On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 3:16 PM Barry Leiba <barryleiba@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> But 90% of the efforts of the academy and 99% of those of commerce are focused on
> the Blockchain, an integrity technology.
It's worse than that, because not only is most of the effort placed on
blockchain technology, blockchain technology is also being pushed as
the answer to *everything*. Blockchain technology has a place, but it
doesn't make sense everywhere, and when one says, "Wait, let's take a
step back and look at what we really *need* blockchains for, and where
we don't," then one seems a heretic... or at best, quaintly naïve.
Barry
And it's even worse because Blockchain is not just a technology, it is an ideology.
What is useful in Blockchain is the technology patented by Haber and Stornetta in 1990. Extending one way functions to create one way sequences is very powerful. We use that in Certificate Transparency. The idea of using a one way sequence to anchor a naming system is very powerful and should have been the basis for the RPKI (nobody wanted to listen).
But when people propose taking their problem and jamming it into Blockchain, they are inheriting a whole bunch of legacy that really isn't helpful. It is pretty easy to guess who Satoshi was and he knew he was dying when he launched the scheme. He was a man in a very big hurry and he was not designing a platform for the ages. BitCoin and the other cryptocurrencies are currently consuming roughly 1% of global energy use. The amount of electronic commerce taking place on BitCoin in goods other than other crypto currencies is still a rounding error. A lot of people are getting rich from what regularly turn out to have been Ponzi schemes.
I am not hitching my wagon to Blockchain because it is the regulatory equivalent of a kick me technology. A practical model for ubiquitous end to end security is enough of a political liability without building on a platform whose only constituencies are drug peddlers, child abusers and money launderers. Terrorists already know how to obtain end to end encryption products that meet their needs, I do not know of any technology that would prevent terrorists using existing end-to-end encryption schemes. But I do know how to shut down the cryptocurrency world.
