Thursday, 9th August 2018
Easy explainer: a "blockchain" is a linked list with an append-only restriction, and appending is made incredibly expensive but super parallelizable, so when things work well a big group of people can work together and it's too expensive for a small evil group to compete. [...] Does your problem benefit from storing information in an append-only list, and relying on a central authority to manage it is so bad that it's worth paying the enormous append costs to have a bunch of Chinese servers manage it for you? Then maybe look at a blockchain.
Using achievement stats to estimate sales on steam (via) Really interesting data leak exploit here: Valve’s Steam API was showing the percentage of users that gained a specific achievement up to 16 decimal places—which inadvertently leaked their exact usage statistics, since if 0.012782207690179348 percent of players get an achievement the only possible input is 8 players out of 62,587.