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A comment on Gitchain: Decentralized P2P Git Repos aka "Git meets Bitcoin".

Re:Gitchain: Decentralized P2P Git Repos aka "Git meets Bitc... by comex on Friday May 16, 2014 @10:10PM (#7759001)
Cloning something like Chromium or Linux is already a multi-gigabyte affair without needing everyone to download everything ever committed to the system... and what happens when code needs to be taken down for copyright reasons?

I like more-decentralized Git, but I don't think this is necessarily the way to do it. The main problems today include plumbing around decentralized issue tracking and wikis, good Git web interfaces, etc.. Better P2P might make forking easier without centralization (Gittorrent?), but most serious projects probably won't find it difficult to obtain a VPS; data integrity and distributed authority, things the blockchain provides, are not really necessary at all.

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Re:Gitchain: Decentralized P2P Git Repos aka "Git meets Bitc... by goldfeld on Friday May 16, 2014 @10:23PM (#7759028)
That code can't be taken down for "copyright reasons" is a feature in my eyes, not a flaw. The best way to stand up to censorship and legal threats is to really not be able to comply, just like the best defense against torture is not to know (and much more so if your would-be agressors have a way of being sure you really don't know, and technology can do that against censorship.)
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Re:Gitchain: Decentralized P2P Git Repos aka "Git meets Bitc... by voltagex_ on Saturday May 17, 2014 @12:36AM (#7759236)
You should see some of the stuff that's in the Bitcoin blockchain... one day the community is going to have to make a decision on how to purge that data.
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Re:Gitchain: Decentralized P2P Git Repos aka "Git meets Bitc... by colordrops on Saturday May 17, 2014 @01:22AM (#7759297)
What could possibly be so bad as to have every single node in the network compromise the blockchain?
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Re:Gitchain: Decentralized P2P Git Repos aka "Git meets Bitc... by pjc50 on Saturday May 17, 2014 @02:26AM (#7759383)
At a guess, child porn which would make it illegal to posess?
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Re:Gitchain: Decentralized P2P Git Repos aka "Git meets Bitc... by krapp on Friday May 16, 2014 @11:56PM (#7759179)
To be fair, right now it's all but impossible to entirely take code down for "copyright reasons" if incentive exists to pirate it. I don't know that this is necessarily a strong argument for using a blockchain in this way.
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Re:Gitchain: Decentralized P2P Git Repos aka "Git meets Bitc... by bnj on Friday May 16, 2014 @10:43PM (#7759076)
Just turns out to be a huge drag when secrets get accidentally committed to the swarm.
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Re:Gitchain: Decentralized P2P Git Repos aka "Git meets Bitc... by kadhjasdkj on Friday May 16, 2014 @10:53PM (#7759101)
I fully agree, but isn't that roughly the same with Github?

Technically it's much much different of course, but if you commit some private keys/etc to Github, you have to invalidate everything used and assume that someone saw it, Google saw it, and it's cached in multiple places. Right?

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Re:Gitchain: Decentralized P2P Git Repos aka "Git meets Bitc... by droopyEyelids on Friday May 16, 2014 @11:07PM (#7759123)
While your criticisms are valid, I think the best way to consider developments like this is as if they were a new branch of math.

These are new things we can do with the logical/mathematical system. As of now, the best application may not have been found. Saying how these new discoveries are 'not useful' sort of confuses the spirit of exploration.

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