The Lambda-SQS poller will slow down in response to the lambda's error rate for this exact reason.
Note that this can cause issues: say you have a time sensitive application that receives a batch of "bad" messages which cause failed lambda invocations. The poller will slow down and the throughput will drop drastically, even though your intention might be for the lambda to continue processing at the same rate and power through the bad messages.
This behavior can be disabled with a support request.
You're confusing the discussion by trying to force the "leader" terminology. That term does not appear in the BTC whitepaper and the protocol's approach to consensus is different than a traditional leader elected system.
There is no "voting" and no "leader" except in the most abstract sense and I'm not sure why you're so determined to use those terms.
People aren't as dumb as our betters believe. They pick up on obvious lies ("stop buying masks" => "everyone must wear a mask"), dishonesty ("ivermectin is for animals") and inconsistencies that fly in the face of intuition ("even if you had covid you still need the vaccination").
If the powers that be would stop trying to "shape human behavior" through lying we wouldn't see nearly the same level of vaccine hesitance and alternative medicine we do right now.
I agree that the public health messaging has quite a number of statements that may not be true. But they may not be false either. Instead of lies, scientists are erring on the side of caution for what they do know.
I agree that sanctimonious public health and politicians have created a lot of distrust. Their messaging is condescending, manipulative, and generates the direct opposite of what they are trying to achieve.
There can be honesty even if they are playing it safe: Just state plainly that the data is inconclusive, things are moving quickly and this is the best estimation they currently have. Spewing out patronizing misinformation (see the FDA's sassy "You are not a horse" tweet) is counter-productive.
Ancient Rome had no shortage of outrageous decadence and constantly struggled with class warfare, slave uprisings and the political necessity of winning the hearts of the "people"
I'm not saying these concerns aren't anywhere in Roman history and politics (that would be naive), but I think in many cases the law can be a reflection or encoding of what a culture puts value on, without that as direct explanation. If there was a cultural outrage, and expectation that the state do something... Then why not?
We spend a lot of time in society today talking about "limited government" and focusing a lot on overreach, many people thinking the state shouldn't legislate morality. I have a hunch the Romans felt less of this.
I can't think of any reason outside of product positioning.
A lot of the novelty of Lambda is its identity as a function: small units of execution run on-demand. A Lambda that can run perpetually is made redundant by EC2, and the opinionated time limit informs a lot of design.
It may be product positioning, but Lambda really stems from AWS desire to do something about the dismal utilisation ratio of their most expensive bill item: Servers [0].
I speculate, 1min or 15mins workloads are optimum to schedule and run uncorrelated workloads. Any more, and it may diminish returns?
> A Lambda that can run perpetually is made redundant by EC2
Is only conceptually true outside of "EC2 Classic", because (to the best of my knowledge) every other EC2 launches into a VPC, even if it's the default one for the account per region, and even then into the default security group (and one must specify the IDs). That may sound like "yeah, yeah" but is a level of moving parts that Lambda doesn't require a consumer to dive into unless they want to control its networking settings
I would think removing the time limit on Lambda would be like printing money since I bet per second for Lambda is greater than EC2
Lambda does provide a level of convenience via abstraction that EC2 doesn't: just provide inline code, an S3 hosted zip file or, recently, an ECR image and it's off and running.
I doubt this is a difference marker for most medium to large sized customers though. Making a wrapper for invoking uploaded code is trivial and if done on EC2 doesn't come with the baggage of Lambda (cold starts, costlier expense, more challenging logging and debugging, lack of operational visibility, etc)
>Waters extending to 12 nautical miles from the shore of a coastal state. The territorial sea is under the sovereignty of the state, although foreign ships (civilian) are allowed innocent passage.
Military ships are also allowed "innocent passage". There are a lot of things they aren't allowed to do while on such a passage (e.g. launch planes, leave on certain radars, do weapons drills), and have to go as quickly as possible. Some countries (Romania, Lithuania) have declared that the mere presence of nuclear weapons on ships violates innocent passage in their eyes, and in general adding nuclear propulsion creates more paperwork.
It doesn't matter if that's the case though. The British were explicitly conducting gunnery drills violating a condition of innocent passage. They did it to violate innocent passage. Because the point was to assert that Crimea (and it's surrounding territorial waters) do not belong to Russia and therefore they can do what they want (subject to Ukraine's approval). This is similar to what US warships do near the fake islands built by China in the South China Sea. Constantly objecting prevents annexations from becoming fiat accompli.
