I took a quick look at Holochain and its got the regular set of better than bitcoin/ethereum claims that most alt coins say. Its saying its more efficient and safer to use than other blockchain languages. Now these are really big claims so let's see what its got!
Looking at https://holochain.org/ , most of my scam senses are not going off tooo much. Its got some weird testimonials and then a white paper! So far so good.
Ok, lets skip to the white paper. Now what I'm looking for here is mainly how do you verify computations are valid amidst BFT and sybil attacks.
So its got some stuff about how every message received can be verified by the receiver by using "validation rules". Okay... so we can use custom validation rules that each receiver can define and run themselves. Fine, one such rule could be Bitcoins proof of work.
So it can be as expensive as Bitcoin. Now of course there can be other rules that are less expensive of Bitcoin, but theres a big reason Bitcoin's PoW is so expensive... Its been battle tested and looked at by 1000s of people to verify that its correct and can resist just about anything up to a 51% bad node attack. Allowing any program to define its own set of validation rules in the hopes that they will be faster doesn't make things safer. It just makes it more likely for fails. This looks like the major contribution that Holochain is trying to make. Let everyone write their own proof of work functions that suits their needs and mess it up. The number of ethereum dapps that failed to write safe contract is proof enough that this will happen in an identical fashion.
Did I miss something? Maybe there really is something here thats new, but I'm not seeing it at first glance. Its doesn't look a scam though so its got that going for it
If you're coming from the blockchain scene you really won't get it at first glance. I first started mining Bitcoin in 2010 at $0.50 each, then went heavy into Ethereum from 2014. It took me a few weeks of deep-diving to unlearn a lot of the conditioning imprinted in the blockchain bubble.
Holochain has no mining, no staking, no core token, no fees, no global consensus, no global ledger, it's not a platform, and there's no possibility of a 51% attack.
It's more akin to a P2P protocol/framework/pattern where users store their data and run apps locally, and where each app is its own private distributed network. Underpinning all of that are cryptographic counter-signing events and immutable hash chains.
In addition they have a parallel project called Holo (yeh confusing) that acts as an _optional_ hosting bridge for Holochain apps to offer a simple UX for normal web users. With Holo, developers can pay a distributed network of hosts in HOT (this is the coin you see on exchanges) to serve their happ/dapp like any regular website via Cloudflare DNS. No browser extensions required, nor any need to buy crypto to interact with Holochain apps. HOT for now is an ERC20 but will swap for a Holo mutual credit currency in the near future.
Sidenote: when you grasp mutual credit cryptocurrencies you'll also see all traditional cryptocurrency tokens as nothing more than speculative gambling chips.
Also checkout HoloREA and REA accounting (resource-event-agent). This is a good podcast on it with some mates of mine; we all worked at ConsenSys with a longer history in Ethereum before coming to the difficult realisation that Ethereum was the perpetuation of everything wrong with the global economy: https://soundcloud.com/user-376287461/holochainpodcast-2-pos...
Looking at https://holochain.org/ , most of my scam senses are not going off tooo much. Its got some weird testimonials and then a white paper! So far so good.
Ok, lets skip to the white paper. Now what I'm looking for here is mainly how do you verify computations are valid amidst BFT and sybil attacks.
So its got some stuff about how every message received can be verified by the receiver by using "validation rules". Okay... so we can use custom validation rules that each receiver can define and run themselves. Fine, one such rule could be Bitcoins proof of work.
So it can be as expensive as Bitcoin. Now of course there can be other rules that are less expensive of Bitcoin, but theres a big reason Bitcoin's PoW is so expensive... Its been battle tested and looked at by 1000s of people to verify that its correct and can resist just about anything up to a 51% bad node attack. Allowing any program to define its own set of validation rules in the hopes that they will be faster doesn't make things safer. It just makes it more likely for fails. This looks like the major contribution that Holochain is trying to make. Let everyone write their own proof of work functions that suits their needs and mess it up. The number of ethereum dapps that failed to write safe contract is proof enough that this will happen in an identical fashion.
Did I miss something? Maybe there really is something here thats new, but I'm not seeing it at first glance. Its doesn't look a scam though so its got that going for it