Is Blockchain the Most Important IT Invention of Our Age? (theguardian.com) 190
mspohr writes: This article makes a fairly persuasive argument for the utility of the blockchain. It discusses a wide variety of companies and government exploring blockchain to maintain secure records which cannot be altered. One interesting application is to use blockchain to maintain property records in many countries where these records are often incomplete and are easily corrupted (intentionally or unintentionally). A linked article in The Economist expands the thought and discusses changes to the blockchain to improve performance, reduce overhead and accommodate different uses.
(See also this related poll.)
answer: no (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:answer: no (Score:5, Insightful)
Does he mean that blockchain that is already having trouble scaling in a Bitcoin market of meth dealers and Russian ransomware jockeys? What would happen if we tried using it to, say, keep track of the world's Visa transactions?
Re:answer: no (Score:5, Informative)
Re:answer: no (Score:5, Informative)
The great thing about the blockchain concept is that it is distributed. There is no central server you can compromise. As long as a given percentage of the miners aren't hostile, everything is fine. The idea is great, but in practice its dead. A majority of the bitcoin hashing power is provided by very few people. They of course have a high interest in bitcoin still being trusted, otherwise the bitcoin price crashes and goes close to 0$, and all their expensive rigs are worthless. But its not at all a system anymore where the "small guys" control everything.
Bitcoin has been designed so that if you own the private keys for a wallet, nobody can steal your bitcoins. This is even provided if the blockchain gets compromised or controlled 99% by entities hostile to you. Your bitcoins remain yours. But the moment you use some website which knows the private key for the wallet, you fully trust them. And if the website gets hacked, they can of course get stolen. So its not a problem of bitcoin itself.
Re: answer: no (Score:2, Insightful)
The great thing about the blockchain concept is that it is distributed. There is no central server you can compromise.
Unfortunately if you own a significant portion of the compute power in the network you can comprise it. Additionally the proof of work function used by bitcoin can be easily computed by special purpose hardware. There are countries and corporations with enough resources to take over bitcoin. One way to make that harder is use a memory-hard proof of work function, because memory is always expensive no matter how efficiently you can do the computation.
If it ever became worthwhile for a government to compromis
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If it ever became worthwhile for a government to compromise these systems, they will.
When it became worthwhile for a government to compromise these systems, they did.
TFTFY.
Re:answer: no (Score:5, Informative)
You're right, except for the bits where you are wrong:
So to boil it down,
Cryptography doesn't boil down. You learn to understand it in full or you end up with a broken view of how you think it doesn't work.
there is a parent server
No there's not, the blockchain is distributed amongst all users, that's how you verify someone who sends you something owns it in the first place
that is tracking all uses and exchanges of the bit of pertinent data.
Yes
And that can never ever get compromised.
Unless the people who verify the data cryptographically can control more than 51% of the efforts to verify it.
Because nobody has ever lost bitcoins?
Correct, you can't lose bitcoins. Think of it as money that is only ever tied to your wallet. Everyone in the world knows the exact concept of that wallet. You can lose the wallet, someone can even pick it up and spend the contents, but you can never just magically lose money out of it. It has to go somewhere, and the blockchain tracks its movement.
Sorry about the sarcasm.
Don't be sorry, simply learn about the technology and then you won't have a need for it.
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Two miners control a majority (Score:2)
One would have to compromise a large percentage of the nodes on the network to directly "mess with" the data.
Last time we discussed Bitcoin scalability [slashdot.org], two Chinese miners controlled the majority of hashing power. And they have a vested interest in seeing transaction costs skyrocket as more network users try to fit their transactions into a single block.
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Internet humor is defined as tragedy that ends with the words "and then I lost my bitcoins".
Pray that doesn't become "and then I lost my visa".
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That's OK you don't need a worker visa to work in US anyway...
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>Internet humor is defined as tragedy that ends with the words "and then I lost my bitcoins".
They hacked my Nest thermostat, and then I lost my bitcoins.
They hacked my web-enabled refrigerator, and then I lost my bitcoins.
They hacked my television, and then I lost my bitcoins.
Sing along, now.....something something something, "and then I lost my bitcoins."
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I'd grant it "most important invention of October 31, 2008".
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This is a discussion forum. Questions are typically a good mechanism for starting a discussion. Perhaps this is not a good place for you.
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Can Betteridge's Law Of Headlines Be Applied 100% of the Time?
