Towards a design philosophy for interoperable blockchain systems

https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/05/30/towards-a-design-philosophy-for-interoperable-blockchain-systems/

by godelmachine • 8 years ago

45 22 8 years ago

blog.acolyer.org

Animats• 8 years ago

The use case for this is what?

I believe anything that uses blockchain. Use cases can range from record keeping to tracking data or flow of transactions. It can also span across multiple and diverse industries like healthcare, transportation and logistics, government welfare benefits distribution et al maybe even voting.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 8 years ago

Use cases can range from record keeping

I am told that an old-style SQL database can do that just fine. With a lot less overhead.

_hl_• 8 years ago

Not much really. Blockchains are a cool solution to a very specific problem. Trying to use them for everything as a general solution, as the author suggests, is not very practical.

discobean• 8 years ago

For a new pump & dump scheme

skywhopper• 8 years ago

This has gone beyond silly and into irresponsible territory. Not only is this a tremendous amount of overhead to build on top of already extremely wasteful blockchain systems, but building a legal-trust-based distributed-transaction network on top of multiple blockchain systems would just immediately discard what actual benefits there are to using a blockchain. And if you do work hard and come up with a metablockchain system to record your cross-blockchain transactions, you still have to interact with the real world at some point, and that will always be the weak link. Building layers on layers of provable tech doesn't solve the real world problem of "how do you trust your business partners?" We have centuries of governmental and legal infrastructure built to solve that problem, and you will never be able to replace that layer so long as humans and human concerns are involved.

ThomPete4• 8 years ago

Not sure I understand your point.

The resilience, usefulness, and value of a system often isn' its elegance but its adaption. A decentralized trust system IS immensely valuable if it can be done because it allows for a lot of transactions that right now falls between chairs in the digital space.

A lot of the critique of the blockchain is based on the belief that digital allows for abundance (copy paste) and that that is the value of digital. But the reality is that there is plenty of value in scarcity ESPECIALLY in the digital space as it opens up for establishing a unique digital footprint which itself has a lot of value.

As an example, you can't easily exchange a piece of music with a game asset. Or an ebook with a digital pokemon card as there is no medium for the transaction. In other words, a decentralized trust-based system allows, for example, for a second-hand market for among other things digital assets. Or put another way a decentralized blockchain based trust system allows for more fluidity in the market and allow for an ever-increasing level of sophisticated trades.

Our legal infrastructure is built for a non-digital reality, even governments would be interested in adopting the blockchain to allow them to implement regulation in the digital space too.

So I don't think it's silly at all, in fact, it feels a little bit like we are reliving the birth of the internet again when it comes to peoples opinions about it.

CPLX2• 8 years ago

there is no medium for the transaction

Yes there is. They're called Dollars.

admax88q• 8 years ago

In other words, a decentralized trust-based system allows, for example, for a second-hand market for among other things digital assets.

This sounds like you're trying to use blockchain to invent artificial scarcity for "digital goods." The only possible benefit I see from that is letting copyright owners preserve their current business models rather than adapt to the reality that bits are freely and easily copyable.

Why would we want that?

weedking• 8 years ago

The Chainlink project addresses many of these issues. https://link.smartcontract.com/whitepaper

superflyguy• 8 years ago

Won't this mean that if you poison one Blockchain with child porn (or whatever) you'll poison all of them?

erdevs• 8 years ago

Interledger and other such protocols are designed to facilitate exchanges across distributed ledger networks. The underlying whitepaper this article is based on mentions Interledger in a few places as a promising direction for some components of inter-ledger-transactions. In my view, Interledger/ILP is an elegant and simple protocol. I didn't glean (from only a cursory skim) what the paper finds is lacking in ILP?

Towards a design philosophy for interoperable blockchain systems

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