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Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona

reuters.com

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Re: Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona

#51

Post by Mangalor »

lawn wrote: post #3

> The pilot will run until February 2021 and will use block-chain technology, the Riksbank said. Will it really? Riksbanken can have a central server to resolve any double spends, which is only really a problem in a decentralized network. Once you have a singular authority you can just let them decide, and you'll have no need for an inefficient cryptocurrency. > which is being developed by consulting firm Accenture A…

When one of these banks inevitably gets hacked, we're talking billions stolen overnight.

Part of the appeal of Bitcoin was it's decentralized authority, giving people more confidence in a currency that was digital.

Re: Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona

#52

Post by tzumby »

teh_infallible wrote: post #48
rabuse wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's buzzwords being thrown around again. Blockchain is highly inefficient for anything other than decentralized consensus.

Are blockchains inefficient if you’re not using proof of work? I thought it was the latter that was a source of inefficiency, and you don’t need PoW on a permissioned network.

If you're not using proof of work, blockchains start to look more like distributed storage with an audit trail and immutable row level db constraints

- if it's a Proof of Authority is like a way to deal with who has access to write to the db

- the distributed consensus part is well researched (Raft, Paxos etc)

The only advantage that I can think of is interoperability: you will be able to communicate with the public blockchain for point in time "backups". Also, building your internal smart contracts you can use an existing language like Solidity.

Re: Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona

#54

Post by lawn »

teh_infallible wrote: post #50
socialdemocrat wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem with a central server for money is that it makes the whole state vulnerable. If everybody use central bank e-currency you can just attack their sever to destroy the flow of all money. But if it is distributed like real crypto currency, you have to be able to attack and take down hundreds or thousands of severs geographically spread.

I don’t know why your comment is being downvoted. That was my understanding as well. A distributed ledger is much harder to tamper with, which is why “blockchain technology” is actually a reasonable solution to this problem, IMO. I am open to being proven wrong, though

I did not downvote him, but a cryptocurrency is only tamper proof because the entities that decide the rules are distributed (in Bitcoin it's the miners who extend the blockchain). So to being down the Bitcoin network you need to bring down all the miners, which is basically impossible.

But here there's only a single entity that decides the rules. So if you shut down riksbanken's servers, the servers that are deciding which transactions are valid, you essentially shut down the network.

Sure you can have thousands of servers around the globe sharing the last seen state or new but not yet verified transactions, but that's not a very useful network. They would instantly be discarded once riksbanken's servers come online to sort out the mess.

You can have this problem in Bitcoin too, if you isolate a majority of the miners from the rest of the network, essentially splitting it in too. But that's much harder to do.

Edit: Here I refer to deciding double spends, which the critical problem any digital currency needs to solve. Without it anyone can print money out of thin air.

Re: Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona

#55

Post by ChainOfFools »

lawn wrote: post #3

> The pilot will run until February 2021 and will use block-chain technology, the Riksbank said. Will it really? Riksbanken can have a central server to resolve any double spends, which is only really a problem in a decentralized network. Once you have a singular authority you can just let them decide, and you'll have no need for an inefficient cryptocurrency. > which is being developed by consulting firm Accenture A…

> Once you have a singular authority you can just let them decide, and you'll have no need for an inefficient cryptocurrency.

Unfortunately the mass of confused language around blockchainism has made its own miniature political weather system, and consequently there is a growing niche for such Potemkin Decentralization models.

I would even buy the argument that all decentralization models turn out to be mere smokescreens that misdirect the focus of critical attention on to one aspect of a complex system, only to obfuscate de facto centralization accumulating in a different part of that same system.

By the time this concentration of leverage has become too dominant to hide, the new Potemkin Decentralization system has made serious inroads into the incumbent it seeks to displace.

Re: Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona

#56

Post by lawn »

jernejzen wrote: post #46
darawk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between deciding all transactions will be published and making them public by design constraint. Blockchains make transactions public by design , and this design cannot be easily subverted by the people running it.

Not really. Ever heard Monero or Zcash fe?

All transactions in both Monero and ZCash are public, and we can verify that they're valid.

But what we cannot do is see all transactions details, such as the transaction amount.

These are two different things.

Re: Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona

#57

Post by darawk »

leppr wrote: post #49
darawk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between deciding all transactions will be published and making them public by design constraint. Blockchains make transactions public by design , and this design cannot be easily subverted by the people running it.

> There is a difference between deciding all transactions will be published and making them public by design constraint. In a "blockchain" with a centralized validator set, there's no constraint forcing transactions to be public. The network will keep running even if the validators decide to stop publishing transactions. It's very much still a social contract. Tampering (adding false transactions) is the only thing t…

Right, but users would know when a secret transaction has been added. And no, your example does not negate the only technical advantage. Governments are not the only entities that might tamper. And most importantly, a blockchain forces even government tampering to be transparent, whereas a private database does not.

Re: Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona

#58

Post by beefield »

acuster wrote: post #31

Kudos to the swedes for working methodically to try to find a way for the central bank to issue digital money. They have been working for a number of years on this and seem to be thinking effectively about all of the issues involved. One of the reasons that most interest me in this type of digital money comes from its use by the government itself within its various branches. Moving the financial accounts of the gover…

> Kudos to the swedes for working methodically to try to find a way for the central bank to issue digital money.

Can you elaborate what you mean by digital money? My understanding is that vast majority of money issued by central banks is already digital.

Re: Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona

#59

Post by [deleted] »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #32
lawn wrote: post #3

> The pilot will run until February 2021 and will use block-chain technology, the Riksbank said. Will it really? Riksbanken can have a central server to resolve any double spends, which is only really a problem in a decentralized network. Once you have a singular authority you can just let them decide, and you'll have no need for an inefficient cryptocurrency. > which is being developed by consulting firm Accenture A…

Problem with a central server for money is that it makes the whole state vulnerable. If everybody use central bank e-currency you can just attack their sever to destroy the flow of all money. But if it is distributed like real crypto currency, you have to be able to attack and take down hundreds or thousands of severs geographically spread.

[deleted]

Re: Sweden’s central bank says it has begun testing an e-krona

#60

Post by [deleted] »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #32
lawn wrote: post #3

> The pilot will run until February 2021 and will use block-chain technology, the Riksbank said. Will it really? Riksbanken can have a central server to resolve any double spends, which is only really a problem in a decentralized network. Once you have a singular authority you can just let them decide, and you'll have no need for an inefficient cryptocurrency. > which is being developed by consulting firm Accenture A…

Problem with a central server for money is that it makes the whole state vulnerable. If everybody use central bank e-currency you can just attack their sever to destroy the flow of all money. But if it is distributed like real crypto currency, you have to be able to attack and take down hundreds or thousands of severs geographically spread.

[deleted]
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