Re:answer: no (Score:5, Insightful)
While some of the uses are ingenious, it's essentially just a new take on "the logfile".
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Technically a blockchain can be "edited" too. Adding transactions to a blockchain is an edit function.
No, you CANNOT go back in and twiddle previous transactions (it'd break the blockchain). That still doesn't stop a blockchain from essentially being a logfile though.
Of course not (Score:5, Interesting)
You can achieve similar things with a gossip protocol. Blockchains are just one step in the evolution of distributed and public logs. Blockchains are in fact a very very wasteful, with all that proof-of-work. Most of bitcoin is controlled by china, and most of china's energy comes from old-fashioned coal. So, Blockchains as of now are a very very dirty technology.
But I'm really looking forward in seeing newer approaches emerge which don't need this kind of proof of work but are still safe against spam. Bitcoin has done one very important thing IMO, it has put attention to this topic. There are tons of startups everywhere. One really has to fear that "blockchain" becomes a new buzzword.
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and most of china's energy comes from old-fashioned coal.
The thing I 'like' about China is they get stuff done. They could announce tomorrow they were going to be 100% nuclear in 10 years and I believe they'd actually do it.
Meanwhile all the locals around here are all up in arms over our coal plant shutting and whining how the EPA 'ruins' Murica. I couldn't imagine the shitstorm that would happen if a "Muslim" suggested that.
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Yeah, democracies are slow in this regard, and even the chinese government criticises the slowness as problem of the democratic approach. But still, its the best proven system guaranteeing individual freedoms, so no way we should chose another one.
China has a big problem with regional party bosses playing "little god". Bejing has to keep them all under control.
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Reality is probably that it's thirty years old and has been run like a car stolen by a teenage speed freak. Any sort of failure you can think of happening in a conventional thermal power station has happened in an American power plant somewhere due to sheer neglect - but it does provide good case studies into how bad things can get. At least one place had everything on the boiler and
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The obvious solution, naturally, is to have several high-profile Muslims start a campaign to expand energy production via coal, while simultaneously lobbying to end nuclear, wind, and solar initiatives.
We'll see either an end to the irrational fear of Muslims, a redneck push toward clean energy, or their heads will explode. In any case, it'll solve at least one problem.
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The thing I 'like' about China is they get stuff done. They could announce tomorrow they were going to be 100% nuclear in 10 years and I believe they'd actually do it.
Haha, sucker. They also claimed they'd be fully industrial by now but they have cities lying around empty because they won't let their people come up fast enough to fill them [citymetric.com] and they are building more. If China said they were going to build 30 nuclear reactors, I would assume they were going to break ground on 20 and finish 5
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And yet, they haven't. We'll see how that plays out in a few years when they have a massive population on early medical retirement because their lungs wore out faster than the rest of them.
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Distributed ledgers have some value, but there are not many applications where the cost of the bitcoin approach is justified. All this talk of the blockchain in the finance industry is interesting but frankly smacks a bit too much of "me too" bandwagonism for my liking. I really struggle to understand the benefits of a distributed ledger in most financial transactions. Certainly can't understand the value with latency and volume constraints like the current bitcoin implementation.
I think public key cryptogr
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Congratulations. You are now the proud owner of a double F minus in Fungibility 101.
Plus, bonus!
An exclusive membership is now heading your way to an elite social club which includes former Canadian politicians who asserted than none of the Canadian tritium headed to America was making its way into nuclear warheads (fine print: as America was very care
One last land grab (Score:2)
Finally, once and for all, it will bring peace to the world wherever their is a land dispute!
Define "Age" (Score:5, Funny)
Normal definition is 99 million years. So, no; most important IT invention is probably the digital computer.
Blockchain problems (Score:2)
The main problem with the blockchain is that it's a consensus. That's OK as long as anyone isn't actively trying to subvert it. If someone does actively attempt to subvert it, would anyone actually notice?
The other issue with it is, of course, trust. At some point you have to trust someone, which leads to the normal theft, fraud, etc issues. That's not really a blockchain problem per se, it's more of an operationalization issue.
Re:Blockchain problems (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, the blockchain has been designed with distrust in mind. Unlike most other systems, it isn't the usual "just add a 3rd party everyone trusts, and lets call the problem solved" (like with TLS certificates, there you even have hundreds of parties everyone trusts), but it gives you a real hard number of people you can assume to act "hostile" and the system is still stable, without having a trusted third party. Its all real nice, in theory, except for the question of how to bring information about the current hashing speed of the network to the client. This is the only information you as non-hashing party have to trust.
