Comment on Is the blockchain an interesting innovation, aside from cryptocurrencies ?
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 11 months agoThis is true, the fundamental of a blockchain is simply signed blocks of binary data. We can get into the debates on weather this can work in a public system like many groups are trying now, though I presume that that is not really what the poster is talking about since most public chains fundamentally rely on thier cryptocurrencies to to function, which for some is an argument as to why they can’t work.
dragontamer@lemmy.world 11 months ago
My cryptographically signed .pdf for my mortgage document requires no cryptocoin or “blockchain” to function.
Its just simple hashing and signatures. You know, standard cryptography. The thing that allows “HTTPS” connections? The thing that signs your credit-card each time you enter it into Amazon? The thing that signs your password as you type it into the password field?
Yeah, that’s cryptography. Not “cryptocoins” or “blockchain”, its just a cryptographic hash, signature, or encryption.
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 11 months ago
if you just keep your document on your machine and only use it for personal encryption sure. its a key exchange network, this is for when bob and alice want to talk, not look at something in the safe and put it back. distributed PKI has been a challenge for decades, im not sure about this current incarnation of public systems but I find a lot of promise in many other applications.
dragontamer@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m not sure if you fully understand what I’m talking about.
www.docusign.com/solutions/industries/mortgage
I’m talking about real world business. I’m not getting a $300,000 mortgage leaving a pdf on my personal computer. I’m talking about real world applications here.
manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 11 months ago
so if you are looking at this its a question to trust scopes, at least in public systems. here you are trusting:
the proposal for a decentralized ledger with neutral execution is that the only “trust” needed is that in the contracts function, however this is not entirely true, in reality you are shifting trust to:
some people feel this is a better way of doing things, ive found it interesting to work in the space technically but I dont necessarily agree with the wildwest nature of the public systems and am more an advocate of regulated channels if these are going to be done at all. There is also the idea that a large enough network makes it possible for the network to handle larger loads than any individual processor could handle, this has borne out in some cases though its not perfect since we know P2P network instability tends to ripple through a network.
Finally if an application has been built with web3 practices enshrined its entirely possible to ensure service continuity even in the event of the provider failing finically and being unable to serve the users. Important to note this is RARELY done properly and I have only seen a couple cases where it worked so far.
If we are talking the internal org, like docusign itself, an org like might adopt a ledger based system for the in-built capabilities of some chains, you find quickly that enterprise grade cryptographic tracking of large scales of assets or process gets VERY expensive. Ledgers can be very helpful in these cases though are more a consideration when validating a new system rather than it being an impetus to upgrade in and of itself.
I often refer to it as a specialized app-server stack to clients.