To the moon!
lambo
Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
151–160 of 177 posts
Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's unclear whether or not the alternative 'proof of stake' technique will be more efficient than proof of work. It is susceptible to abuse, and is likely to require an arms race of CPU power to prevent attackers from abusing it.
It's definitely more efficient than proof-of-work, since no energy is burned off with the only purpose being to calculate a proof of this. The problem is that it makes consensus harder to reach, since there's no problem with having 10 different chains, because no energy needs to be burned off for each chain. This, effectively, makes your account balance a democratic decision by nodes in the Ethereum network (as oppos…
That's a bit early to say for certain. Nobody has made PoS work in an adversarial environment yet.
It is misleading to describe PoS as a democratic vote. There is no voting as that could be faked.
If you want an allegory maybe jury duty for the richest. That also captures the basic problem with it, when the chosen few collude. Let's just say it is an active research area.
Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
#153How pointless. The whole point of Bitcoin was to have uncensorable, decentralized asset that can be used to exchange value without any trust etc. That is the only reason we endure this utterly shitty and inefficient blockchain thing, and we exchange money for this otherwise pointless online points. I have no problem with ETH as cryptocurrency / smart contract platform. But this whole Enterprise Ethereum Alliance is j…
Enterprise Ethereum has almost nothing to do with Ethereum the public blockchain, or crypto-currency. Ethereum based blockchains (that is based on Ethereum the software, not the canonical global instance of that software) provide an ability to create an auditable log of events. Those events might be "who accessed my credit card account and when" or "who requested access to my health records and when". These chains ca…
That doesn't make sense. Read accesses couldn't possibly be logged. You probably wouldn't want sensitive information like health records in a block chain. The risk for leaks is obvious.
Both credit cards records and health records are data where there is a single authoritative data source. You want to know who actually accessed the data, and not any sort of decentralized consensus about the matter.
Agree about the wider aspects however, but those are probably about payouts to stakes in immaterial data or zero knowledge trading of cryptographic keys rather than your health data.
Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
#154It seems like Ethereum is getting a lot more industry support than Bitcoin ever did. If Ethereum continues it looks like it could kill off Bitcon, the looming possibility of a hard fork might be contributing make that happen really soon.
>It seems like Ethereum is getting a lot more industry support than Bitcoin ever did.
Why do crypto currencies need industry support?
Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
#155At this time, there are 78 comments to this post, none of them addressing technical concerns. Quite unusual for HN. I've devoted my life to cryptocurrency since 2011 and still question whether or not this system even makes sense. It seems too expensive with the technology we have today. Once privacy, such as zk-SNARK, is added, it becomes unreasonable. Perhaps this is what a bubble looks like. I wasn't there for the…
"Perhaps this is what a bubble looks like."
Exactly. People trying to get on the easy money train.
Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
#156Ethereum itself can be used as a financial language, which can be quite revolutionary for the banking industry. Instead of using the proof of work consensus, banks could have their own consensus method. Which does allow for the order of scale that the real world needs.
Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enterprise Ethereum has almost nothing to do with Ethereum the public blockchain, or crypto-currency. Ethereum based blockchains (that is based on Ethereum the software, not the canonical global instance of that software) provide an ability to create an auditable log of events. Those events might be "who accessed my credit card account and when" or "who requested access to my health records and when". These chains ca…
That doesn't make sense. Read accesses couldn't possibly be logged. You probably wouldn't want sensitive information like health records in a block chain. The risk for leaks is obvious. Both credit cards records and health records are data where there is a single authoritative data source. You want to know who actually accessed the data, and not any sort of decentralized consensus about the matter. Agree about the wi…
This is especially true for Health Records with regards to US Health Care, as access control is heavily monitored and Hospital Employees are instructed clearly and frequently that you do not access records for anyone you are not treating, accidental access needing to be reported, and so on. Confidentiality of the patient records requires a clear system to see who accessed what, when, and from where they accessed it.
Blockchain seems like a complete mismatch for such an endeavor.
Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
#158No mention of Master Card. Mods please edit the title.
Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's definitely more efficient than proof-of-work, since no energy is burned off with the only purpose being to calculate a proof of this. The problem is that it makes consensus harder to reach, since there's no problem with having 10 different chains, because no energy needs to be burned off for each chain. This, effectively, makes your account balance a democratic decision by nodes in the Ethereum network (as oppos…
That's a bit early to say for certain. Nobody has made PoS work in an adversarial environment yet. It is misleading to describe PoS as a democratic vote. There is no voting as that could be faked. If you want an allegory maybe jury duty for the richest. That also captures the basic problem with it, when the chosen few collude. Let's just say it is an active research area.
> It is misleading to describe PoS as a democratic vote. There is no voting as that could be faked.
I disagree. With PoS there is, ultimate, only the democratic vote.
For example, in a network with 1,000 nodes, let's say 95% follow one chain and ignore another chain, and that the remaining 5% follow that other chain. The two chains are completely different, but are both valid. In a PoS-system there would be no way, besides democratic vote, to determine which chain is the right one. You're forced to either ask someone you know which chain he's using, or just go with the 95%-chain. With Bitcoin, the answer is very simple: you follow the chain with the largest amount of work, regardless of how many nodes say the one with less work is the right one.
Bitcoin is inherently non-democratic in this scenario, as all nodes only care about chain work, and not how many nodes follow which chain. As opposed to PoS, where two competing, valid chains only differ in which (trusted/untrusted?) -- and how many -- nodes follow each chain.
Re: Master Card, Cisco, and Scotiabank Join the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Federated blockchains allow multiple parties in an industry (for example) to maintain a shared trusted database, with no single owner, or single point of failure. (Also, changing immutable data or posting fraudulent transactions requires collusion between multiple parties.) This is why many large industries like healthcare and finance are actively exploring this space.
Distributed databases can be configured to work that way as well. Why do you need a proof-of-work blockchain? With such a small number of participants doesn't that weaken it's integrity to attacks, especially without capital incentives?
Traditional distributed databases require all nodes to be trusted to achieve consensus (e.g., with Paxos, Raft, etc.) Proof-of-work allows for consensus to occur even if there are malicious nodes -- for up to half the hashrate, which means that major collusion must occur to do something fraudulent.
In these industries the number of participants are in the hundreds -- past the point at which you can trust everyone.