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My understanding is that the blockchain can be forged if more than half of the network agrees
To be succinct, the blockchain that you currently see can be a forged if more than half the network that you can currently see conspires.
I think this distinction is just glossed over. Even if its hard to topple the global belief in the blockchain, its still possible to temporarily manipulate local beliefs.
No (Score:3)
I'd say it was the flush toilet.
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I'd say it was the flush toilet.
The flush toilet is not an 'IT invention'...
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It sure helped with my core dumps and, unless some resources are blocking, prevents overflow errors.
Yes (Score:2)
The new selected gatekeepers of allowable cyber fund movements for a fee and tracking.
What the Vice, Master Race, American Excess credit cards allowed past generations to enjoy will now be presented in a new digital front, one branding hop away from a big bank.
Same big gov tracking back to you if you try to support a whistleblower
As a database (Score:2)
Would it be possible to store data this way?
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It isn't so much a way to store data, which can be done with any peer to peer network like a TOR network, and is in fact where the concept of "cloud storage" comes from. What a block chain does is to timestamp and certify that the data integrity is maintained in such a peer to peer data network.
It is a time stamp so far as you can also demonstrate a chronological sequence between each block and point to one block and certify that it came before another block. You can also establish "ownership" of a chunk
nope, it's still the router (Score:4, Informative)
If anything is the most important IT invention of our age, it's the invention of the router. routers are the fundamental building block of what we consider to be the internet. they can be software or hardware based but they are what tie many computers together so that they can communicate quickly. without routers, bitcoin could not have even existed beyond an idea.
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Block chains don't need routers to exist, although it certainly is a useful feature. You can easily (or with modest difficulty) run a block chain network strictly through a sneaker network (aka with just thumb drives/floppy discs (yes... they still exist)/optical storage/etc.) moving data physically from one computer to the next. That is also true of sending transactions for cryptocurrency as well, although at some point you need to get those transactions folded into the primary block chain.
I would agree
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Blockchains can have lag times of up to about 10 minutes per data exchange or longer, and building chains on separated nodes that on independent networks or computers only makes a difference when one has a longer chain than another... and the longer chain wins anyway. That is just for mining. You need zero syn/ack packets at all in that situation as they aren't needed to synch one block chain miner to another.
As for transaction data, you can pass data around on something like Fidonet... which may have a "
Is this a bitcoin puff piece or just stupid? (Score:2)
Why bother? (Score:2)
>> companies and government exploring blockchain to maintain secure records which cannot be altered
Why bother? The most important information and most important decisions usually have no paper trail. After all, it just takes a phone call to make a hard drive disappear, and once people reach a particular level they seem to be completely immune to restrictions on handling classified information.
easy answer (Score:3)
more complete Answer "FUCK NO, to think it is laughable"
Yes, it changes everything and here's why (Score:3, Interesting)
Bitcoin is a distraction. What the underlying technology, the blockchain, is actually enabling is a new internet.
This is part of a larger trend that covers things like serverless architecture (e.g. AWS Lambda, public cloud computing) and peer-to-peer storage systems (e.g. IPFS, Storj). We are moving increasingly towards a web that will be "decentralized".
These are not buzz words or utopian fantasies. This is a continuation of the internet's development. What started from widely distributed networks has long since been concentrated into enormous data silos and processing farms under the tight control of a handful of megacorps. We've been complaining about that for over a decade now. But it's only over the past year or two that we starting to witness a swing of the pendulum back in the other direction.
With the advent of new blockchain-based platforms, most notably Ethereum, but perhaps also Tao chain and MaidSafe, we are going to see the business models of the current web come under threat in a serious way. Just like piracy disintermediated media giants and news publishers, just like open source disintermediated proprietary software. and just like Bitcoin and Uber have been attempting to disintermediate the financial sector and taxi industry, there is no question that a large segment of top tech companies are going to evaporate under the coming weight of this movement.
They will never be able to compete with organizations that have become entirely decentralized. These organizations, which are in the making as we speak, are going to drastically lower transactions costs, stimulate greater public participation, support more efficient governance, and promote more incentives for average web users. All these organizations need to do is replicate current models like Airbnb, Amazon, Uber, Reddit, Twitter, and so on, with the new tech.
