Blockchains, Usenet, and brainstorming about things I don't fully understand.

[finkleshnorts]

I had a thought today that made me laugh, about somebody trying to "post" a binary file in the blockchain, as they have done over NNTP for years--with surprising efficiency. Then I had a crazy idea...

Usenet servers store lots and lots of data, and my limited understanding of usenet is that it is essentially a p2p network on the macro level.

-Could Usenet be somehow used to solve the burden of the blockchain on the bitcoin network? And blockchain spam?
-Could a protocol be invented where transactions are posted to a newsgroup (or newsgroups), in a manner that is tamper-proof, decentralized, and cryptographically verifiable?
-Could the double-spending problem be solved?

It doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility.

The warez scene imposed itself on usenet and isn't showing signs of slowing down. NZBs and par files were invented for this purpose. I read that 9 TB a day are posted to Usenet. Our dinky little blockchain would be a drop in the bucket. It seems like an untapped resource and I couldn't find any threads about it.

Or is this another dead end idea?




Newscoin? (sorry, couldn't resist)

[Mike Hearn]

Hi, this idea doesn't make a whole lot of sense I'm afraid.

The difficult part of handling the block chain isn't really storing or serving it - disk space is super cheap and has been getting steadily cheaper for a long time. The difficult part is managing the database that's calculated from it, and verifying updates to it.

Most of the work that's gone into improving Bitcoin lately has been around how to more efficiently manage the database, and also how to serve subsets of the chain to clients that don't want to download the whole thing. That requires servers (nodes) that understand the structure of the chain and the Bitcoin protocol, which obviously NNTP servers don't.

[finkleshnorts]

Hi, this idea doesn't make a whole lot of sense I'm afraid.

The difficult part of handling the block chain isn't really storing or serving it - disk space is super cheap and has been getting steadily cheaper for a long time. The difficult part is managing the database that's calculated from it, and verifying updates to it.

Most of the work that's gone into improving Bitcoin lately has been around how to more efficiently manage the database, and also how to serve subsets of the chain to clients that don't want to download the whole thing. That requires servers (nodes) that understand the structure of the chain and the Bitcoin protocol, which obviously NNTP servers don't.

I see. Thanks very much for the explanation, Mike.

[th3joker]

Would be a great place to keep an up to date blockchain now though seeing as downloading it takes forever through the client wallet.