hmm no i think it does. the 'Resilience and availability' section is relevant for your question: https://developer.holochain.org/concepts/4_dht/
holochain is completely distributed, so there is no 'offline' and 'online' because there is no third party. it sounds weird writing that but i'm hoping it might challenge you to dig a bit deeper into the docs, because it's there. if not, please come back and let me know so i can pass on feedback about the docs that were unclear or unsatisfactory for you.
> does not solve conflict resolution
from the docs: "Holochain DNAs specify validation rules for every type of entry or link. This empowers agents to check the integrity of the data they see. When called upon to validate data, it allows them to identify corrupt peers and publish a warrant against them. [...] (the DNA is simply a collection of functions for creating, accessing, and validating data.)"
> All the DHT does is accumulate all these [updates] and present them to the application.
Yes, people will want conflict-resolution for contention on scarce resources, and it'd be lovely to have that baked into the system.
Two options (and yes, both still leave conflict resolution in the app dev's hands):
- Have the zome function resolve the conflict after it retrieves conflicting metadata from the DHT
- In the future we'll bake conflict resolution right into the network layer, so DHT authorities can resolve the conflict automatically using CRDTS or manually by pinging the nodes that published conflicting information so they can resolve it themselves.
It's also worth mentioning Syn, a library which uses operational transforms (a precursor to CRDTs) for conflict-free collaborative document editing. https://github.com/holochain/syn. I'm looking forward to seeing someone produce something similar, but with CRDTs.
How does it relate or differentiate with the GNU/Net project? What naming schemes does Holochain support and could it theoretically interop with the GNU Name System? [0]
so for all the people who might struggle with this (like my mom), but who still want to enjoy these new apps, Holo (again, stupid name, but this time it's the org who stewards the open source holochain library [1]) came up with a strategy that allows people to rent out some spare processing power on their computer/home-server, to host holochain applications for the above-mentioned people (so sort of like an Airbnb for AWS). they even ran a successful crowdfund that sold a million dollars worth of hardware for committed early adopters (plug-and-play home servers) [2].
so essentially the Holo hosting network is IPFS (and Holofuel is like Filecoin), but instead of hosting someone's files, you are running encrypted app code for them so that they can take part in the app/network, without having the required technical chops (the holofuel currency measures/represents processing power). the FAQ does a good job of explaining it a bit more: https://holo.host/faq/
i'm not super interested in the whole holo thing (they did a filecoin-type crowdfund to pre-sell hosting credits), yet i am glad they did it because it meant the team could ramp up development. they are already alpha-testing now.
about marx and engels. i am personally most excited about the potential for http://valueflo.ws on top of holochain (library called hREA) [3], because it will allow us to move away from today's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, into a new paradigm of Network Resource Planning (NRP) software. i hope it will have a big impact and enable the growth of the democratic and transparent supply chains of the next (socialist) economy.
> How does it relate or differentiate with the GNU/Net project? What naming schemes does Holochain support and could it theoretically interop with the GNU Name System? [0]
i'll take a look at it, i'm not too familiar with GNU/Net.
[1] https://github.com/holochain/holochain
[2] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/holo-take-back-the-intern...
you might like the architecture of holo-chain (stupid name, imo), it's still mostly going under the radar (also because they chose to refactor their library from go to rust to improve security):
"Holochain combines ideas from BitTorrent and Git, along with cryptographic signatures, peer validation, and gossip. Holochain is an open source framework for building fully distributed, peer-to-peer applications. [It's] purpose is to enable humans to interact with each other by mutual-consent to a shared set of rules, without relying on any authority to dictate or unilaterally change those rules. Peer-to-peer interaction means you own and control your data, with no intermediary"
good dev intro: https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...
"Holochain is [...] like a decentralized Ruby on Rails, a toolkit that produces stand-alone programs but for serverless high-profile applications."