The downside is there are often missile locks between the armed forces of two countries, and, since firing on a warship is casus belli, may cause a war between nuclear powers.
It is customary for a nation to ask diplomatic permission before entering territorial waters with a warship. OTOH maritime law is fairly clear:
---
According to Article 19 (2) of UNCLOS, passage of a foreign ship shall be considered prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal state and thus in non-innocent passage if, in the territorial sea (less than 12 nautical miles from shore), it engages in any of the following activities:
(a) any threat or use of force against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of the coastal State, or in any other manner in violation of the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations;
(b) any exercise or practice with weapons of any kind;
(c) any act aimed at collecting information to the prejudice of the defence or security of the coastal State;
(d) any act of propaganda aimed at affecting the defence or security of the coastal State;
(e) the launching, landing or taking on board of any aircraft;
(f) the launching, landing or taking on board of any military device;
(g) the loading or unloading of any commodity, currency or person contrary to the customs, fiscal, immigration or sanitary laws and regulations of the coastal State;
(h) any act of wilful and serious pollution contrary to this Convention;
(i) any fishing activities;
(j) the carrying out of research or survey activities;
(k) any act aimed at interfering with any systems of communication or any other facilities or installations of the coastal State;
(l) any other activity not having a direct bearing on passage.
---
Just sailing through is usually not a problem even with a warship. In this case of course, both parties were making a statement. The British that they don't recognize the annexation of Crimea, the Russians that they don't care what the British think about it.
> (c) any act aimed at collecting information to the prejudice of the defence or security of the coastal State
This could have an extremely broad interpretation. Any military ship sailing through territorial waters with some passive wireless sensors, sonar, and temperature/salinity gauges could fall under this. Civilian ships as well if that info is later forwarded to the military.
>People clearly see the flaw in PoW if they are not emotionally attached to it because they have no money at stake. You should not misinterpret that as hate because they missed the train to richness.
The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.
> The vitriol that Bitcoin evokes from HN commenters can really only be explained by jealousy, the environmental concern is just a cover for covetousness.
Obviously some people are jealous that they didn’t hold Bitcoin earlier and make a lot of money.
But equally, people who hold Bitcoin now are incentivized to dismiss any critique of Bitcoin, since they stand to profit directly from Bitcoin’s reputation.
Therefore the motivations of all participants must be borne in mind, and no ad hominem carries any special weight since all participants have incentives for motivated reasoning.
This is true, because the vitriol was there prior to anyone complaining about Bitcoin's power usage (i.e. when it was too small to matter).
I remember when I first heard of Bitcoin. I quite frankly found it technically intimidating. It was a totally new concept. I didn't get it. I took my own discomfort as a sort of signal that it was really important; something totally new. So I studied it. I had to put time and effort to read the books, play with the code... Eventually I got it and found it to be one of the most elegant pieces of technology and sociology of my lifetime.
I think a lot of geeks never made that first push past the intimidation. As the value has gone up, the sour grapes have as well. This is a group of people that should have been first on the wagon, but instead many of us found out the hard way we weren't on the cutting edge as much as we liked to think. Myself included, I have some Bitcoin but I'm not a BTC millionaire, like I would have been had I pushed harder through my intimidation faster.
If you do the same kinda research about FBA you will "get it" too and you will know that PoW is useless.
You probably wont make money form that but still I hope you dig into it. I myself saw "the beauty" in bitcoin once and later saw it in FBA again.
After all it solves the same problem just in a very different way.
There are FBA coins out there so people who want can trow money at something an maybe make profit if they gain value. But its not new so who knows how early people who join now really are.
Can't compare it with buying bitcoin at a few bucks that's for sure.
The problem is that there could easily be flaws in Bitcoin that have been there all along. We’ll know the answer to this if it eventually fails.
I too wish I’d made more effort to buy it earlier. Presumably that sentiment applies to the majority of humans on earth, whether you are now a Bitcoin millionaire or not.
Counterexample: when I recently read about its energy consumption (per byte stored), I sold my bitcoins in disgust, at roughly today's prices. I've held almost continuously since 2011, although I trimmed my position a few times.
If I come across something that works without PoW, is safe against quantum computers and somehow eliminates the threat of forks (seems impossible), I'll invest in that.
This will likely be dismissed as shilling of a shitcoin, but on the off-chance anyone is actually willing to take a look, this cryptocurrency meets your criteria (which is exactly why I bought it): https://www.algorand.com/.
