What is blockchain? It's a way to create a global ledger without trust.
What do you need to track your pork chops? A ledger.
What is IBM? A huge, trusted, corporation.
Does anyone think if IBM operated a bog standard database of pork chops that the users would not trust it?
Every few months I'm reading these articles about using blockchain, which is pretty clever, for something that doesn't require it.
Interesting. Do you have some pointers for more information on these efforts?
Take for instance the options contract market. Let's say you have a pool of 50 trusted brokerages and financial institutions that rapidly trade these contracts. The current solution is each entity has their own custom, internal tracking system along with either a centralized service that they all communicate with, or inter-party connections. In either case, this is fragile, highly expensive to build and maintain and is often slow.
The blockchain isn't a miracle technology like these articles portray it as, and IBM, JP Morgan, et al don't see it that way anyway. It is a convenience tool for a more robust ledger that will lower costs for trusted inter-party transactions.
You're right, from a technology point of view. But for this system to run, you need to convince a lot of people, from different cultures/backgrounds, to use it.
Maybe talking about the safety of the bitcoin network instead of a mathematical proof makes that marketing challenge easier ?
1- The main advantage over something like Paxos or Raft is simplicity. There are also serious disadvantages, and normally I would still suggest grabbing a library that does Paxos or Raft instead of something blockchain-based. Still, it's not "no advantage".
If there is a benefit in using blockchain to track pork chops, and if all the pork chop companies know and kinda-trust each other already, a private blockchain could keep the hackers out and implement various security schemes, and maybe even have a board that could publicly organize a rollback to undo a "DAO-hack". (As seen with Ethereum, such a "board" exists implicitly anyway even in a public blockchain system).
But do you enjoy reading something like this [1]? Can you analyze blockchain code like that? Ideally before you know that there's a bug?
It's on Ethereum to show how to make things secure. The general level of software buggyness is inacceptable if you say "code is law".
[1] http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/06/18/analysis-of-the-dao...
It's still a problem in the largest deployment. Does anyone have a "solution" to this?
In this specific case, it seems like what they really should do is have a set of trusted nodes for ledger replication.
W.r.t. having a set of trusted nodes, that's fine, however does the blockchain add anything in this situation?
Satoshi didn't coin the term blockchain and they existed for a long time before bitcoin so giving him sole claim to it because it paired it with a feature that isn't specifically required to have a blockchain seems silly.
That said I do agree that their are a lot of buzzword vultures using it at the moment for stupid business ideas though I think 99% of the bitcoin business ideas are poorly thought out and poor replacements for existing solutions("but with bitcoin!") so it's no surprise 99% of the blockchain ones are too.
In the original form though, it makes no sense to fire up your own bitcoin, because when it's small it's vulnerable to the attack you mention.
The real reason behind techniques such as PoW instead of just Distributed Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithms is scaling in terms of number of validators. Most of DBFTs (afaik Algorand is the only exception) don't really scale. Proof of Authority behaves similarly to PoW, since it also does not have that problem.
Go with DBFT unless you want to have huge number of validators.
This creates a vast overhead as you can't secure a billion+ dollar market without massive and continuous investments.
But if you have some trusted party just use a DB.
Blockchain's also provide data redundancy and security between entities. It'd be way more effective way to communicate commodities, medical records, etc as the security, data model, and system API are all integrated into the blockchain model.
Having the "database" be the API would be great for those of us dealing with supply chain. Want information from your supplier in Shenzhen? Good luck with current systems! Paxos/raft do nothing to resolve data access and verification.
If you don't do that it's easy for your idea of what something is to morph into something sexy that's the best thing since sliced bread. Also it's a function of non technical people having a brainstorming session. They pat each other on the back for taking this thing to the next level, which is actually the previous level.
The problem is in the corporate world there is no trust. People seem to get the notion that if you use facts to show them their idea is bad that it is some sort of personal attack. Or worse, there are those in the corporate world that can spot a bad idea and not say anything -- only to watch it fail.
Even without that, its a confounding problem for me. Im always doing those things: asking questions either to genuinely learn or to ferret out possible mistakes, pointing out errors, sharing better methods/techniques, etc. I just cant help it, and while I try hard to word things in a constructive manner, to make sure it IS constructive, more often than not I think it is taken poorly.
I want the same criticism of my own work, but I still often have a difficult time with it myself, though I recognize the signs as the knee-jerk reactions that they usually are, and seem to get better at that every day.