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Goldman Sachs Drops Out of R3 Blockchain Group

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Re: Goldman Sachs Drops Out of R3 Blockchain Group

#81

Post by CalChris »

seanhunter wrote: post #60
CalChris wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect. Goldman Sachs received $10B which they repaid. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/economy/2009-04-14-tarp...

That's true. All the banks were forced to take bailout money because the concern was if a sound bank was allowed to refuse, shaky banks would either be punished in the market for accepting or worse would be pressured into refusing when they actually needed the money. GS paid the money back literally as soon as they were allowed to.

Not a GS fan at all. Arguably Lehman was gutted at their bidding. They only became a bank that September. Etc.

Re: Goldman Sachs Drops Out of R3 Blockchain Group

#83

Post by mst »

wtbob wrote: post #70
alblue wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually modern finance has its roots in the coffee houses of London, circa 1650. http://www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-london/lond... These were the meeting places in which the maritime insurance deals were made at a time of increasing maritime exploration by the British. These also evolved to be the places such materials were bought and sold - and in fact the trading pits were (and in some cases are) bas…

Nice comment, right up until your final sentence, which just drips with bitterness.

If we do end up picking a path to brexit that fucks over the London financial sector, in hindsight his comment will probably look like merely an impassioned statement of fact.

I'm moderately hopeful than we won't, but, well, 2016 has been 2016 and I have a horrible feeling 2017 is going to go "Hey, 2016, hold my beer and watch this!"

Re: Goldman Sachs Drops Out of R3 Blockchain Group

#84

Post by buckie »

cm2187 wrote: post #74
buckie wrote: post #25

I can't say I'm all that surprised. R3 serves as both an R&D lab and a place to connect vendors and potential clients. Moreover, the focus is on private/permissioned blockchain tech. The tech in this space is still quite immature overall and pretty much everyone has had a hard time building actual blockchain infrastructure vs things that are sorta like a blockchain. If you can't show clients value for their membershi…

I would be curious to understand what problems these blockchains solve. Intuitively, they do not seem like obvious candidates for financial transactions. 1. They really shine in a p2p architecture where no party trusts each other. But that's not how the financial system works. Banks trust central banks, exchanges and clearing houses, and it is very much a club where players have to be vetted and monitored by a regula…

I'd say there are a few ways to think about blockchain's utility in private contexts (public chains are pretty different because of their ability to allow for anonymous participation). The two best ones are the intra- and inter-organization use cases.

For intra-organization, one way to view private blockchains is to look back to the days of mainframes and the shift to databases. While you technically never need a DB and can get things done with code, DB's are incredibly useful as a general utility because of the baseline features you get by using one. Private blockchains are similar, in that they give you some new features (e.g. sharable DBs) and are much easier to build with as they raise the baseline on how bad a solution can be that is built with them.

While you can have a pretty messed up DB schema, bespoke mainframe solutions can be much worse. Private blockchains are like that (especially when they have smart contracts) -- sure you can really mess up the systems setup but issues that DB's can have like high availability and disaster recovery are 100% commoditized. Also, they demand a higher bar for authorization making them generally as more robust the most hardened DB by default.

That isn't to say that a private blockchain will replace the DB as blockchains can be wild overkill for many domains. A small company that needs a DB doesn't need a blockchain's feature set, but a large company that needs a globally distributed DB for holding a ledger (of anything) would be well served by one. When you're working with a system that by default is BFT, incredibly paranoid about authorization, perfectly replicated and highly available then build a solution gets much easier.

As for the specific problem that they solve, it's the settlement problem: organizations currently hold internal ledgers of truth about what they own but they can't inherently trust other organizations' ledgers of truth about what they own, so we need 3rd parties to settle cross-ledger. Currently, institutions handle this role but private blockchains represent an algorithmic solution.

Re: Goldman Sachs Drops Out of R3 Blockchain Group

#85

Post by buckie »

pjc50 wrote: post #72
jaekwon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kadena seems like a solid team, kudos for their work. Smart contracts require you to work in a completely new language and toolset. You don't need smart contracts to create a blockchain application, if you use the right libraries (e.g. go-merkle) and write your application to be deterministic. See Basecoin in the page below: http://tendermint.com/ecosystem If you want the benefits of Tendermint BFT consensus but w/ E…

Does anyone have a good solution for bugfixing and updating defective smart contracts yet, other than "fork the entire blockchain" Ethereum DAO passim? If they are to be immutable then you're going to have to code to NASA standards.

Pact[1], the language we've built, has the idea of an `admin keyset` that enables admins with the right number of signatures from the right number of keys to migrate contracts. Our approach is rather different from the EVM's as smart contracts interact with/guard a table in a DB (think stored procedures accessing a table) and the system has modules.

This way, if a bug is found, the admin can update the smart contract module guarding the DB table directly vs having to track down the on-chain contracts for migration (if it's even possible). From a normal user's pov, they don't see a difference (unless the admin decides to change the namespace or something).