The pedigree of the team behind it is ridiculous, most notably its creator: Silvio Micali - one of the co-inventors of zero-knowledge proofs as well as other cryptographic primitives.
EDIT: it's not quantum-safe yet, but that's a problem they're actively researching, and given the team they seemed credibly positioned to solve it.
What exactly is the "threat" of forks? Being able to fork the network is often seen as a feature, not a issue. If you're building a decentralized network, you sometimes have to have consensus when doing upgrades globally. This is in reality a fork but everyone agrees to keep with one of them. Those who don't agree, can continue running the other one if they feel like it.
unwanted/unplanned forking is a "threat" in the sense that it causes uncertainty. Idk about this specific project and how they handle this but for example the XRPL has amendments which come with software update but are not enabled they are open to votes. Each amendment must constantly get over 80% positive votes for 2 weeks to be accepted. The validator nodes who voted against it are overruled by this they must install the latest version to be able to vote on the amendment therefore they do have the code and if the consensus is to enable the new code their node will do so. This prevents forking.
Intentional forking as a feature is ofc still possible. Validators owner who disagree with an amendment to the point that if it is accepted they would want to stay on the "old chain" and thus fork it, can simply remove the "yes" votes from their validator list essentially ignoring their votes and thus separate from each other. By the time one cluster enabled an amendment and the separated cluster does not, a fork happens*. This requires some kind of coordination and is unlikely to happen unexpected. A largely unpopular amendment would simply not reach the 80%. And one that reached 80% is unlikely to be consider so bad by the remaining 20% that they would want to fork. But the possibility is there it just never happened in the 8+ years its running.
*ofc it would also go the other way around. An amendment that wont reach 80% could also cause a cluster to intentionally separate and enable it there which would also case a fork.
First you bring up something that is neither a cryptocurrency or properly decentralized (XRP and the XRP Ledger [Ripple]) then you simply miss the question as a whole.
The question was: "What exactly is the "threat" of forks?"
Your answer seems to be the answer to the question "How can we prevent forks?"
"Uncertainty" is certainly getting at some sort of answer, but falls short as you're not really explaining what kind of uncertainty and why it's bad in the first place.
>The question was: "What exactly is the "threat" of forks?"
Yes uncertainty was the answer. If a fork happens you dont know which side is going to die or if both keep going on. You dont know which sides coin someone wants if he wants to be paid in the coin named prior to the fork.
You may not even know there is a fork because it happen on accident and is only discovered after it happened.
I would say this is the "threat" the "bad part" and it is bad because it is unwanted by most users of the system but that's just my opinion. There is now way to proof its unwanted by most user nor does that mean its bad for everyone. So this goes nowhere. If you think its good I'm happy to agree that this is purely an opinion.
A controlled/planed intentional fork seems to be what I assume most people would want but that again is "good" solely because its my opinion.
Hence my message pointed out the fact that we can have the "good" part about forks without the "bad" part about forks if the system prevents the "bad kind" of forks to happen. Your message already pointed out the benefit of forking and preventing unintentional forking would not affect these benefits.
Now to the other part which was really just an example how another system managed to prevent unintentional forking without preventing forking itself. I'm sure there are tons of other solutions so the fact that you don't seem to like this one is kinda irrelevant, it was just the example that I know best and was probably the first around.
Still gonna "fact check" this because why not^^ You seem to be confusing stuff. I wont go any further into a discussion about that tho because quite frankly its all out there to read for anyone who cares. It not my goal to shill stuff or prevent people from reading and believing whatever FUD they choose. Everything can be verified, no need to trust what I tell you, its all public since many many years.
First, the XRPL is not a cryptocurrency and I never said it is, its a distributed ledger. XRP is a cryptocurrency/digital asset/token whatever you wanna call it. There is no consent over the definition for these words so its not really debatable.
The XRPL is however definitely "properly decentralized" regardless of what FUD you may have read about it.
Decentralization is rather well defined and whether something is or isn't can be objectively "measured". Although I ofc dont know what _your personal_ definition for "properly decentralized" may be, its decentralized as in no single point of failure or control exists in the system. If you use another definition then it may or may not fit. But this is the most common simplified definition.
For a system that has to "decentralized" reach 80% agreement this means at least 3 independent entities are necessary to make it de-facto decentral. However, 2 colluding would break this already so obviously more than 3 is wanted. 3 would be the theoretical minimum. How many _you personally_ want to have to make it "properly decentralized" _for you_ isn't really a debatable topic, its an opinion. More is objectively better and less than 3 is objectively not decentral anymore.
