Re: [alto] Draft: Alto for the blockchain

Dear authors,

I read your draft and get interested in utilizing ALTO for block chain. I
have considered about it over the past few days. Here are some comments:

1. Be more general-purpose for block chain

I noticed that there’re some parts of introduction about bitcoin have been
removed from the first version and believed this draft is not specified for
bitcoin. Also mentioned in title, this draft is about block chain. But it
only mentioned bitcoin as use case of block chain.

In bitcoin wiki, it said “Block chains were invented specifically for the
Bitcoin project but they can be applied anywhere a distributed consensus
needs to be established in the presence of malicious or untrustworthy
actors.”

Despite it may cost too much to implement block chain for non-financial
cases, mentioning some other use cases (e.g. alternative chain) could make
the draft looks more general-purpose for block chain.

2. Consider about security

Compare to traditional data base, I thought the block chain was invented to
solve the security problem.  So, it is necessary to consider about security
which is much more important than efficiency. For example, ALTO server may
accept some suboptimal results to improve the randomness and avoid the
prediction mentioned in section 7.

3. Let applications aware of the different roles

In section 6, it said “This requires that the ALTO server is aware of the
different roles”. But roles like wallet, miner and relay nodes are
specified for bitcoin, it may have different roles in other use cases of
block chain. Including such information in ALTO protocol is not
general-purpose for block chain.

By the other hand, ALTO is invented to provide low-level network
information which application can’t get before. Since the information about
different roles is not low-level, it could be more appropriate for ALTO to
let applications maintain the map relationship between each node and its
role.

Hope these helps. :)

Best Regards,
Shenshen Chen

2016-07-07 23:36 GMT+08:00 Stefan HOMMES <Stefan.Hommes@uni.lu>:

> Dear ALTO group,
>
>
>
> I am a research associate from the University of Luxembourg, and we have
> submitted a draft that is using ALTO for the blockchain:
>
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-hommes-alto-blockchain/
>
>
>
> We are very curious and interested to receive some feedback about this
> draft. Please feel free to send us your comments. We highly appreciate your
> opinion and looking forward to the IETF meeting in Berlin.
>
>
>
> Kind Regards,
>
> Stefan
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Dr. Stefan Hommes
> Research Associate, SEDAN team, Room C003
>
> Mail: stefan.hommes@uni.lu
>
> Phone: (+352) 46 66 44 5834
>
> University of Luxembourg
>
> Interdisciplinary Centre on Security Reliability and Trust (SnT)
>
> 4, Rue Alphonse Weicker, L2721 Luxembourg
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
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