That will rapidly destabilize whatever you might think is a stable landscape. I can't predict precisely what will happen, but if my research on this subject is worth anything at all, then it's likely that we'll be seeing a transformation on the scale of the internet itself, if not greater.
Do some in-depth reading on this before letting your complacency and skepticism get the better of you. Bitcoin is a joke compared to what's coming.
Re:Yes, it changes everything and here's why (Score:4, Insightful)
Since all you have is airy handwaving, buzzwords, more buzzwords, and yet more buzzwords... I'd say your research is less than valueless.
Not even on the list (Score:2)
The blockchain isn't even on the list of important inventions of our age.
To ask whether it's the most important, is like asking if Ryan Hoyer is the most important quarterback in the NFL. He's really important to one city, but he couldn't handle prime time.
Not by a large margin (Score:3)
Email, the WWW, computers, computer networks, etc. are all a much, mucg more important than this specialized solution for a problem that has other solutions as well.
The question can be answered with a resounding "No, and why are you asking stupid questions?"
Hell No! (Score:2)
I'm getting pretty old now, so "My Age" has brought me technological advances like Linux, broadband and mobile Internet, and Smartphones.
Compared to those, electronic funny money like Bitcoin isn't even on the radar. Hell... Bitcoin has supposedly been "popular" for 5 years now and most brick and mortar stores still don't take it.
But, hey... I know that a few Slashdot editors got in early and made some money. Good for them, I guess, but they probably should have cashed out when the price was briefly above $
Re: Hell No! (Score:2)
Blockchain is not Bitcoin!
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OK, then please tell me what other large/popular open source projects are using Blockchain technology that Aren't cryptocurrencies.
My hunch is that none of the replies that I'll get currently have 1/10th the number of users of Bitcoin at the moment. It's just too early to consider this technology to be super "important" at this point.
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I think it's more about the potential of the blockchain rather than actual use today. The idea that you can have a publicly available trusted ledger without trusting anyone has a lot of potential uses and there are a lot of people developing different applications.
Here's a few more articles from MIT:
http://www.technologyreview.co... [technologyreview.com]
http://www.technologyreview.co... [technologyreview.com]
http://www.technologyreview.co... [technologyreview.com]
This MIT syllabus gives some idea of the potential:
http://blockchain.media.mit.ed... [mit.edu]
Blockchain logging (Score:2)
Could a blockchain be used to create a tamper-proof log file?
Re: Blockchain logging (Score:2)
Yes! You got it
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How about online voting?
e-Voting (Score:3)
Re: e-Voting (Score:2)
Yes it could. TFA mentions that application.
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Sorry. It's a bit buried.
You have to go to The Economist article and look at the comments where voting is discussed.
http://www.economist.com/node/... [economist.com]
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You can't implement a secret ballot since all transactions are public.
The Virtual Machine (Score:2)
The introduction of virtual machines was a huge step forward for computer utilization and security. The ability for a single physical server to serve a diverse set of workloads in a secure and efficient manner made mainframes far more versatile and is a cornerstone of cloud computing.
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This is Slashdot. We don't do discussin, we do arguin! Give us something to wave our pitchforks at or we'll just go "meh".
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You are doing it wrong. Its "meh." not "Meh.".
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Oh you kids with your fancy way of typing simple words.
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Blockchain != bitcoin. Currency is just one use of it. RTFA, it makes this exact point...
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The blockchain is only useful because it is used as a currency. When there is no financial incentive to waste electricity making heat the blockchain can be easily circumvented with a 51% attack.
Without Bitcoin as a currency, all that is left is a massively inefficient distributed file store with a layer of cryptography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_distributed_file_systems
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When there is no financial incentive to waste electricity making heat the blockchain can be easily circumvented with a 51% attack.
The financial incentive doesn't have to come from the blockchain directly in the form of currency. It can come from the desire to not see the blockchain compromised (e.g. when your economy depends on it).
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But that doesn't mean that any blockchain used outside of Bitcoin has to be useless. There are other cases where having a distributed ledger of events (or transactions) is very useful. One is for instance recordings of ownership for real estate. Everytime, some piece of real estate changes owners, you update the blockchain of that real estate. This would amount to a tamper proof way of recording real estate transactions. It's o
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If for instance you have a court decision that the wallet is rightfully yours, you could get all transaction nodes agree to perfo
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Re:No, C and C++ are the most important. (Score:4, Insightful)
C and C++ are only the foundation because the happened to become popular due to a bunch of misc. factors, not because they are inherently great inventions in themselves. Also, they (and their standard libraries) evolved over time to their current state.
