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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
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Tuesday January 17 2017, @06:04PM
Can it always be perfectly be predicted whether a transaction will be performed in a "safe" (transaction guaranteed) vs. "exploitable" (not guaranteed) state?
The CAP theorem [wikipedia.org], proved by Eric Brewer, can be stated as follows:
"Consistency, availability, partition tolerance: pick two."
The featured article recommends dropping availability in the case of a split.