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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: 2) by arslan on Tuesday January 17 2017, @11:41PM

    by arslan (3462) on Tuesday January 17 2017, @11:41PM (#455155)

    Thanks nice explanation even though I don't get some of the details yet. However your point about conditioning the user with eventual consistency is a key one, even outside the context of blockchains. The finance sector, and likely a lot of others, have been brainwashed with the absolute need for atomic consistency for way too long.

    In my 20 years, I've never really seen any application that truly can't live without atomic consistency if designed properly.

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  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday January 18 2017, @05:05AM

    by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday January 18 2017, @05:05AM (#455244) Journal

    If you're interested in blockchains and you haven't read the Bitcoin Whitepaper (PDF link [bitcoin.org]) it's highly recommended and pretty short. It gives you a brief overview of what's going on without assuming that you already know any Bitcoin-specific terminology.