Re: [Ilc] New Non-WG Mailing List: Ilc -- Discussion of mechanisms and applications for Internet-level consensus.

[David Mazieres <[e-mail]>]

Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]> writes:

> On Fri, Feb 10, 2017 at 11:39:45AM -0800,
>  IETF Secretariat <[e-mail]> wrote 
>  a message of 21 lines which said:
>
>> A new IETF non-working group email list has been created.
>
> Congratulations for managing not to spell "blockchain" even once :-)

Thanks.

>> The Stellar payment network
>
> Good, I own 400 lumens :-)

Obviously this list isn't about Stellar or Bitcoin.  But those systems
are an existence proof of consensus technologies not currently in use by
any IETF protocols.  So to the extent there may be an unmet need, they
are worth exploring.

>> Stellar has an ongoing secure naming project that aims to allow
>> domain name owners to assign human-readable names to end-user public
>> keys
>
> Is it a reference to
> <https://www.stellar.org/developers/guides/concepts/federation.html>?

It's an internal project that could maybe be viewed as v2 of that.  But
the larger point is that, in the IETF context, such a system would face
an unmet need for global consensus.

E.g., if I'm an email provider with a domain name, I have no standard
way to certify my users' public keys for end-to-end email encryption
that gets me out of the trust loop.  There are proposals (e.g., CONIKS,
the Google/Yahoo end-to-end email encryption system), etc., but they
would be strengthened by a global append-only log.

David