Is Blockchain the Most Important IT Invention of Our Age? (theguardian.com)

mspohr writes: This article makes a fairly persuasive argument for the utility of the blockchain. It discusses a wide variety of companies and government exploring blockchain to maintain secure records which cannot be altered. One interesting application is to use blockchain to maintain property records in many countries where these records are often incomplete and are easily corrupted (intentionally or unintentionally). A linked article in The Economist expands the thought and discusses changes to the blockchain to improve performance, reduce overhead and accommodate different uses. (See also this related poll.)

Comments

answer: no

[turkeydance]

and any other post that ends with a question mark

Re:answer: no

[Applehu Akbar]

Does he mean that blockchain that is already having trouble scaling in a Bitcoin market of meth dealers and Russian ransomware jockeys? What would happen if we tried using it to, say, keep track of the world's Visa transactions?

Re: answer: no

[WarJolt]

The great thing about the blockchain concept is that it is distributed. There is no central server you can compromise.

Unfortunately if you own a significant portion of the compute power in the network you can comprise it. Additionally the proof of work function used by bitcoin can be easily computed by special purpose hardware. There are countries and corporations with enough resources to take over bitcoin. One way to make that harder is use a memory-hard proof of work function, because memory is always expensive no matter how efficiently you can do the computation.

If it ever became worthwhile for a government to compromise these systems, they will.

Re:answer: no

[Chas]

While some of the uses are ingenious, it's essentially just a new take on "the logfile".

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Dahamma]

C and C++ are only the foundation because the happened to become popular due to a bunch of misc. factors, not because they are inherently great inventions in themselves. Also, they (and their standard libraries) evolved over time to their current state.

It's like saying English and Spanish are the most important languages because they are fundamentally the "best-invented" ones, not because of the accidents of fate that were colonial expansion, WWII, and the Internet.

Re:There's no evidence it's even sustainable

[Anonymous Coward]

The blockchain is only useful because it is used as a currency. When there is no financial incentive to waste electricity making heat the blockchain can be easily circumvented with a 51% attack.

Without Bitcoin as a currency, all that is left is a massively inefficient distributed file store with a layer of cryptography.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_distributed_file_systems

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Wycliffe]

C and C++ are only the foundation because the happened to become popular due to a bunch of misc. factors, not because they are inherently great inventions in themselves. Also, they (and their standard libraries) evolved over time to their current state.

It's like saying English and Spanish are the most important languages because they are fundamentally the "best-invented" ones, not because of the accidents of fate that were colonial expansion, WWII, and the Internet.

C and C++ are the foundation because they give you the power to talk directly to the hardware with relative ease and flexibility. You cannot compare C/C++ to Perl, Python, PHP, or even to Java. Yes, C++ is harder to use than higher level languages but that's kindof the point of the higher level languages. The point of C++ is to be an intermediate language that straddles both worlds. There are really no other languages that can switch between machine code, assembly, and high level concepts with the ease and flexibility of C++. That's the reason C++ has the staying power it does.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Dutch Gun]

If you know what you are doing then C itself can be used to write safe and secure code.

The difference between writing safe code in C and C++ is how the language (and by extension, the compiler) can help to keep you safe. A well-designed C++ class is almost impossible to use incorrectly or unsafely. Saying you can write safe code in C is like saying you can be safe while riding a motorcycle - you're perfectly safe until you make a mistake, and then you're not.

Back on topic, this sentence caught my eye:

"...in so far as Joe Public thinks about distributed ledgers at all, it is in the context of Bitcoin, money laundering and online drug dealing..."

I was about to laugh this off, and then I see this comment below the article:

"The problem with all this is that anyone who controls 50%+1 of the blockchain controls all of the block chain. Thus the only thing guaranteeing the integrity is that the bad guys cant control more than half. And thats the problem , for a block chain to be effective it needs to be widely decentralized, and if its widely decentralized, it has the potential to be hijacked and then bot netted. Next thing you know, your block chain belongs to someone else, and with 50%+1 control, they can start editing that blockchain."

Whelp, the author sure called it. People apparently can't distinguish between the concept of a distributed ledger and a specific implementation of one (i.e. Bitcoin). The underlying encrypting technology of preserving a history is the most important part of this system. Any alteration affects every transaction going forward, so making surreptitious changes to the transaction history are impossible.

I've always heard the mantra "electronic records can be altered", spoken as an absolute truism. I guess the proper counter is "yes, but it can't necessarily go undetected". It will be interesting to see how many ways this technology can be used when you need to guarantee the integrity of a set of data and related transactions.

Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore

[caseih]

Doesn't look like the mods understood what the article was talking about anymore than you did! This isn't about bitcoins. It's about the technology for doing a trustrworthy and tamper-proof ledger of transactions between parties that need not have any trust for each other. The article contains at least one good use for the blockchain: land deeds.

Re:Yes, it changes everything and here's why

[DerekLyons]

if my research on this subject is worth anything at all

Since all you have is airy handwaving, buzzwords, more buzzwords, and yet more buzzwords... I'd say your research is less than valueless.

Re:No, C and C++ are the most important.

[Rockoon]

C and C++ are the foundation because they give you the power to talk directly to the hardware with relative ease and flexibility.

You seem to be confusing pointers with something low level (even BASIC can read and write arbitrary memory.)

Do explain to us, which language feature of C or C++ gives you the power to talk to the hardware directly. All you noob C and C++ programmers that werent banging keys 30 years ago dont seem to have any idea what a phrase like "talk to the hardware" means but you guys sure seem to use it a lot when referring to your favorite language.

Let me explain things for you. The magic of C is that the myriad of algorithms and data structures a simple operating system needs can be expressed succinctly in it, making it a good but still unnecessary choice for writing an operating system. What you think is low level is actually just C's abstract machine, what C programmers target, which you incorrectly think is "hardware."

"Standard" libraries such as io implement common low level functionality through mixed-language measures (frequently inline-assembler) because the C abstract machine, the thing C code is targeting, doesn't have anything low level in it, and for good reason as otherwise it wouldnt be hardware agnostic like its supposed to be.