Re: IETF Chair

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 3:16 PM Barry Leiba <[e-mail]> wrote:

> > But 90% of the efforts of the academy and 99% of those of commerce are
> focused on
> > the Blockchain, an integrity technology.
>
> It's worse than that, because not only is most of the effort placed on
> blockchain technology, blockchain technology is also being pushed as
> the answer to *everything*.  Blockchain technology has a place, but it
> doesn't make sense everywhere, and when one says, "Wait, let's take a
> step back and look at what we really *need* blockchains for, and where
> we don't," then one seems a heretic... or at best, quaintly naïve.
>
> Barry
>

And it's even worse because Blockchain is not just a technology, it is an
ideology.

What is useful in Blockchain is the technology patented by Haber and
Stornetta in 1990. Extending one way functions to create one way sequences
is very powerful. We use that in Certificate Transparency. The idea of
using a one way sequence to anchor a naming system is very powerful and
should have been the basis for the RPKI (nobody wanted to listen).

But when people propose taking their problem and jamming it into
Blockchain, they are inheriting a whole bunch of legacy that really isn't
helpful. It is pretty easy to guess who Satoshi was and he knew he was
dying when he launched the scheme. He was a man in a very big hurry and he
was not designing a platform for the ages. BitCoin and the other
cryptocurrencies are currently consuming roughly 1% of global energy use.
The amount of electronic commerce taking place on BitCoin in goods other
than other crypto currencies is still a rounding error. A lot of people are
getting rich from what regularly turn out to have been Ponzi schemes.

I am not hitching my wagon to Blockchain because it is the regulatory
equivalent of a kick me technology. A practical model for ubiquitous end to
end security is enough of a political liability without building on a
platform whose only constituencies are drug peddlers, child abusers and
money launderers. Terrorists already know how to obtain end to end
encryption products that meet their needs, I do not know of any technology
that would prevent terrorists using existing end-to-end encryption schemes.
But I do know how to shut down the cryptocurrency world.