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I can't help but plug my take on why enterprise blockchains are almost entirely bullshit: https://medium.com/@qertoip/enterprise-blockchains-are-a-huge-overpr

by qertoip 10y ago

I can't help but plug my take on why enterprise blockchains are almost entirely bullshit: https://medium.com/@qertoip/enterprise-blockchains-are-a-huge-overpromise-7ca2d19324b3 https://medium.com/@qertoip/enterprise-blockchains-are-a-hug...

davidgerard 10y ago
One of the best explanations of why Business Blockchain is not like Bitcoin or its assorted altcoins is actually this post from the R3 Consortium: https://r3cev.com/blog/2016/4/4/introducing-r3-corda-a-distributed-ledger-designed-for-financial-services https://r3cev.com/blog/2016/4/4/introducing-r3-corda-a-distr... Their Corda Distributed Ledger Designed for Financial Services seems the most sensible of all the Business Blockchain approaches: after careful consideration of the fact that the Bitcoin-style blockchain was expressly designed to be the direct opposite of what large paying customers with money want, their “Blockchain Product” does not, in its default configuration ... contain a blockchain. PREDICTION: Merkle trees are great, and business is about to discover how to use them as a tamper-evident ledger. That's what will be left of this in a year or so. Possibly branded "Blockchain".
buckie 10y ago
Before I founded a company[1] in this space I investigated blockchain applications for JPM and I agree with your take on bitcoin-style blockchains being mostly BS for industry. I'd take it a step further to note that mining is incompatible with private blockchains of any form because the new coins+fees incentive structure doesn't exist. Permissioned/Private Blockchains don't need to look like Bitcoin, they just need to offer many of the same features plus a few more. What we're really talking about is a database that competitors can share, which is largely inspired by Bitcoin's system. Some things it needs to actually work: - Vastly increased performance: 5-15 transactions per second is useless for industrial use. - Smart Contract languages designed for safety over generality: more of an empowered SQL than a C/Go. Tokenization doesn't provide enough of a benefit over traditional approaches and generalized computation is too dangerous. - Deterministic BFT Consensus: this is to replace mining + remove anonymous participation, it needs to be fast and scale. - Confidential transaction support: the trickiest of the lot, as we cannot currently hit performance + double-spend protection at once. In case you're curious what our approach is: BFT Raft-like for consensus (8k-12k trans/sec), soon to be open sourced smart contract language, signal protocol over the chain for confidential stuff. [1]: http://kadena.io http://kadena.io
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  When's the ICO?
  - buckie 10y ago
    We're focused on private deployments currently but are playing with the idea of a public chain. The issue is that it would look so different from what people are used to that we're having a hard time with the monetization strategy/figuring out what people would use it for. For one, there's no Mining so what's the meaning of the initial coins? Also, it'd be much closer to an AWS Lambda + Stripe/Ripple than anything else which makes fee structures tricky. The big reason is that we would run all of the nodes ourselves because our core IP is ScalableBFT and we think that's the most valuable bit. It's the first/only deterministic BFT Consensus that can scale into the 1000's of nodes + maintain constant performance as it scales. Being a bit of a breakthrough, we are keeping the protocol and its implementation proprietary.
    - cdetrio 10y ago
      > can scale into the 1000's of nodes + maintain constant performance as it scales. So transaction throughput stays at 5-15 tx/s and does not increase as you add nodes?
      - buckie 10y ago
        The blockchains we're discussing here are about uniform replication & inter-node agreement, so constant performance is as the system scales is the goal. Our implementation of ScalableBFT runs at 8k-12k transactions per second, not 5-15 tps, and it maintains this performance as cluster size increases (up to some limit, we haven't managed to test it past the limit yet and think it's around 5k-15k nodes). The other deterministic BFT systems like PBFT and SmartBFT are a little bit faster for small cluster sizes but slow down for every added node, encountering full system locks before 256 nodes. It's worth noting that these systems generally do not do pubkey sig verification on every command, instead relying on consensus and direct replication via TLS for authorship guarantees. The drawback, of course, is that an attacker is one server (the client's TLS server) away from inputting fake commands that the system deems real + smart contract authority is handled logically and not cryptographically... we see the CEO and the Mail Clerk having different keys to be a huge benefit from a Bitcoin-like approach. This makes the bottleneck for us crypto-verification. Verifying 8k-12k signatures per seconds is pretty tricky if you don't skimp out on the crypto, which a lot of vendors are doing in the name of speed.