It's like saying English and Spanish are the most important languages because they are fundamentally the "best-invented" ones, not because of the accidents of fate that were colonial expansion, WWII, and the Internet.
Re:No, C and C++ are the most important. (Score:5, Insightful)
C and C++ are only the foundation because the happened to become popular due to a bunch of misc. factors, not because they are inherently great inventions in themselves. Also, they (and their standard libraries) evolved over time to their current state.
It's like saying English and Spanish are the most important languages because they are fundamentally the "best-invented" ones, not because of the accidents of fate that were colonial expansion, WWII, and the Internet.
C and C++ are the foundation because they give you the power to talk directly to the hardware with relative ease and flexibility. You cannot compare C/C++ to Perl, Python, PHP, or even to Java. Yes, C++ is harder to use than higher level languages but that's kindof the point of the higher level languages. The point of C++ is to be an intermediate language that straddles both worlds. There are really no other languages that can switch between machine code, assembly, and high level concepts with the ease and flexibility of C++. That's the reason C++ has the staying power it does.
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C and C++ are the foundation because they give you the power to talk directly to the hardware with relative ease and flexibility.
You seem to be confusing pointers with something low level (even BASIC can read and write arbitrary memory.)
Do explain to us, which language feature of C or C++ gives you the power to talk to the hardware directly. All you noob C and C++ programmers that werent banging keys 30 years ago dont seem to have any idea what a phrase like "talk to the hardware" means but you guys sure seem to use it a lot when referring to your favorite language.
Let me explain things for you. The magic of C is that the myriad
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And lastly, the fact that C has one of the smallest run-time requirements of any language.
Forth diehards will claim that Forth's runtime is even smaller.
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I would consider myself foremost a C/C++ programmer. But in the 90's I wrote software that interfaced with custom built ECL-based muon detectors in Turbo Pascal for Fermilab's D0. C is not the only language that can easily access memory mapped IO, and certainly not the first.
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C and C++ are only the foundation because the happened to become popular due to a bunch of misc. factors, not because they are inherently great inventions in themselves. [ ... ]
No, C *was* a great invention. That there are other choices today doesn't change that. It was perhaps the first HLL (high level language) that was small, efficient, and yet also usable for low-level tasks. It was "small" in the sense that that it provided a minimal number of constructs and didn't provide any hard to parse features (unlike, for example, Ada). The fact that it was small was probably a big factor in C having one of the very first machine independent compilers, the Portable C Compiler [wikipedia.org].
Fr
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Rust, is shaping up to be a massive failure, in my opinion.
Why do you think that?
They give you the utmost of power and flexibility. But contrary to what some fools think, they can be used very safely.
Yes, they can be used "safely", of course. But still there are major problems connected with C++. One is their exception system. They had to add lots of complexity in order to run destructors when the stack gets unrolled and similar. Its really a mess.
Modern C++ actually makes it trivial to write safe and secure code, yet still have it run extremely quickly with little overhead.
If you know what you are doing then C itself can be used to write safe and secure code. But if somebody writes code by copying some answer from stackexchange, they'll end up with a big mess. With C++, you can shoot yourself into the foot
Re:No, C and C++ are the most important. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you know what you are doing then C itself can be used to write safe and secure code.
The difference between writing safe code in C and C++ is how the language (and by extension, the compiler) can help to keep you safe. A well-designed C++ class is almost impossible to use incorrectly or unsafely. Saying you can write safe code in C is like saying you can be safe while riding a motorcycle - you're perfectly safe until you make a mistake, and then you're not.
Back on topic, this sentence caught my eye:
"...in so far as Joe Public thinks about distributed ledgers at all, it is in the context of Bitcoin, money laundering and online drug dealing..."
I was about to laugh this off, and then I see this comment below the article:
"The problem with all this is that anyone who controls 50%+1 of the blockchain controls all of the block chain. Thus the only thing guaranteeing the integrity is that the bad guys cant control more than half. And thats the problem , for a block chain to be effective it needs to be widely decentralized, and if its widely decentralized, it has the potential to be hijacked and then bot netted. Next thing you know, your block chain belongs to someone else, and with 50%+1 control, they can start editing that blockchain."
Whelp, the author sure called it. People apparently can't distinguish between the concept of a distributed ledger and a specific implementation of one (i.e. Bitcoin). The underlying encrypting technology of preserving a history is the most important part of this system. Any alteration affects every transaction going forward, so making surreptitious changes to the transaction history are impossible.
