Blockchain is alchemy

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

I maintain a log of notable cryptographic patents and their expiry dates
and raised the imminent expiry of Haber Stornetta in PKIX a year before it
expired. I was very interested in 'Satoshi''s decision to launch bit
coin seven months before the patent expired. As we now know, Hal Finney had
just learned he had a terminal illness which is probably why he didn't want
to wait and why he chose to use the pseudonym.

The problem with blockchain is that the killer app as far as the VC is
concerned is to convert lead into gold. And the BitCoin bubble is really
quite spectacular unless you happen to track the prices of TSLA, NKLA, etc.
etc. on the NASDAQ. The market cap of BTC is a drop in the bucket compared
to the speculative value being placed on companies in the equity markets.
And unlike BTC... some of the companies make stuff and might even turn in a
profit that isn't an accounting fiction some day.

As with alchemy, there is real value there but the lead into gold part
isn't real no matter how many people clap their hands and say they believe
in tinkerbell.

To pick up the point made by John Levine, the ledger is useful, the
consensus mechanism is a problem, not a solution. It doesn't actually give
finality to transactions, they can be unwound with a 51% attack. Which
means that IF you have two cryptocurrencies that make use of the same
resource then one of them is vulnerable to a 25% attack. If you have a
hundred, its a 1% attack.

Oh and all the time this is burning up the planet and spewing CO2 into the
air. Having an algorithm that solves a problem is one thing. For an
algorithm to be useful we normally expect it to be efficient. Proof of
waste is an algorithm that by definition depends on its inefficiency.


If the data at rest problem has been solved then how come the CEO of one of
the largest Internet companies had his emails hijacked by a nation state
actor and leaked to destroy his marriage?

My system is working in the lab and pretty soon it will be deploying. And
once deployment happens it is going to be very difficult to make changes.


On Wed, Oct 14, 2020 at 7:52 PM Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
>
> On 15/10/2020 00:40, Benjamin Kaduk wrote:
> >> Every piece of digital evidence that is collected should be time
> stamped at
> >> the time it is collected and enrolled in a notary service using a one
> way
> >> sequence. At regular intervals, the notary offering this service should
> >> cross notarize with other notary services, thus making it impossible for
> >> any one notary to defect without detection unless every other notary
> >> colludes. And NIST and every other national lab should run a national
> cross
> >> notary service whose probity would be automatically considered valid by
> the
> >> courts of that country.
> >>
> >> That is not the sort of construct I see being built in blockchain land.
> >> Noooo, much more fun selling virtual cowrie shells. But it is exactly
> the
> >> sort of infrastructure we need.
> > Yup, that would be swell.  Too bad I don't have a budget to help make it
> > happen.
>
> An expired draft with some (fairly vague;-) ideas in that
> space. [1] There are probably others too. Ours never went
> anywhere (so far:-)
>
> S.
>
> [1] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-farrell-pkng-swig-00.txt
>