Show HN: Interactive implementation of the NIST Blockchain use case flow chart(brucemacd.github.io) |
Show HN: Interactive implementation of the NIST Blockchain use case flow chart(brucemacd.github.io) |
"Blockchain for nuclear weapons"
Any fan of Dr Strangelove should know that there is a problem with the system, it is not just the president's nuclear football that can bring on the omnicide that the people in CND are so scared of.
Blockchain for nuclear weapons - where could it go wrong?
It is an obvious use case, not a solution in search of a problem. I stand corrected with all my scepticism regarding blockchain. We don't need pesky INF treaties, we can just go with smart contracts and have only the president able to launch that decapitation strike rather than some rogue general.
The senstivity issue can be overcome by submitting a cryptographic hash of the information (say sha256) and storing the encrypted data on ipfs. In future audits, one can reveal the unencrypted data and ensure the hashes match.
There are ways to work around this, for example objecthash[0] describes a small modification that prepends the input data with 32 bytes of random data before hashing in order to prevent this.
yes the data itself becomes difficult to verify. Then you must move towards are for more complicated ZKSnark or Homomorphic scheme
This is really helpful by the way. My sister is completing her MBA and I think IBM is a program sponsor or something and has really been pushing their blockchain product. Whatever the case, she's drank the Blockchain Kool-Aid. I'm going to point her to this (this site and the NIST doc) the next time she brings it up.
>Blockchains do not allow for modification of historical data. Consider a database.
If that was true it wouldn't even be possible to send any tokens. Log of all past actions can't be deleted or updated, which is a quite different thing.
In second generation blockchains like Ethereum there's a difference between world state and ledger data. Only the Ledger data (record of state transitions) is immutable by design.
[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf [1] H. Massias, X.S. Avila, and J.-J. Quisquater, "Design of a secure timestamping service with minimal trust requirements," In 20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, May 1999.
Say you took out a mortgage on an open ledger (a PoW based blockchain ledger), BYOB. What happens when you get scammed? How do you reverse the transaction? What legal enforcement is there? Remember, you've said it yourself, the blockchain's supposed value comes from that nobody has full control of the database, but this is flawed thinking-the absence of authority does not make a ledger more trustable just because it's not in the control of anyone, which is false, bitcoin being a clear example of centralized ownership, or a perfect model of "rich miners getting richer".
Trust is not a simple matter of storing information, it's much more than that. It's based on human to human level trust, which blockchain industry has pretty much failed spectacularly with the vast majority of ICO pump-dump schemes.
http://cdixon.org/2009/09/10/non-linearity-of-technology-ado...
Blockchain is 3 for 3!