The XRPL currently has about 30 _legally independent_ validator operators. There is no means to measure independents however. And no means to evaluate what would be needed to make 80% collude. BUT its important to know that colluding would not give them any financial benefit, in fact it would just stop the XRPL from working, which they all voluntary choose to support so that does not make much sense.
There is no double spending or the like possible if someone gains control over 80% of the validators. It could be turned off or they could push an amendment though that does whatever they want but its all public. No honest node can be tricked into breaking its own rules and add any kind of invalid transaction, reverse something or allow double spend. No amount of control can change the code that runs on the other validators. Assuming you dont trust anyone, you have to run your own node and then you can only be fooled if someone takes over your node at which point there is no way to prevent you from being fooled anyway.
If a collusion or take over would happen is would be a situation where a fork would be unavoidable and ofc wanted. Every honest participant would obviously choose the side that didn't push some amendment trough that somehow benefits someone. So there would be a fork with everyone who doesn't wanna play by the rules and the "main chain".
This immediately renders the whole collusion useless as they have full control now but only on their own chain that no one cares about and are excluded from voting on the "main chain".
But overall its a purely theoretical scenario. There is no incentive to gain control if you cant do anything useful with it as the honest participants would just fork and exclude the compromised parties.
Same if they would turn it off. It would just be a matter of time before the non-compromised parties ignore the offline ones so they can reach 80% consent again.
>(XRP and the XRP Ledger [Ripple])
That makes no sense
- XRP is the token in the XRP Ledger
- The XRPL is the whole system, the "blockchain", the DLT
- rippled is the name of the C++ implementation of the XRPL
- Ripple is a company that currently maintains the source code of XRPL reference implementation (rippled), which is open for anyone including for contribution.
They are not controlling the XRPL.
They are not controlling the code.
Just like controlling the bitcoin GitHub repo does not control bitcoins code or the network.
Ripple also runs validators and in the early days they ran all of them so it was not decentralized according to the definition above. Over time more and more validators joined so Ripple no longer has any special power.
So far exactly 1 amendment was accepted with over 80% quorum without ripples positive votes. That means Ripple could not prevent that amendment from being enabled - they got overruled/over-voted.
Ripple also holds a lot of XRPs that however gives them no special rights or control over the XRPL.
Most of these XRPs are in a time escrows.
Hope that clarifies some stuff you may have head. There is always XRPL.org for more in detail information.
And like I said its not the only system that prevents unintentional forking.
> when I recently read about its energy consumption (per byte stored), I sold my bitcoins in disgust
You fell for the meme...
Energy consumption as compared to what? What energy sources? This line of argumentation feels very misleading to me and always has because it is presented with a very specific framing. Here's an alternative framing for example:
As per my original message you should look into FBA.
Its not a coin but some coins do use it.
Whether you want to buy such coins and which one is none of my business, but the tech is there and works since years.
The hair dryer, unlike a blockchain, is not a technology for durable, immutable and highly available storage, so I wouldn't judge it based on energy per byte second.
My take is HN commenters try to typically reason through articles with thought and an open mind. I would wager there are so many bitcoin bros who hype ad nausea that beckons the skepticism you see here.
I believe the distinction is that if you or I are accused of sour-graping Bitcoin, we cry crocodile tears on the internet, but if Bitcoin bros aren't taken as serious thought leaders of the future world economy, they stand to lose a lot of money, potentially leveraged.
It's a sexist term that degrades the countless amounts of female Bitcoin investors as well as those who identify as trans or POC. I'm surprised it's allowed on HN.
You have called lock downs "arrogant and threatening authoritarian movements" and told someone that saying racist hate groups lead to violence is "hyperbole that isn't going to work for you much longer". You also said that "hn is filled with indignant nocoiners".
I think acting offended by 'bitcoin bros' is hypocritical.
My own comments (many of which I don't remember making, it's possible my account was temporarily compromised) shouldn't have any bearing on the offensive remarks made by others.
Funny how there was no "environment" argument in the whole message but someone came alone an made sure to devaluate it anyway.
The argument was that PoW can not not scale. Its an obvious objectively verifiable fact and its completely irrelevant what kind of environmental side effects bitoin has or will have in the future.
For all we know it could run on fusion reactors and biodegradable ASICS only and it still would not scale.
I don’t understand the recent preference for taking assertions and declaring them “obviously objectively verifiable fact”.... but that is a good indicator they are false.
Bitcoin can and has scaled. And that is a fact, from Segwit and Taproot to Lightning the capacity and cost have improved dramatically.
