Decentralized Thoughts
decentralizedthoughts.github.io · Group blog · on HN since 2020
Decentralized Thoughts is a group blog by distributed computing researchers on consensus, Raft, synchrony models, and cryptographic protocols.
What HN saysCommenters recommend it in blog lists and link its posts on Raft liveness problems and Ittai Abraham's series on distributed system models.
19HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
17stories submitted
66story points
2 years agolast shared
2020people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Raft does not Guarantee Liveness in the face of Network Faults8 people · 14 points · first shared 2020 · 1 comments on HN
- 2Distributed consensus made simple (for real this time)2 people · 21 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 3Simplifying Raft with Chaining2 people · 16 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 4Synchrony, Asynchrony and Partial Synchrony2 people · 8 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 5EIP-1559 in Retrospect1 people · 2 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 6The SAP theorem for storing secret keys1 people · 2 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 7Private Set Intersection: A Soft Introduction1 people · 1 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 8The Private Set Intersection (PSI) Protocol of the Apple CSAM Detection System1 people · 1 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 9Asynchronous Agreement Part One: Defining the Problem1 people · 1 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 10Homepage1 people · first shared 2021
- 112019 06 23 what is the difference between1 people · first shared 2020
- 122020 05 14 streamlet1 people · first shared 2020
What HN people wrote when they linked it
hugofirth · 2021-02-01
I have many recommendations of different kinds:
## Blogs:
- http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/
- https://bartoszsypytkowski.com/
- https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/
- https://www.the-paper-trail.org/
- https://blog.acolyer.org/
- https://pathelland.substack.com/
## Other web resources
- https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/ - set of resources from Amazon about building distributed systems
- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLeKd45zvjcDFUEv_ohr_HdUFe97RItd… - lecture series from Cambridge
## Books
- https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1213/PrincComm/mfcn.pdf - A great book on the maths of networking (probability, queuing theory etc...)
ryscheng · 2020-04-09
Hi all! I just wanted to say thanks for the awesome questions. I can't say I have the answers to these questions, but I can lay out some of my intuition and would love to work together with anyone that also finds these questions interesting!
1. Will this scale?
Blockchains vary from the order of ~10^0 tps (PoW) to ~10^4 tps (PoS).
https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/2019-06-23-what-is-the-differe…
Wikipedia sees 50K HTTP requests/second and 80K SQL queries/second.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/uptime/data-center-providers-adjus…
But it is also read-heavy. Let's say if 10% of the workload includes writes (probably too conservative), we barely squeak by... I'm willing to guess the number is way lower than that. They saw 10M page edits for the entire month of Dec 2018.
https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesDatabaseEdits.htm
My guess is, this might be doable :-D
2. Who runs this? and who pays?
Great question. The blog completely skips the question about incentives which in my opinion will vary depending on the app. For creating an censorship-resistant Wikipedia, it'll be different than a communications app. Some apps might be better off permissioned (e.g. enterprise settings)
Wikipedia is 43GB of text and 23TB of rich media (images and video).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
If we limit ourselves to just Wikipedia text, it might be reasonable to do this permissionless!
Hoping to write a blog post…
Cardinal7167 · 2023-05-07
But raft isn’t strongly consistent, it has known liveness issues.
https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/2020-12-12-raft-liveness-full-…
Vervious · 2020-10-27
(For more, Ittai Abraham has a series of nice posts:
https://decentralizedthoughts.github.io/2019-06-01-2019-5-31-models/)