Hacker News Reader

Comment by yumraj | Hacker News Reader

It seemed great, but then I read:

founder of a blockchain-based SIEM startup

Now I'm worried for Bulgaria.

From looking quickly at their product, it seems that the “blockchain” part of it is mostly here as a marketing buzzword more than anything: It seems that they are building a Merkle tree of logs and calling that a blockchain (you know, like the famous blockchain project called git).

I know you say this in jest but, now that you mention it, wouldn't git be a blockchain if it just had a decentralized consensus protocol to allow a cluster of repo servers to agree on the current state?

I'm usually the last person in the world to say anything should be on a blockchain but I feel something like this could be handy for hosting open source projects.

It actually is a blockchain, just that it outsources a part of work to humans.

git IS blockchain without Proof-of-Work. So yeah, if you can add PoF somehow on top of it - you will get something somewhat like bitcoin-like stuff :)))

Well, calculating those commit hashes is work :)

It won't be a blockchain anyway, because the data structure is a DAG (Directed acyclic graph) and not a freaking Linked list like blockchains!

And there's no need to agree on anything between repos, heck git allows you not to agree with yourself on your own repo between different branches. Git actually works completely fine between a number of different repository (the UX isn't great of course, but which part of git's UX is…).

Hmm. If we account for the DAG vs LL issue by calling it a "Manydimensional" or "Multiversal" blockchain do you think they will start up the money printer?

There even is a cryptocurrency using a DAG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOTA_(technology)

Why?

"blockchain based siem" is a completely useless phrase.

I wonder what "blockchain" means here. The word is all over https://logsentinel.com/ but it may be just to make "immutable audit trail" more buzzwordy.

In 2017 they posted a skeptical https://techblog.bozho.net/blockchain-its-all-greek-to-me/ which in linked to from very recent https://techblog.bozho.net/digital-transformation-and-techno...

> Technology alone will not solve anything. And my blockchain skepticism is a hint in that direction – many blockchain enthusiasts are claiming that blockchain will solve many problems in many areas of life. It won’t. At least not just through clever cryptography and consensus algorithms.

It's exactly that marketing worda for tamper-evident audit log

I'm a bit sad that marketing words work on customers, but that's just how the world is apparently. :) Thanks for the reply and major congratulations and good luck!

same here, couldn't agree more

Reply on news.ycombinator.com