Man, the blockchain being inserted wherever it doesn't need to be is becoming rampant on HN, isn't it? Humor me, though, how would that work and why would the cost of running a "blockchain," both in terms of money and energy wasted, be better than a simple feed aggregator?
A signed append only log, distributed with webtorrent would provide provenance and distribution. This would allow for not having to have dedicated infrastructure for collection.
One could also use USENET and get rid of the garbage will killfiles.
There are thousands of people contributing ADS-B data many times a minute.
You can't just "create a blockchain". Blockchains depend on hashing power for security. A new niche chain provides very little security, and a rich person like Elon could set up a hash cluster to out-hash everyone else and block updates for his jets.
In order to fund hashing power and security, there has to be economic incentive for the miners. That requires some token, which ultimately requires everyone who submits updates to pay a fee.
The reasons I and many other people provide ADS-B data to aggregation sites is that it's free (minus the one-time cost of the hardware) and I get something in return: a free upgraded account which, depending on the site, enables historical flight searches. If I lost money every time I provided data, it wouldn't make any sense to continue.
I also wouldn't want to have to download an entire (or a good chunk of a) blockchain or raw data ledger to check history for a tail number. That's what I'd have to do if it were truly decentralized. Ledgers do not provide efficient indexing.
It would be data signed by a key and added to a torrent swarm. This would only handle data collection, someone would still need to sync the swarm and process/visualize it.
It really isn't. Everyone hopping on to the next fad-air-trak-site.io is going to reproduce the same problem. Distributing the data over webtorrent from the beginning will make data access democratic.
Can you explain how you'd use Webtorrent to synchronize a large dataset that's updated in realtime? If you mean to get a P2P transport wouldn't WebRTC be what you're aiming for?
I'm genuinely curious but isn't Webtorrent just using WebRTC to join a Torrent Swarm? Torrents are fundamentally immutable, the identifier is a static hash of the content of the torrent. That would mean producing a new torrent for each new data point or chunk of data points only to then submit that hash to a WebRTC based connection to again fetch torrent content?
Genuinely curious, I'm interested in how torrent swarms can be used for novell applications.
Something that happens once in a blue moon, for data that is already in multiple locations (to varying degrees of precision).. You've failed to sell it to me, I'll continue to contribute to the simpler solutions that won't need a crap ton of extra work, thanks.
