unboxed_type

What is a "promotion committee"? By saying promotion, are you talking about transitioning from "engineer level 1" to "engineer level 2" kind of thing?

I wonder if your advice can be applied in non-google setting? For example, in some general enterprise company.

Listen to this wise man, he knows what is speaking about.

True. It is worth pointing out that Isabelle/HOL does not have dependent types in its underlying logic making framework building a (much?) harder work.

Despite being based on semi-functional programming language Scala, I found no evidence that the language AxLang has anything to do with formal verification. I may be wrong, but what I see now is lots of promises without any details.

GitHub feels so much like some social network site. It has too many distraction factors for any thinking person, that's why I hate it. Bitbucket is a real thing. Go get it, stop being a GitHub hipster today!

Whats the business model behind that kind of activity?

Authentication of a write operation is not the only problem a blockchain system solves. Using a public blockchain, for example, you are assured that: 0) all writes are authenticated 1) all the data written will be accessible to anyone Now contrast it with a centralized solution where admit can just restrict access to some data. Yes, all writes are authenticated, but who cares if you cant access them? 2) The history of all writes is also reliably preserved and accessible to anyone. 3) In case of smart contracts, the business logic is visible to you upfront. You can study the contract and decide if it is fair to participate. You can study the history of that contract also. 4) All "redundant" nodes have proper incentive to participate in the activity. They gain value just by validating and processing your transactions.

My point is that this is just not achievable using traditional DBMS: the original premises ("trust model" and incentive model) of those systems are very different.

Please correct me if I am wrong somewhere.

Interesting point, thanks for sharing. But, anyway:

What incentives do those mirroring nodes have to store regular data blobs and process requests from clients?

Who will decide the privilege to be such a 'mirroring node'. The origin can run several such 'mirroring nodes' and rewrite history on all (some of) them: how would you know who is giving you the truth in case of conflicting information?

I bet if you solve those questions, you will be simulating a blockchain system. Do you agree?

Thanks for that quote!

>But of course, if this is the case, then it begs the >question of why a blockchain is even needed. Just use a >shared database.

Two issues regarding your second observation.

1) A change that requires a consensus among some non-tiny group of participants is not trivial thing to accomplish in practice. You will have to wait before every one from a group of N (say, 20) representatives will agree with your change.

2) Why a blockchain is needed? Because no other "shared database" provides the same trust model which is "everyone trusts no one". Every other database "security model" in existence assumes that every admin trusts every other admin. If it is not so, then things quickly become complicated and impractical.

I wonder how one may prove that a thing originates from some specific place? I mean, you have to have some kind of trusted by all parties external observer who will assure that fact. Am I wrong here?

If a supplier is running its own blockchain, then it really makes little sense. But to gain real trust of its clients, supplier will actually put it on a public blockchain. Only then external experts will say: "yeah, this supplier is really trustworthy". In other words, the incentive to use a public blockchain instead of their own, private one, is to gain real trust.

Why not to use already running platforms like Ethereum where all those incentive issues are already solved?