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Digital preservationist, David Rosenthal, has a blog post discussing his recent Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) talk about distributed ledger technology. CNI is a joint initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE to promote the use of digital information technologies to advance scholarship and education. The discrepancy between the available capacity in transactions per second and what is actually needed, plus the excessive power consumption, suggests that many attempted uses for distributed ledgers are inappropriate and counterproductive.
I gave a talk at the Fall CNI meeting entitled Blockchain: What's Not To Like? The abstract was:
We're in a period when blockchain or "Distributed Ledger Technology" is the Solution to Everything™, so it is inevitable that it will be proposed as the solution to the problems of academic communication and digital preservation. These proposals typically assume, despite the evidence, that real-world blockchain implementations actually deliver the theoretical attributes of decentralization, immutability, anonymity, security, scalability, sustainability, lack of trust, etc. The proposers appear to believe that Satoshi Nakamoto revealed the infallible Bitcoin protocol to the world on golden tablets; they typically don't appreciate or cite the nearly three decades of research and implementation that led up to it. This talk will discuss the mis-match between theory and practice in blockchain technology, and how it applies to various proposed applications of interest to the CNI audience.
Below the fold, an edited text of the talk with links to the sources, and much additional material. The colored boxes contain quotations that were on the slides but weren't spoken.
Earlier on SN:
BitCoin's Record Drop may have Started Scaring Miners Away
Cryptocurrency Miners Are Building Their Own Electricity Infrastructure
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12 2018, @09:23PM (7 children)
No, that's not true at all in fact.
There are multiple consensus models. PoW is one, but there are literally thousands of others.
Blockchain is about taking the cryptographic hash of the sum of previous hashes and using it as the basis point for the next step in the chain.
It's called "block chain", because data submitted to the network is aggregated into relatively fixed size blocks of information, with the cryptographic hash of the data contained within the block, plus the cryptographic hash of the previous block being used to form a chain. Different chains have different ways of accomplishing this. However the more recent blockchain technologies take a hash of the individual unit data, add it the hashes of other data units, never actually storing the raw data itself in the chain. Hashes only, and then the hashes can serve as an address in a content addressed network wherein the raw data unit itself is stored. This reduces size of the chain and means you can use other techniques to achieve consensus on what blocks are accepted or rejected, without the need to marshall gigs of data between worker nodes.
Fundamentally the article fails to even understand what a blockchain is, nor how they operate.
They are perfect if you need a cryptgraphically secure, time stamped, registry of data especially if this is used and index into a content addressable network.
Ledgers are just an application of the time stamped data.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday December 12 2018, @10:17PM (1 child)
Amazing how often this happens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 13 2018, @11:09PM
Yet somehow we want to pretend they know what they are talking about on other topics.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Wednesday December 12 2018, @10:28PM
Wow, well put.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday December 12 2018, @10:42PM (3 children)
I think you're missing the sarcasm in:
Of course that's not what blockchain is designed to do, that's the widely acknowledged (often mistakenly discounted) weakness in the original bitcoin protocol.
Loosely equating blockchain and bitcoin is kind of like loosely equating Republicans with blind fundamentalist racist idiot bigots. Of course that's not true of all Republicans, just the entertaining ones.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 12 2018, @10:57PM (2 children)
I know you're being a little sarcastic there, but the shitty Republicans hurt my brain on a logical and moral level. Entertaining they are not, their rhetoric is so obvious and bad I can not call it entertainment. Their views quite literally impact the freedom and safety of their fellow citizens.
For a group that doesn't like being compared to Nazis they sure are quick to label any opposition as Pol Pot style socialists, as if no one has enough of a brain to see through that comparison.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday December 12 2018, @11:47PM (1 child)
The #AmazonWashingtonPost [twitter.com] says I'm the worst guy since Pol Pot (RIP!!!). Because I promised to get the 11 million Illegals out of our Country -- something I'm working very hardon (very successfull meeting with Chuck & Nancy). So I invited Henry Kissinger -- big Pol Pot guy -- to my Washington White House. Something Crooked H would have loved to do. She couldn't do it, because she lost very badly. And I had a great talk with Henry. We talked about North Korea, China and the Middle East. So interesting! And I'm thinking, maybe Pol Pot wasn't so bad. He's not my enemy!!!
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 13 2018, @01:17AM
Don't you and Chuck and Nancy all basically agree on the immigration issue?
Have you outdone the Deporter in Chief yet?
Only crazy libertarians and socialists believe that labor should be able to move as freely as capital moves.