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

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

[ninthbit]

All I read here, is that finance can't use a system that is 100% accountable. They need a way to create scape goats and reverse bad decisions.

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

[ls671]

I read: we require a backdoor into everything...

Come on, ledgers are never edited, correction transactions are written when a mistake happens.

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.

Re:In other words

[lgw]

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

A blockchain with limited participants is still a blockchain. It's as trustworthy as those participants. If the participants all trust one another, or trust the system to protect them from the others, it serves its purpose, even if they are in fact pathologically lying shitsacks like financial companies.

I'm dubious of the "editing", but if it's really just new records that say "this record replaces record XYZ", i.e., it's still write-only except by convention, that's fine too.

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

Not sure what you mean here. Sure lots of marketeers talk about "stored in the cloud", but most often that does mean "stored with AWS or Azure, behind the scenes". And there's plenty of "cloud computing" too: more and more distributed scientific jobs are moving that way, as well as naturally-distributed work like animation rendering. Heck, it's the new fad for small software companies to build and test jobs in the cloud.

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

[MightyMartian]

It's interesting, but some of the earliest accounting software I used, which was COBOL-based, didn't allow you to change any ledger once a month was posted and closed. I suppose it was possible to go into the actual database and directly alter records, but the underlying concept was that once a fiscal period was complete, it was inviolate, and the only way you could alter any closed ledger was to post adjusting entries in this period. This could be rather ugly, so you tried really hard not to do any major mistakes. Even end of the year adjusting entries were posted in the next fiscal year.

Since then I've seen a number of accounting systems that allow all sorts of monkeying around, including posting adjusting entries for a fiscal year within that fiscal year, even though you may be a couple of months into the current fiscal year. It seems common practice now, but a quarter of a century ago that was viewed as completely inappropriate, as it opened the door for fraud.

Signed patches

[John Allsup]

So basically they've taken a bitcoin like distributed ledger, restricted who can do the mining work, and allowed certain privileged entities to produce some form of signed patch. Effectively it's just taking something like bitcoin and adding a new transaction type. As such, it's a blockchain counterpart to the way that UDF allows modifying and deleting on WORM media (that is, a convention for saying 'x was deleted', or 'x replaces y'), perhaps with the means to prevent the erased information being recovered from the updated blockchain.

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.

Accenture

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the remnants of the company which facilitated the Enron scandal. Are we really to trust they will use this crack "responsibly"? Who determines when a block chain should be edited? Them? Why?

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

[ShanghaiBill]

Come on, ledgers are never edited, correction transactions are written when a mistake happens.

Ledgers are "corrected" all the time. In theory, that should never happen, but there are plenty of ways to fudge. Some accounting systems, including Quickbooks, have an "owner" mode that allows anyone with a special password to modify and backdate transactions. This is one reason Quickbooks is so popular.

Another possibility is to restore from backup, and re-enter the transactions, leaving out or modifying the troublesome entry. If the software doesn't allow you to enter an arbitrary date, then just set the system date & time between transactions as you enter them. You can download scripts to automate this.

And, of course, there is the classic solution of keeping two sets of books: one ledger for internal accounting, and a separate ledger for the tax man.

Huh

[Hognoxious]

"managed by designated administrators under agreed governance rules"

Sounds like a bank. Or maybe a payment processor.

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

[sjames]

Unless, of course, you want to make it easy to cook the books. At one time, bankers and accountants understood that even the slioghtest whiff of impropriety was a problem even if you actually weren't actually doing anything wrong. Today, they're all YOLO.

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

[SvnLyrBrto]

Remember who "Accenture" really is: the post-scandal-renamed Andersen Consulting, aka: Arthur Andersen. Accounting fraud is their very purpose for existing. And corrupting blockchains to destroy accountability is exactly the sort of thing you expect out of those people.

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

[mysidia]

The reality with financial transactions is some decisions are actually reversed or rolled back. What do you do when your ledger says a transaction occurred that actually didn't occur?

If it's in a blockchain, and it pertains to a cryptocurrency exchange, then it DID occur, because the thing in the Blockchain IS the transaction.

If it's something else, then you establish rules that let you create a New entry which will be recorded As If it was an edit, BUT it is not an "In place" edit; it's a new record in the Blockchain that is interpreted as an edit, so you could then later go back and programmatically see that an edit was made, and the historical information "THat such and such transaction was erased" will always be intact as an element in the chain.

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.