Last time I checked block time was 10 min just like 10 years ago. (obviously objectively verifiable fact)
Last time I checked max TPS was like 7 or something so it has like what doubled in the last years? (obviously objectively verifiable fact)
LN is forever beta (obviously objectively verifiable fact) and does not even address bitcoins scalability problem. It just off loads Tx to reduce on-chain Tx. (obviously objectively verifiable fact) That does not make bitcoin any better. (obviously objectively verifiable fact) Just like Wrapped Bitcoin does not make bitcoin any better but it did reduce load on the chain so thanks to WBTC the chain inst as much fu**ed as in 2017 yet. (obviously objectively verifiable fact)
Compared to FBA solutions with block times in the single digit seconds and TPS way over 1000 These improvements are as irrelevant as its gets. There is no proposed way to make bitcoin scale to any level that would make it useful on a global scale. And the fun part is, even a proposal that could do this would not go trough. It would just lead to another fork.
The energy wastage argument isn't "environmental concern". If bitcoin were to scale up enough to combat Visa, it would twice as much energy as all the generators in the world put together can produce, just to do what Visa already does, but without fraud detection, ID verification, or reversibility.
I'm not confident that it would. There doesn't seem to be a clear connection between the transaction rate and the power use. That's not to say that the power use is or isn't "worth it" or whatever.
But, I think that one way the "energy per transaction" framing is misleading, is for exactly the "if you scaled up the transactions, the power use would scale proportionally" idea.
First, it isn't clear to me that it is even possible to scale up the transaction rate without either making the security worse or substantially modifying the design (or possibly both), but if you did manage increase the transaction rate, it isn't clear to me that this would impact the total energy use rate at all.
Well, ok, it might influence the power used by influencing the price or the issuance rate.
But, aside from that, I expect that the power use would be determined by whether someone profits by increasing the amount that they spend on power in order to mine bitcoin. This doesn't depend on the transaction rate.
Err, ok, I suppose technically if the transaction rate were higher, miners might get more transaction fees, and really the relevant thing is issuance rate + transaction fee rate,
but I suspect that the average transaction fee would decrease if the number of transactions were increased, so that impact should be small I think, because those two should largely cancel out.
Hm, ok, so if the transaction fees are determined essentially as an auction, what is the effect on the average fee per transaction, of multiplying the number of items (slots in the block) available per amount of time? I think this depends on the demand curve for transactions. I don't know what that curve looks like.
If we pretend that it is linear (just pulling that out of a hat. Though I guess if we zoom in far enough it should look locally linear, unless we zoom in too far and then it will look piecewise constant due to discrete numbers of people... whatever.), then, --- I should get back to work, shouldn't be doing this calculation right now.
As most authoritarian-collectivist movements go, the "Stay the fuck home" crowd took no time at all in destroying all goodwill towards their worldview.
Had its tone been more educational and pleading instead of arrogant, shaming and outright threatening they could have avoided polarizing the conversation and creating a contrarian counter-movement that resists even sensible compromise.
Lives are at stake here, so the "Stay the fuck home" crowd, as you put it, has a right to express feelings that may be stronger than "educational and pleading."
You might feel the stakes are higher than other people, just like there are people who probably elevate issues like, say, gun control to a similar level of urgency. That's the whole basis for discourse in a society.
If it was truly that urgent I would hope the "stay home" crowd could act pragmatically by taking a more receptive tone. That's belied by a truly frightening undertone of violence that I see simmering underneath the messaging, e.g. "Can't we just throw all the anti-maskers in prison?"
But that's precisely the problem. While you may think this way, someone else may not. So when you try to convince that person from an assumption that they agree with you on the importance of the premise, you fall flat.
Lives are at stake for every single large scale event or decision. McDonalds changing the price of their fries, in either direction, has lives at stake.
If you can't calmly and dispassionately discuss "lives at stake" situations you have no business in any conversation of importance.
Interestingly. Many have been clamly and dispassionately discussing a "lives at stake" situation called Climate Change and there hasn't been much meaningful action.
Also, i find this rebuttal interesting. Why do humans have to be dispassionate? We are humans. Getting rid of the passion really seems dehumanising.
Note that this can cause issues: say you have a time sensitive application that receives a batch of "bad" messages which cause failed lambda invocations. The poller will slow down and the throughput will drop drastically, even though your intention might be for the lambda to continue processing at the same rate and power through the bad messages.
This behavior can be disabled with a support request.