It's a subtle but important difference. When someone using Pact sends the transaction `(payments.transfer "me" "you" )` the transaction (after doing a bunch of auth with ppk-sigs) looks up the `payments.transfer` command from the on-chain smart contract and executes it with the provided args. As such, the admin can update buggy contracts without issue (and roll-back, fix tables that have bad data).

[1]: http://kadena.io/pact/

Re: Goldman Sachs Drops Out of R3 Blockchain Group

#86

Post by jaekwon »

murbard2 wrote: post #38
jaekwon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kadena seems like a solid team, kudos for their work. Smart contracts require you to work in a completely new language and toolset. You don't need smart contracts to create a blockchain application, if you use the right libraries (e.g. go-merkle) and write your application to be deterministic. See Basecoin in the page below: http://tendermint.com/ecosystem If you want the benefits of Tendermint BFT consensus but w/ E…

If you want a deterministic smart contract language, you're better off avoiding the EVM, or worse, Solidity. Tezos (plug, plug, I'm the lead on the project) has a VM with a full formal specification, and even a rudimentary embedding in Coq. It's statically typed and purely functional. https://tezos.com/language.txt

We should plug Tendermint into Tezos as well.

Re: Goldman Sachs Drops Out of R3 Blockchain Group

#87

Post by buckie »

m3ta wrote: post #80
buckie wrote: post #25

I can't say I'm all that surprised. R3 serves as both an R&D lab and a place to connect vendors and potential clients. Moreover, the focus is on private/permissioned blockchain tech. The tech in this space is still quite immature overall and pretty much everyone has had a hard time building actual blockchain infrastructure vs things that are sorta like a blockchain. If you can't show clients value for their membershi…

> - Signed Transactions (TLS based authentication trades security & audibility for speed) I think you meant "auditability". How are "Signed Transactions" an upgrade from TLS 1.2? How is TLS trading security for speed?

I did, though I can't edit it now sadly. And it's not that TLS isn't secure but about what features TLS gives the system.

The gist of this is that TLS doesn't give one a durable/persistable form of security vs ppk-sig's ability to verify that x signed y at any time. TLS is much faster than verifying the sig with every transaction on every node but after, say, a cluster restart the question of "who sent x" is answered via consensus and not cryptography.

There are a couple other issues too. Using ppk-sigs means that the mail clerk and the CEO use different keys to sign transactions vs TLS where you'd either have a logical "from:" field or a different connection for different users. Both of the TLS solutions have rather obvious flaws. Finally, a TLS based approach puts an attacker 1 server away from impersonating, potentially, an entire organization because the system using TLS cares only that it came via the correct pipe.

Overall I'd describe systems using TLS as not being paranoid enough about who authored a transaction, as PBFT/SmartBFT are by default very trusting of a client's transactions vs Bitcoin's model where everything is to be questioned/require independently verifiable cryptographic proof. Hence the tradeoff.

Re: Goldman Sachs Drops Out of R3 Blockchain Group

#88

Post by buckie »

generalseven wrote: post #67
buckie wrote: post #25

I can't say I'm all that surprised. R3 serves as both an R&D lab and a place to connect vendors and potential clients. Moreover, the focus is on private/permissioned blockchain tech. The tech in this space is still quite immature overall and pretty much everyone has had a hard time building actual blockchain infrastructure vs things that are sorta like a blockchain. If you can't show clients value for their membershi…

If it's going to be a permissioned system anyway, wouldn't you get better performance from a non-blockchain solution? The permissioned blockchains are being called "a horseless carriage with a horse" by Andreas Antonopoulos.

Maybe, our system gets 8k-12k transactions per second with full replication + crypto up to a few thousand consensus nodes (slows down around 4k nodes). That type of performance opens up a lot of potential applications.

As for "a horseless carriage with a horse" perhaps, we'll see. These systems do give you something that you can't get otherwise which is a distributed DB that you can share with competitors without worrying about them stealing from you/breaking it. Blockchain is to overloaded right now, but it's the name that has stuck likely because "a Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant Consensus database" (BFTCDB) is just too impenetrable. If one of these BFTCDB take off, if may not actually be a blockchain (though I suspect it will be because cryptographic data structures are just too useful for them) but I bet it will be called one.

But that the end of the day, that's what a permissioned blockchain is -- a DB you can share, which is a seriously new capability.

Re: Goldman Sachs Drops Out of R3 Blockchain Group

#89

Post by jenamety »

known wrote: post #52

Reasons for internal resistance to blockchain tech at banks Regulatory 63% Compliance 56% Security 31% Cost 19% http://qz.com/823739/accenture-blockchain-banking-survey-no-...

bingo. and off the tails of http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2016/11/21/irs-... i'd say the Regulatory figure just jumped significantly.
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