Quote from: Cassius on March 11, 2015, 04:13:31 PM

Quote from: synechist on March 11, 2015, 04:00:42 PM

Quote from: Cassius on March 11, 2015, 03:36:46 PM

Quote from: synechist on March 11, 2015, 03:18:47 PM

Multigateway, which facilitates the exchange of currencies between nodes on different blockchains, involves groups of servers mediating the exchange.

As such, exchange between buyer and seller is not conducted on a peer-to-peer basis. There is a third party involved (albeit not a traditional monolithic third party, but groups of servers utilising m-of-3 multisig). This third party mediates the transaction, and must be trusted to do so.

The above is what it means to perform a cloud service. Processing occurs at (well, near) the centre of the network, rather than being pushed to the network's edges (i.e. the peers), which is what defines fog computing.

Therefore, Multigateway is a cloud service bus for blockchain-based nodes.

In contrast, the Blocknet's decentralised exchange is being developed on a radically p2p model, making it a fog computing service.

You are selecting one element of SuperNET - one of the gateway mechanisms for coins, fiat, assets etc - and characterising all of SuperNET in terms of this alone. InstantDEX is a near-realtime peer-to-peer exchange service. This is clearly not cloudy.

You're entirely correct. I have only referred to Multigateway and not to all the other SuperNET components.

On the other hand, I selected Multigateway carefully. InstantDEX is p2p but runs on the NXT Asset Exchange and thus is on the NXT blockchain. Therefore it is not inter-chain which is the context of the discussion.

To give another example of something related to InstantDEX that is cloudy rather than foggy, ATOMIC is a blockchain that records transactions of other chains. Thus it centralises inter-chain networking.

(Correct me if I'm mistaken, of course. I'm no expert on this tech and I'm happy to stand corrected if I'm mistaken.)

I'm not an expert at every aspect of the tech myself. If you are genuinely interested in learning the differences then do drop over to Slack and ask. However, I'd be wary of calling any blockchain 'centralised', NXT or Atomic or any other, even in this context. It seems like an odd word to use to describe it. This is only the first stage, in any case, but you'd need to ask devs directly for details as I'm not at liberty to discuss them.
Ultimately if you want to differentiate the two projects, I'd think there were better and clearer ways of doing it. If you're serious about pushing crypto out to a broader user-base, then discussions about the difference between distributed and decentralised aren't going to be much of a marketing tool.

Thanks for the invitation. I'd be interested in joining, though as far as I'm aware the SuperNET folks don't seem very positively disposed toward me for some reason. Do you think they'd actually welcome me?

I agree that there's some irony in calling blockchain-based tech centralised, though in this context - which is the networking of chains - the distinctions do apply, and without ambiguity.

(That said, I also agree that there's a lack of marketing-friendly terminology to talk about this stuff. With so many layers, each of which can be centralised or decentralised, it's a complex landscape. Once we move from developing the core components onto marketing it to customers, we will need a good set of ways to present the differences. For the time being, I'm just using technical though confusing language.)