Answering some misconceptions about Podping and Hive on Stacker News

This is an answer to this post from Stacker News: Do you know that podcastindex utilizes a shitcoin for building postcasting 2.0?

You write with great authority and certainty about that which you clearly have little knowledge. Interesting that I found this today.

I proposed the system which became Podping to Dave Jones and Adam Curry and all the other devs who actually show up and build stuff for the Podcasting 2.0 community project.

Before I proposed it, however, I actually knocked up a working prototype and showed live on a Jitsi call how it could solve a very real inefficiency in the way new podcast episodes have been found for the last 20 years.

It was only because of the unique technical properties of Hive (3 second blocks, no transaction fees, permissionless) that I was able to code this so quickly and cheaply.

It was the governance and ownership aspects of Hive which are less well understood, which gave me the confidence that Hive will be around for the long term. Those aspects:

• no VC funding;
• no corporate ownership of core aspects or code;
• a widely distributed and diverse collection of known and pseudonymous Witnesses;
• a stable and positive rewarding mechanism for the runners of key infrastructure to keep servers running;
• a long list of backup witnesses and battle proven ability to defeat and thrive after a 51% money attack;
• the kind of community comradeship which follows from repelling an alien invasion.

Do you know that podcastindex utilizes a shitcoin for building postcasting 2.0?
1667 sats \ 8 comments \ @holger 27 Jun
After some digging i found out that postcastindex uses the HIVE blockchain for building their podcast index. The parsing works as follows:

a small server program parses different RSS feeds and stores the result in the HIVE blockchain (https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podping-hivewriter)

The Podping Hivewriter is open source software that anyone can run. You just need a Hive account and probably holding (not spending) $10 worth of Hive and you can send out many podpings per day. To do something similar on Bitcoin or any POW system would cost a fortune.

Podpings are merely notifications that an RSS feed has changed. Anyone who sees that notification then needs to pull down the RSS feed and parse it as has been done since the dawn of Podcasting history. It is only the mechanism to alert for the need to scan a feed which Podping changes. Previously this was done with repetitive polling: servers would periodically check every one of the 4m+ RSS feeds asking if they've changed yet.

Each podping is a custom_json stored on the Hive blockchain containing one or more RSS feed IRIS. Here's one:

As you can see that Podping was sent by podping.aaa, an account controlled by Dave at Podcast Index. He runs a friendly web front end which Podcast Hosting companies like Transistor.fm, Buzzsprout, RSS.com and a growing list of other, all use to send podpings (they could run the software themselves and maybe one day they will but for now a get request to PodcastIndex is easier).

The entries can be check here: https://hiveblocks.com/@podping.aaa
Blockchain watcher (https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podping.cloud) parses the HIVE blockchain and build the SQL database at https://podcastindex.org/
he @podping.aaa is in control of a single user https://peakd.com/@brianoflondon

Any account can send out Podpings. We can't control Hive or who can write to it: it's permissionless remember? As part of Podcasting 2.0, however, we have put in place a kind of potential spam filter.

This answers the misconception you had in a later comment "HIVE is a dpos chain and at the moment there is a single private key to write entries.". No, any Hive account, including one you can make now, can start sending Podpings immediately. If you start sending junk you will be ignored, if you send valid Podcast updates your podpings will be recognised by all our clients after I (or Dave because he has the keys to do this) simply click Follow in any one of half a dozen front ends to Hive (I could write directly to the chain too but it's easier to use a nice web front end).

The Open Source Podping Hive Watcher software that we've shared contains code which validates the account which sends Podpings. Basically any account which is "followed" by the Podping main account will be watched. You can see this list here or access is via an API I wrote.

But this is just a safety feature. If you want to watch for Podpings from anyone, you can, because the entire Hive chain is public and anyone can see all the content on it.

(Check for recovery account at https://hiveblocks.com/@podping.aaa. A recovery account can reset the account password and claim >the account at any time)

This is completely wrong. I won't go into the full mechanics of recovery accounts but it's more like a multi sig addition which helps you recover if any of your lower level keys are compromised. If you lose or forget all your keys there's nothing that can recover a lost Hive account. The recovery account cannot gain control of a Hive account without significant actions by the target account to invite this. It's a last ditch recovery system.

It is correct that I have created the majority of accounts used for Podping, but I've given the keys of many of these over to those who are using them.

Unlike an afterthought bolted on to Bitcoin, there are separate private keys for posting, transferring funds and even higher ownership activities like revoking and regenerating new keys. Hive is quite sophisticated and well thought out as might be expected from a system that's been around so long and worked on by some smart people.

As you can read here:
https://peakd.com/hive-110369/@brianoflondon/continuation-hive-to-value-4-value-the-hive-bitcoin-lightning-bridge-part-3

This should be used to pump the HIVE blockchain.

what do you think about this? It is also very interesting that you will not find anything about their usage of HIVE on https://podcastindex.org/>

Hive works and does so in a sustainable way without external funding. Podping on Hive works. Podping is a tiny and insignificant amount of traffic for Hive but nobody has come up with a better solution and after one year, it is gaining even more traction within the very blockchain sceptic podcasting world.

Just FYI over the last 8 hours Podping has sent 1,486 transactions and alerted changes to 9,825 feeds. Podping represents less than 0.01% of the traffic on Hive.

  {
    "hive_accname": "_total",
    "timestamp": "2022-08-16T18:40:23.682543+00:00",
    "recent_ping_datetime": "2022-08-16T18:34:12",
    "recent_ping_age": 371.665709,
    "ping_count": [
      {
        "hours": 1,
        "count": 171,
        "feeds": 1148
      },
      {
        "hours": 4,
        "count": 731,
        "feeds": 4821
      },
      {
        "hours": 8,
        "count": 1486,
        "feeds": 9025
      }
    ]
  }

It is of side interest that I applied for and received a grant of what was worth at the time around $7000 USD from the Hive DAO. When Hive forked from Steem after Jusin Sun's money attack, the Steem pre-mine tokens that represented the stake Justin Sun bought were instead diverted to a DAO. If enough community members support a proposal, it is funded. My current work bridging between ⚡️Lightning and Hive is supported this way too.

Adam and Dave don't shout about how Podping works because they don't need to, the main thing is that it has totally changed the way notifications of rss feed changes can be done.

The next mind blowing part which is already working is cross app and cross platform live notifications which any host will be able to use. This is going to be revolutionary and only those with a good deal of imagination and the humility to realise they don't know everything, are going to see it coming.