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Re: blockchain, not IETF Chair

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> Wed, 14 October 2020 20:39 UTC

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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
To: ietf@ietf.org
Cc: phill@hallambaker.com
Subject: Re: blockchain, not IETF Chair
In-Reply-To: <CAMm+LwgWLfZjs6p9q30dEk_EWHFREh8N_382NyU9DdyWgR9waQ@mail.gmail.com>
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In article <CAMm+LwgWLfZjs6p9q30dEk_EWHFREh8N_382NyU9DdyWgR9waQ@mail.gmail.com> you write:
>> Blockchain technology has a place, ...

>What is useful in Blockchain is the technology patented by Haber and
>Stornetta in 1990.

Yup, the timestamped ledger is indeed useful. The distributed
consensus part is a technical tour de force but is a problem
masquerading as a solution looking for a problem.

In my experience the only practical use of blockchain is as pixie dust
that people in big companies can sprinkle on otherwise boring but
worthy database reenginering projects to get upper management to fund
them. I suppose that's OK, but it's a rather narrow application.

R's,
John

PS: They published an article on it in 1990. They got a patent in 1994
on a tweaked version but the basic technology has always been
unencumbered. The patent expired in 2015 so the tweak is P.D. too.

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