I don't think society worked that way until the web made it possible for society to work that way. And it's not working particularly well. It's brittle, coercive, and it asks operators to have a hand in supporting it in any way to support it in every way, raising the challenge of participating to a level where only the largest companies can.
If we think we can fundamentally change it for the better, we should.
I'm not especially enamored of blockchains. I think that partition tolerance is more important than global consistency, so mostly it's CRDT's that I'm trying to apply. I just brought up blockchains because they seemed especially applicable to the problems that SCROLL is trying to solve.
If you have a single source and a reliable connection to it, SCROLL seems great, I just think we should be preparing fallbacks for when those assumptions need to change. Because the real world doesn't operate on single sources of truth. Pick anything that people talk about, and you'll find that they're not on the same page about which sources are trustworthy for that topic. The software world operates on single sources of truth not because the real world does, but because software has so far failed to be useful outside of that domain.
> I don't think society worked that way until the web made it possible for society to work that way.
I very much do think so - moreover, it's literally how it worked for decades, if not centuries. Before the internet, there was only one organization that knew whether you paid your taxes, the IRS. There was only one organization that knew your bank balance, the bank. There was only one organization that knew whether you have active water service, the water company. Everybody else - including yourself - had to either guess, or ask the single authoritative source.
Internet changed nothing about this. It only increased the number of queries and shortened response times.
If we think we can fundamentally change it for the better, we should.
I'm not especially enamored of blockchains. I think that partition tolerance is more important than global consistency, so mostly it's CRDT's that I'm trying to apply. I just brought up blockchains because they seemed especially applicable to the problems that SCROLL is trying to solve.
If you have a single source and a reliable connection to it, SCROLL seems great, I just think we should be preparing fallbacks for when those assumptions need to change. Because the real world doesn't operate on single sources of truth. Pick anything that people talk about, and you'll find that they're not on the same page about which sources are trustworthy for that topic. The software world operates on single sources of truth not because the real world does, but because software has so far failed to be useful outside of that domain.