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Comment by csande17 | Hacker News Reader

> BC solves a problem there because operating a database for that scale would be very complicated.

Would it, though? Google tells me that India has a population of around 1.4 billion people. Let's assume each person has one phone number, and each phone number requires one kilobyte of number-mobility-related data. Then the database would need to store 1.4 terabytes of information.

1.4 terabytes doesn't seem like an impossible amount of data to store. That fits on a consumer hard drive! Dell will sell you a single server with that much memory! Request volume doesn't seem like a huge issue either, since porting a phone number is something people do extremely rarely.

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I don't think it is the size that is the problem. I imagine it is like a routing table, keeping track which number is managed by which operator, and if India has number portability, there needs to be a transactional method to update it that is shared by all operators. I could imagine this being done with a blockchain.

Or for that matter, recording of call details for billing between operators?

"Keep track of which number is managed by which operator" reduces to "store a small amount of information for each phone number".

In a traditional database setup, the "transactional method to update it" would be sending a request to a central server to update the database. The central server can be run by whatever regulatory body or industry association is responsible for number portability -- ideally, this would be the group with legal authority to overrule whatever the computer system says anyway. It wouldn't need to handle a large number of transactions per second because people don't change phone providers very often.

You could imagine doing it with a blockchain instead, but you could also imagine doing it using a Yahoo Groups email list -- that doesn't make it a necessary or good solution.

Sounds good at first, but now your calls stop working if the regulator's system goes down for maintenance. You can certainly make it work, but I don't see what the major benefit of using a central database is here.

> It wouldn't need to handle a large number of transactions per second because people don't change phone providers very often.

That makes it fit blockchain quite well, actually.

What if other operators don't want to introduce an additional governing entity with a super power of taking their customers? Like if they don't want additional corruption, easy to misuse power, etc?

I mean, I can imagine government wants this, so if such ideas comes from government you're going to have such regulatory body. But otherwise, if it comes from operators itself, they don't want to introduce such entity, and they don't want to award one of them as an ultimate boss to rule all of the numbers. Blockchain, at least, gives them a chance to continue to be equal.

Blockchain backers seem to take it as a given that centralization is bad. But when pressed on why, the best answers I have seen are “because centralization is bad”. Well, I guess that’s not 100% true; the first answer is that we shouldn’t trust authority. Why? Because authority is bad. Why? Because authority is bad.

But as this article articulates so well, that’s a red herring. Like, you can come up with all sorts of wild scenarios where central authority can be bad. But ultimately, these are scenarios you’re unlikely to encounter in the real world, and if you do, there are much simpler solutions.

Blockchain technology always reminded me of that XKCD about cryptographer expectations vs. reality (https://xkcd.com/538/): it’s solving a problem that only really exists in fantasy for 99% of the population.

I imagine the issue is maintaining consensus between the different phone companies. Without blockchain you'd have to have a canonical database run by a single entity, whereas you can use blockchain as the consensus mechanism among competing companies.

It's a shame there's no central authority responsible for regulating telecom in India, or this would be a really easy problem to solve.

I mean sure you could have the government manage the central database but maybe the Indian government is not equip to run such a database. Plus you can avoid some of the problems with high costs or stagnation that can happen with centrally run systems. I don't think there's any particular reason to reject blockchain if it works in this case.

Start non-profit for that purpose that will manage the database.

Ther database will hold only entries signed by telco companies. Some rules will apply on what happens when a number changes.

Everyone gets access to the raw database, and to query the database.

In case of mismatches there will be an agreed arbitration process, with agreed upon fines to the party no being responsible. This or some other contract.

This sort of solves the problem.

The key win in the blockchain - is the decentralization. But we know, in the real world how to arrange cooperation using centralization. it works. It's done every day. So this case is mostly useful when you want to avoid regulation.

Another win of the blockchain - a lot of work has been done verifying that it is secure. It probably is the mose secure system for those sort of problems. And that's a good reason to use it in many places.

I'm not sure I agree that blockchain is the most secure solution for common problems.

Let's say you get a computer virus that steals your banking credentials and transfers your money to someone else's account. In the traditional banking system, it's often possible to reset passwords and reverse transactions, especially if you catch the bad behavior quickly. With Bitcoin, your money is gone forever and it is mathematically impossible for you to ever get it back.

That's true for Bitcoin because it's almost impossible to get most miners and nodes to agree to reversing such a mistake, it's completely against the spirit of the project.

But in the example above that could still be easily fixed, you'd just need the companies involved to agree to reverse the mistake, as they are the miners of the chain.

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