The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus.
I have Excel spreadsheets at home though and you can be assured that they haven’t changed if you take a hash of them.
Comment on Is the blockchain an interesting innovation, aside from cryptocurrencies ?
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 1 year ago
The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus. This can take a lot of form and be the backbone of many types of applications (and already is used by large firms), the current market for direct public ledgers is a mess and I don’t generally agree with much of the last craze beyond the fundamentals needed to manage transfers, ownership and executions. The applications that will use these kinds of networks haven’t really been built yet.
dragontamer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 1 year ago
This is true, the fundamental of a blockchain is simply signed blocks of binary data. We can get into the debates on weather this can work in a public system like many groups are trying now, though I presume that that is not really what the poster is talking about since most public chains fundamentally rely on thier cryptocurrencies to to function, which for some is an argument as to why they can’t work.
dragontamer@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My cryptographically signed .pdf for my mortgage document requires no cryptocoin or “blockchain” to function.
Its just simple hashing and signatures. You know, standard cryptography. The thing that allows “HTTPS” connections? The thing that signs your credit-card each time you enter it into Amazon? The thing that signs your password as you type it into the password field?
Yeah, that’s cryptography. Not “cryptocoins” or “blockchain”, its just a cryptographic hash, signature, or encryption.
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 1 year ago
if you just keep your document on your machine and only use it for personal encryption sure. its a key exchange network, this is for when bob and alice want to talk, not look at something in the safe and put it back. distributed PKI has been a challenge for decades, im not sure about this current incarnation of public systems but I find a lot of promise in many other applications.
dangblingus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s a lot of words to say nothing. Like, you literally aren’t saying anything of substance.
The value is in the forward signed, immutable ledger written by neutral consensus. This can take a lot of form and be the backbone of many types of applications (and already is used by large firms), the current market for direct public ledgers is a mess and I don’t generally agree with much of the last craze beyond the fundamentals needed to manage transfers, ownership and executions.
All of that is word salad.
EnmaAi22@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Blockchains don’t inherently need obscene amount of erlectriciy
Proof of work mechanism does. There’s lots of other consensus mechanism that don’t.
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 1 year ago
Forward signed, immutable ledger - a dataset that is written and logged at time of write and validated using cryptographic signatures of the creator of that data and the node of the network responsible for the data. public systems use incentive systems to ensure unbiased writes, private systems work more like your typical app server.
neutral consensus - this is the p2p aspect, this is a bunch of unrelated actors promising to work toward an unrelated goal, in public systems this is done via some form of game theory, in private systems orgs working together have contract law and are more interested in the the controlled writing.
How it can take a lot of forms. Most people are just familiar with what the general public refers to as cryptocurrency. These are ledgers managed on p2p networks with the aforementioned game theory based consensus system. However ledgers are not required to do this, a ledger and even a blockchain can work without fees or even energy wasting miners, in these cases its usually the cryptographic write and channel messaging they want (some of these are a step up from AWS’s messaging stack).
Ledgers like this are used in many ways and used in large orgs around the world, what the public is angry at and what the technology is are very different things.
I hope I have “unsaladed things” for you
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 1 year ago
Blockchains come in many forms, the ones you are thinking of are what are called Proof of Work chains, these uses a kind of cryptographic race to secure thier data and use a TON of waste energy as a result. Def not a fan either.
The growing popularity and interest in chains is around forms of Proof Of Stake, these use other internal protocol mechanisms to secure the network and work to run the cryptographic functions as efficiently as possible. Unsurprisingly the fastest blockchains are proof of stake and power wise are similar to traditional applications in utilization.
You don’t need any of these networks if you don’t want to use them, fundamentally, they arent even networks, they are cryptographic messaging systems. How the data is sent and processed is incidental, you could work out a bitcoin block on pen and paper if you wanted. This concept has extended to a cryptographic tool called Zero Knowledge Proofs, these will be part of next generation identity verification systems and is a fundamental of the W3C standard around DiD, the whole point is for disconnected attestation.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Maybe this is my “too old for this shit” moment, but this all just sounds like convoluted non-sense that’s never going to go anywhere. We still have SMS and ATMs that run XP.
