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posted by on Tuesday January 17 2017, @02:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the horrible-headlines-hinder-hearkening dept.

The financial sector's enthusiasm for blockchain technology might be misplaced, according to a pair of Australian distributed computing experts.

The problem: if everyone in a consortium trusts each other, they don't need blockchains to protect themselves; if they don't, current blockchain protocols have a flaw that allows a bad actor to game the system.

The warning comes from CSIRO/Data61 researcher Vincent Gramoli, lead author of an arXiv paper describing what he and colleague Christopher Natoli call "The Balance Attack" (the name comes from one aspect of their attack, that it's deployed against subgroups of nodes with balanced mining power).

In the finance/banking context, Gramoli says the problem is that blockchains are probabilistic, but for something like an inter-bank transfer, you need determinism. If the system enters a state in which it can't guarantee all transactions, downtime is the best solution.

Gramoli told The Reg "if the assumptions are not met, users should get a message that 'the system is not available, please try again later'".

Source: The Register


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Tuesday January 17 2017, @04:21PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 17 2017, @04:21PM (#454940) Journal

    I'd like to see the mistakes I may have made through confirmation bias, etc.

    Well, I suppose you can take comfort in Oxford Dictionaries [oxforddictionaries.com] pointing out that

    The word nice, derived from Latin nescius meaning ‘ignorant’, began life in the fourteenth century as a term for ‘foolish’ or ‘silly’. From there it embraced many a negative quality, including wantonness, extravagance, and ostentation, as well as cowardice and sloth.

    The same source says of the word "bully" (which seems to nicely fit your first category above):

    To call someone a bully was, in the sixteenth century, to effectively say ‘good fellow’ or ‘darling’: it was a term of endearment that could be used to either sex.

    Of course, whether this calls your theory into question, or merely indicates that it would not have applied in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, is open to interpretation.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 17 2017, @04:39PM

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 17 2017, @04:39PM (#454952) Journal

    To quibble further:

    Nescius, pronounced with traditional(i.e. not church) Latin inflection, would have more hard consonants(the c), and the e and u would both be short vowels. I'd almost go as far as to suggest that endorses my silly phonosemantic theory, that a meaning switched from positive to negative as the pronunciation softened.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday January 17 2017, @05:53PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday January 17 2017, @05:53PM (#454980)

      Came for a blockchain safety discussion, stayed for the English vowels vs consonant "phonosemantic" theories...
      SN is people, indeed.

      • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Tuesday January 17 2017, @06:03PM

        by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 17 2017, @06:03PM (#454987) Journal

        Oh, I can contribute to the blockchain discussion too: blockchains continue to be a solution in search of a problem. With numerous minor technical deficiencies that may be someday hammered out.

      • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 17 2017, @07:56PM

        by Gaaark (41) on Tuesday January 17 2017, @07:56PM (#455033) Journal

        I came for the alliteration; stayed for the communication, lol.

        --
        --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---