I've always heard the mantra "electronic records can be altered", spoken as an absolute truism. I guess the proper counter is "yes, but it can't necessarily go undetected". It will be interesting to see how many ways this technology can be used when you need to guarantee the integrity of a set of data and related transactions.
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A well-designed C++ class is almost impossible to use incorrectly or unsafely.
Code you guarantee Safe is Safe. Gotcha.
You've just moved the problem to the other side of the class wall and willed it away.
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Yes, you move your code inside a small, easily testable component that encapsulates both a set of discrete data and the functions which operate on that data. And then you build larger objects out of those smaller, well-tested components. It's called "object oriented programming". You may not have heard of it, given that it was invented a mere fifty years ago or so.
Re:No, C and C++ are the most important. (Score:4, Funny)
C has been around for over 40 years. C++ has been around for over 30 years. In all that time we haven't seen even one single other language seriously compete with either of them.
Oh c'mon, what about Javascript? Wait, why are you laughing??
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I'm not laughing. I'm pointing at the exit. You can toss your geek card into the /dev/null provided next to it.
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I'm not laughing. I'm pointing at the exit. You can toss your geek card into the /dev/null provided next to it.
Dude, relax. It was something called a "joke", look it up. :)
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Geek card, nothing. He's right. I HATE Javascript but these days ridiculous things - from 3D game programming to MP4 video parsing/demuxing - are being implemented in it. And that's just the *client* side. If you are scared of Javascript don't even start looking into Node.js. Yesterday's geek is today's useless graybeard...
Perl. Seriously, perl. (Score:4, Informative)
I think the answer to the question depends on what one means by "our age", youngster. But the early internet and almost all of the early bioinformatics work (which was the first science to really truly give data bases and the internet a workout.) was really built on perl. This certainly is not the case now. But in the 90s it was. And that sort of changed everything. First scientific collaboration and federated data became a whole new paridigm. The first science were no one had or cold have the whole data set or tool chain in their own lab. Perl could keep up with internet speeds and it was easy to use so the websites got built on it. And luckily for perl, bioinformatics is "all" string parsing not number crunching. So it was one tool to rule both the internet and the data.
No one would think of doing that now. Though whenever I run into a text file reformatting issue I still reach for perl. It's basically a text based wood chipper and nothing beats it at that game in terms of getting the job done in one line.
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What if you go with your family on a trip and your a self driving car suddenly
Do you often have a problem with suddenly becoming a self-driving car? Sounds like you should see a doctor about that.
Blockchain != Bitcoin (Score:3)
Wait. . . I must be new here. . .
Re:You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't look like the mods understood what the article was talking about anymore than you did! This isn't about bitcoins. It's about the technology for doing a trustrworthy and tamper-proof ledger of transactions between parties that need not have any trust for each other. The article contains at least one good use for the blockchain: land deeds.
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Well, let's point out that you can't have trustworthy and tamper-proof records of transactions if you can't have cryptography free of back doors.
Those two things are incompatible. Either you have robust encryption technologies which allow for such things, or you haven't got a damned thing.
The problem is we increasingly have things which are built on top of encryption, and we increasingly have governments who want to undermine that for reasons of "security" ... and none of them grasp that all of the rest of
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Few people care about Bitcoin. A lot more care about blockchain technology, including major banks and IT firms.
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Bitcoin? Who's talking about bitcoin? From what I gather the article is about the concept of a cryptographical block chain that can be used to verify all sorts of things, the initial stupid attempt to use it for money not withstanding.
All sorts of companies are looking into the technology from the legal system or governments looking to certify paperwork, to oil companies.
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The Bitcoin blockchain grants transaction fees and minted coins to nodes that process and verify transactions. If a blockchain does not represent currency, what will be the reward for operating a node?
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You're assuming that one is using a blockchain for external public use and that someone needs a reward to run a system. Shit I wish I got a reward for running the servers I do at work, but no something called business needs is the reason for that.
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they see me tradin, they hatin
Re: You bitcoin groupies aren't even trying anymor (Score:3)
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One problem: It is not possible for most calculations and it is unknown whether it ever will be.
And another problem: Even if possible with a sufficiently general set of operations, its impact will be rather limited.
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Possible, but will take a while ;-)
Re: Whay are slashdoters hating Bitcoin? (Score:2)
It's not about Bitcoin.