by qertoip 10y ago

davidgerard 10y ago

One of the best explanations of why Business Blockchain is not like Bitcoin or its assorted altcoins is actually this post from the R3 Consortium: https://r3cev.com/blog/2016/4/4/introducing-r3-corda-a-distributed-ledger-designed-for-financial-services https://r3cev.com/blog/2016/4/4/introducing-r3-corda-a-distr... Their Corda Distributed Ledger Designed for Financial Services seems the most sensible of all the Business Blockchain approaches: after careful consideration of the fact that the Bitcoin-style blockchain was expressly designed to be the direct opposite of what large paying customers with money want, their “Blockchain Product” does not, in its default configuration ... contain a blockchain. PREDICTION: Merkle trees are great, and business is about to discover how to use them as a tamper-evident ledger. That's what will be left of this in a year or so. Possibly branded "Blockchain".

buckie 10y ago

Before I founded a company[1] in this space I investigated blockchain applications for JPM and I agree with your take on bitcoin-style blockchains being mostly BS for industry. I'd take it a step further to note that mining is incompatible with private blockchains of any form because the new coins+fees incentive structure doesn't exist. Permissioned/Private Blockchains don't need to look like Bitcoin, they just need to offer many of the same features plus a few more. What we're really talking about is a database that competitors can share, which is largely inspired by Bitcoin's system. Some things it needs to actually work: - Vastly increased performance: 5-15 transactions per second is useless for industrial use. - Smart Contract languages designed for safety over generality: more of an empowered SQL than a C/Go. Tokenization doesn't provide enough of a benefit over traditional approaches and generalized computation is too dangerous. - Deterministic BFT Consensus: this is to replace mining + remove anonymous participation, it needs to be fast and scale. - Confidential transaction support: the trickiest of the lot, as we cannot currently hit performance + double-spend protection at once. In case you're curious what our approach is: BFT Raft-like for consensus (8k-12k trans/sec), soon to be open sourced smart contract language, signal protocol over the chain for confidential stuff. [1]: http://kadena.io http://kadena.io

cloudjacker 10y ago
When's the ICO?
- buckie 10y ago
  We're focused on private deployments currently but are playing with the idea of a public chain. The issue is that it would look so different from what people are used to that we're having a hard time with the monetization strategy/figuring out what people would use it for. For one, there's no Mining so what's the meaning of the initial coins? Also, it'd be much closer to an AWS Lambda + Stripe/Ripple than anything else which makes fee structures tricky. The big reason is that we would run all of the nodes ourselves because our core IP is ScalableBFT and we think that's the most valuable bit. It's the first/only deterministic BFT Consensus that can scale into the 1000's of nodes + maintain constant performance as it scales. Being a bit of a breakthrough, we are keeping the protocol and its implementation proprietary.
  - cdetrio 10y ago
    > can scale into the 1000's of nodes + maintain constant performance as it scales. So transaction throughput stays at 5-15 tx/s and does not increase as you add nodes?
    - buckie 10y ago
      The blockchains we're discussing here are about uniform replication & inter-node agreement, so constant performance is as the system scales is the goal. Our implementation of ScalableBFT runs at 8k-12k transactions per second, not 5-15 tps, and it maintains this performance as cluster size increases (up to some limit, we haven't managed to test it past the limit yet and think it's around 5k-15k nodes). The other deterministic BFT systems like PBFT and SmartBFT are a little bit faster for small cluster sizes but slow down for every added node, encountering full system locks before 256 nodes. It's worth noting that these systems generally do not do pubkey sig verification on every command, instead relying on consensus and direct replication via TLS for authorship guarantees. The drawback, of course, is that an attacker is one server (the client's TLS server) away from inputting fake commands that the system deems real + smart contract authority is handled logically and not cryptographically... we see the CEO and the Mail Clerk having different keys to be a huge benefit from a Bitcoin-like approach. This makes the bottleneck for us crypto-verification. Verifying 8k-12k signatures per seconds is pretty tricky if you don't skimp out on the crypto, which a lot of vendors are doing in the name of speed.