Accenture Patents a Blockchain-Editing Tool (techweekeurope.co.uk)

A blockchain "produces a permanent ledger of transactions with which no one can tamper," reports TechWeekEurope. "Until now." Slashdot reader Mickeycaskill quotes their report: One of the core principles of Blockchain technology has potentially been undermined by the creation of an editing tool. The company responsible however, Accenture, says edits would only be carried out "under extraordinary circumstances to resolve human errors, accommodate legal and regulatory requirements, and address mischief and other issues, while preserving key cryptographic features..."

Accenture's move to create an editing system will no doubt be viewed by some technology observers as a betrayal of what blockchain technology is all about. But the company insisted it is needed, especially in the financial services industry... "The prototype represents a significant breakthrough for enterprise uses of blockchain technology particularly in banking, insurance and capital markets," said Accenture.
They're envisioning "permissioned" blockchain systems, "managed by designated administrators under agreed governance rules," while acknowledging that cyptocurrency remains a different environment where "immutable" record-keeping would still be essential.

Comments

In other words

[bickerdyke]

"permissioned" blockchain systems,"

"managed by designated administrators under agreed governance rules,"

In other words: They are doing something completely different, but still call it "blockchain" because that's the current buzzword.

Reminds be a bit of what "cloud" should have stood for until it became a generic moniker for simple online storage.

Immutable is THE key feature of blockchains

[um... Lucas]

The entire purpose of blockchains (the tech behind bitcoin) is that is an immutable ledger, trustless. First off, accenture's tool is useless for Bitcoin (the main use case of blockchains today) because editing transactions within the blockchain will cause that block, and every block after it, to be unable to be validated. Making a new tech and calling it a blockchain while allowing for edits in previous blocks is basically using the term "blockchain" but creating a bastardization of the technology.

If after the fact edits do need to be made, and they're actually above board, then the simplest solution is to simply publish new transactions that reverse the transactions that were made in error, NOT to allow any transaction to be arbitrarily altered after the fact.

Re:E.g. We can't use it if we can't cheat

[mspohr]

It defeats the purpose of having a blockchain if you can change it retrospectively.
It's not a blockchain if you can "edit" it.

Re:I can see the use of this

[Rakshasa Taisab]

Then you don't really understand what makes blockchains useful as compared to any other kind of system.

For the cases you pointed out, e.g. when changes need to be made to things already in the blockchain, those should be done as new blocks that revert or modify previous blocks. That preserves both the history and trust of the block chain.