Comment by josu | Hacker News Reader

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by josu | Hacker News Reader

For context, Accenture has been criticizing blockchains for their immutability. [1] [2] [3] So I would not take anything coming from them seriously.

[1] Downside of Bitcoin: A Ledger That Can’t Be Corrected: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/business/dealbook/downside...

[2] EDITING THE UNEDITABLE BLOCKCHAIN (PDF) https://www.accenture.com/t20160927T033514__w__/us-en/_acnme...

[3] Accenture Launches A Way To Edit Blockchains: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroenfeldt/2016/10/06/accentu...

What I found especially amazing by that is traditional accounting is based on immutability already: you never delete a ledger entry, you add a correction. The same concept for a blockchain is trivial. Equally, if you _really_ do need to delete something, just insert a record into the blockchain instructing all nodes to delete that record. Sure, you won't be able to verify the chain 100% after you delete the data, but you'll have a auditable record of why that's the case.

Actually their view point is perfectly consistent. They criticized _bitcoin_ not the blockchain. While a blockchain could support some of the regulatory required undo stuff (by appending a record that it's been undone), bitcoin itself certainly doesn't won't let you roll back a bunch of transactions.

Read the PDF: they're working on a chameleon hash scheme so that their blockchain can be undetectably modified, not unlike making an accounting ledger with dry erase markers. That's going way beyond disagreeing with Bitcoin; what they're doing doesn't have the strong auditability that you'd expect from a "blockchain" solution. It's closer to a bog standard database really.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com