends schemes etc, to keep my future happs safe and secure…

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@thedavidmeister

most successful consumer applications focus around humans collaborating in small groups, ostensibly to the exclusion of everyone else, but in reality the companies that create the tech tend to abuse their role as facilitator

to be able to facilitate small groups without central servers, the conversion does needs to include appropriate ‘membranes’ to define ‘in the group’ and ‘not in the group’

Yeah, you’re right, I guess… Let’s see how the future (of Holochain-powered community apps) unfolds…

[thedavidmeister]

@The-A-Man

Sure. I just meant that for things that have to ‘scale’ (horizontally to millions or even billions of users), those restrictive membranes (like captcha, fingerprint-verification (yeah, I once read on the forum that some guy did indeed implement something as silly as that!), facilitator-middle-men, social-security number verification, video-call style verification, etc) are all bogus ideas! For people building closed-communities, sure do implement them.

i agree with that 100%

i agree that ‘membrane’ tends to:

• conjure up bad imagery like all the things you said above
• sound like a weird biology term to deflect away from an engineering problem
• imply that if you don’t roll your own, then holochain is incomplete or fundamentally insecure somehow
• sound like a massive bottleneck for scaling if it needs to be actively maintained somehow
• sound like a total liability if you need to hardcode something that ever could change, like the public key of a secure timeserver…

but it’s intended to sound very neutral and broad like this:

A membrane is a selective barrier; it allows some things to pass through but stops others. - wikipedia

which could even be used to describe the cryptography used to establish a secure connection between two peers, and i don’t think anyone would argue this is a problem or that we shouldn’t do it