On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 07:00:49PM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 5:01 PM Michael Thomas <mike@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > On 10/14/20 12:16 PM, Barry Leiba 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. > > > > What place might that be? I really can't think of any. Maybe you can use > > it for buying and selling tulips. > > > > Mike > > > Every day thousands of courts are presented with digital evidence, pretty > much all of which should be excluded because it is far too easy to tamper > with. I have spent days engaged in pointless arguments over > admissibility that could be avoided entirely. > > Every piece of digital evidence that is collected should be time stamped at > the time it is collected and enrolled in a notary service using a one way > sequence. At regular intervals, the notary offering this service should > cross notarize with other notary services, thus making it impossible for > any one notary to defect without detection unless every other notary > colludes. And NIST and every other national lab should run a national cross > notary service whose probity would be automatically considered valid by the > courts of that country. > > That is not the sort of construct I see being built in blockchain land. > Noooo, much more fun selling virtual cowrie shells. But it is exactly the > sort of infrastructure we need. Yup, that would be swell. Too bad I don't have a budget to help make it happen. -Ben