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 1 year ago
surprisingly small hardware is needed to sign a message. though I do agree that we are still a bit early for workable end-user use cases. People really dont care what the database or app server is, they just want it to work and raw dogging some public node is just a bit much for people, i dont blame them.
more packaged solutions are under development, these will be more like a proper application with the differences of a chain being abstracted by the provider
WintryLemon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Explain like I’m five?
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 1 year ago
sorry, gpt said i could do better
A blockchain is like a special notebook that many people can write in. Once something is written, it cannot be changed, and everyone can check that it was written correctly. This notebook help different people or companies work together by writing down and sharing important information in a safe and secure way.
Some people use these special notebooks to make digital money like Bitcoin. But it’s just way to use them. Companies also use these notebooks for other things, like making sure their business runs smoothly and securely.
So, the blockchain is not just about digital money, but also a to help people and businesses work together safely and fairly.
WintryLemon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Thank you very much!
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 1 year ago
lemmy.intai.tech/comment/578972
You can also look in my post history, ask away, I’m no fan of where public systems have gone and understand the anger, point is, these techs ARE being used already in corp systems and even if you dont use this crop of chains, you will likely be using a system like this in the future, even if you dont know it.
loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
So, if I get it, it’s like torrent, except instead of you manually verifying the hash code, each computer your file passes pay automatically checks and says “yup, the file I received and transmitted is the file I was supposed to receive and transmit” ?
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 1 year ago
pretty much, think of the files like what you would see in your .git folder for a code project. they are all linked together in a history graph. so you are validating the data, its position in history along with its entire history, you also know who changed the data and what systems were responsible for writing those changes. really solid tooling for provenance and chain-of-evidence scenarios.
loaExMachina@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I see, but if I’m not mistaken, git is anterior to the blockchain. What I’m asking here is what new things the blockchain brings to the table, that preexisting protocols like Git or P2P couldn’t do. Or is the blockchain just another application of the same principles (the Merkle chain, as a previous commenter was saying)? If so, what sets it appart ?
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 1 year ago
I’ll refer to one of my earlier responses someone asked about this in context of a process like docusigns’
so if you are looking at this its a question to trust scopes, at least in public systems. here you are trusting:
- the bank
- the broker
- docusign
- you govt
- your courts
the proposal for a decentralized ledger with neutral execution is that the only “trust” needed is that in the contracts function, however this is not entirely true, in reality you are shifting trust to:
- genesis ceremony
your ability/resources to asses the contracts function and your counterparties.
some people feel this is a better way of doing things, ive found it interesting to work in the space technically but I dont necessarily agree with the wildwest nature of the public systems and am more an advocate of regulated channels if these are going to be done at all. There is also the idea that a large enough network makes it possible for the network to handle larger loads than any individual processor could handle, this has borne out in some cases though its not perfect since we know P2P network instability tends to ripple through a network.
Finally if an application has been built with web3 practices enshrined its entirely possible to ensure service continuity even in the event of the provider failing financially and being unable to serve the users. Important to note this is RARELY done properly and I have only seen a couple cases where it worked so far. However personally this is one of the most impressive features, I am biased however as I was involved in the recovery of a commons that has turned into a defacto standard. Didn’t make anything from it other than consulting feed, just really cool to help a non-profit
If we are talking the internal org, like docusign itself, an org like might adopt a ledger based system for the in-built capabilities of some chains, you find quickly that enterprise grade cryptographic tracking of large scales of assets or process gets VERY expensive. Ledgers can be very helpful in these cases though are more a consideration when validating a new system rather than it being an impetus to upgrade in and of itself.
I often refer to it as a specialized app-server stack to clients.
phillaholic@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Any sources in large firms using it? I haven’t seen anything other than generic marketing talk.
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 1 year ago
I can say of the top of my head the JPM and AMEX are running internal ledgers but there are many more, IBM and Accenture co-developed a system called Hyperledger which was given to the Linux Foundation. Its a tool kit for developing and deploying ledger applications primarily targeted at internal corps.
One of the cases these are good for is an easier to manage rights and asset control systems than many products you would pay more for and with less futzing with IAM, LADP or AD.
Rakn@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
These sound more like publicity stunts than anything else. There isn’t really much value in running a private Blockchain. At that point it lost all value a Blockchain would provide. Who are.you protecting yourself against?