Tesla Coils and Corpses report, 2014-08-01

[Zooko Wilcox-OHearn]

.. -*- coding: utf-8-with-signature-unix; fill-column: 73; -*-
.. -*- indent-tabs-mode: nil -*-

LAFS Tesla Coils & Corpses, 2014-08-01
======================================

in attendance: Zooko (scribe), Taylor, Nathan, Brian

Example of servers with disjoint sets. If the reader uses union on
read, then each server (or coalition thereof) gets to choose whether
their uniquely-held elements will be included or excluded from the
reader's view. This bothers Zooko. Because "editorial" or "filtering
and selection" power is close to *write* power in Zooko's mind. (ref.
The Library of Babel, Daniel Dennett's version)

Taylor suggested "biggest set" instead of union, unanimity, majority,
etc. Zooko likes the idea!!

Brian suggested that good adders who like to limit the freedom of the
servers could be expected to download the previous set or remember the
previous set in their local state.

Brian suggested that the servers could enforce upon the adders that
they don't send add commands without a proof of knowledge of the
current version. But we decided against that because the "lob an
element into the set, even though I don't know anything about the set"
is a valid use case. (Example: a write-intensive workload like secure
distributed logging, where the performance and availability
consequences of requiring read-before-every-write would be
intolerable.)

The protocol for uploading has to require adders to provide the
transitive closure of elephants in case the server doesn't already
have them. Should that be an interactive protocol or…?

We talked about Two-Phase-Commit. It can eliminate (assuming correct
implementation) a single server entering a broken state due to a
partially-applied update. It can *reduce*, but not eliminate version
skew between servers, where some of the servers have (atomically)
updated to the new version and others have (atomically) rolled-back to
the current version.

We talked about building distributed ledgers on top of add-only sets.
Nathan is keen on this idea of using add-only sets as a primitive
building-block for Bitcoin-like distributed ledger systems.

Then we started talking about our plans for a cryptocurrency startup…

-- 
Regards,

Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn

Founder, CEO, and Customer Support Rep
https://LeastAuthority.com
Freedom matters.