Interesting. Good discussion, thanks. I offer a few comments.
Block chain refers to a specific, defined technology. Blockchain is a trademark.
Do we mean solutions or requirements? Are the solutions technology specific or general solutions to a business problem, where a block chain may feature as part of the solution set?
If we replace Proof of Work with PKI Federation, which is attractive & desirable in many situations, do we still have a block chain? My block chain colleagues believe that we still do, and there is an ongoing discussion about how PoW might be measured to achieve some sort of LoA that could map, in policy terms, to PKI and create a basis for for BC - PKI federation.
The voting process presents several complexities, some of which could be addressed by an underlying trust fabric. There hasn’t been much discussion about this yet, but it will definitely be moving there later this year as the UK government has just approved its first BC provider to be listed in a catalogue service available to all UK gov organisations.
A feature of BCs being used in regulated settings is that the regulator (regulators in many cases, particularly internationally) requires to have a voting node and so gets to see all traffic. Regulators haven’t woken up to this yet, but I am expecting to see them require the development of rulesets that are embedded in the process in the BC with decision authority (signature), i.e. a smart contract. I don’t understand why this would be a bug. A feature or a factor, yes.
Ref data management, the smart contract is a feature of permissioned block chains because of how the cryptography works. It’s hard to see how this functionality could be replicated easily in other existing technologies. Instead, what is beginning to happen is that companies link their ERP etc to the block chain. The ERP provides the internal business functionality and logic, the block chain DLT provides the external interoperability & contract integrity. The smart contract runs on the chain, not on in the enterprise app. This satisfies the supply chain requirements where a centralised enterprise solution would/does not.
Agree about data replication. Depending on the nature of the business requirement and use cases, data minimisation is one of the privacy principles. Proofs of concept on some Zero Knowledge Proof mechanisms have been completed and a couple are moving to bigger pilots. ZKP and other anonymised attribute assurance mechanisms are attractive and suitable options for block chain privacy requirements.
Interesting that you mention Zittrain. His work on trusted intermediaries has come up in international discussions of lead industries, law enforcement and govs, as a way to address policy collisions on public safety and privacy. The discussions are more about encryption and key management; block chains haven’t yet been discussed, but they might be. I agree about JSON. I’d be interested in knowing more about your and Eve’s work in this area. is there anything you can share?
regards,
Patrick
Patrick Curry
Director
British Business Federation Authority - BBFA Ltd
M: +44 786 024 9074
T: +44 1980 620606
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Though "Blockchain" is in the title of this discussion group, it need not be in all of the solutions. "Blockchains" have large privacy and data security challenges built into maintaining consensus on the state of the ledger (database). Most real life situations have available a range of alternative means of validating the state of the ledger. For instance, a regulator.
So, we might view it as a bug, rather than a feature, if a "smart contract" solution requires execution on a blockchain.
Organizations and humans will want to be able to efficiently manage large numbers of ledger entries, in efficient databases (SQL, graph, IPFS), not blockchains. They will need to be able to run the smart contracts on those other platforms.
Data replication should be minimized, and temporary to the extent possible. This will, I think, also be required by GDPR.
The necessary point of agreement, the waist of the Zittrain hourglass, is very small - a format for ledger entries. CommonAccord asserts (I assert on its behalf) that the key to this is ... key/values, a way of resolving references, and inheritance. For good reasons, JSON is a likely to be the most common "punctuation" (Eve's word) for exchange of ledger entries. Our current rendering engine uses plain text and carriage returns. That is the lightest "punctuation" and may be the best for collaboration on big texts, notably for collaboration among lawyers and regulators on Github. It closely parallels the presentation of software source code. But this barely matters. What matters is a common approach to linking and inheritance.
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