9 ms·

This may be an unusual question, but why?

by xigency 10y ago

kylebenzle 10y ago
Because they still don't get that the blockchain only works as a currency.
- rexpop 10y ago
  It does? I am hoping I'll be able to use it as a public, distributed ledger, and so, too, are many major financial institutions — if they can be said to "hope". Are you suggesting that this aspiration is naive?
  - tigershark 10y ago
    Ethereum worked very well with the DAO...for the hacker that stole several million and that forced them to fork. I will never trust a system where they can decide arbitrarily to void all the transactions that everyone made after several days.
    - nickonline 10y ago
      So, the current banking system?
      - stonogo 10y ago
        You can get insurance with the current banking system.
        vxNsr 10y ago
        As long as you have the money to prove the law is on your side.
        stonogo 10y ago
        That's not relevant. A bank account is an insurable device. An ethereum implementation is not. Until that changes, nobody will take it seriously.
      - tigershark 10y ago
        I never heard that all the transactions in the world got rollbacked after days, and I don't think it is even technically possible. Doing that in ethereum and all the other similar currencies is as easy as pressing a button.
        patrickk 10y ago
        > Doing that in ethereum and all the other similar currencies is as easy as pressing a button. The rollback was (and still is) very controversial. It required the agreement of the large mining pools to support the fork, which they eventually agreed to. It wasn't quite as simple as "pressing a button". Banks get hacked all the time, eat the loss, keep it quiet and move on, e.g. http://www.businessinsider.de/how-to-hack-a-bank-mikko-hypponen-f-secure-mandiant-fireeye-bangladesh-swift-banking-north-korea-2016-6?r=UK&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.de/how-to-hack-a-bank-mikko-hyppo... http://www.dataiq.co.uk/news/20141107/banks-keeping-quite-despite-swathe-customer-data-breaches http://www.dataiq.co.uk/news/20141107/banks-keeping-quite-de...
    - pYQAJ6Zm 10y ago
      The way I recall it, they didn’t void past transactions; they added “irregular state changes” that would “return” the “stolen” funds to their “legitimate“ owners. Nor were they forced to fork; it was a voluntary decision of a group of people with enough social power over the platform. Now this is more a matter of dispute, but I wouldn’t say the hacker stole the funds. They simply followed the DAO contract (not the “smart-contract”, mind you, but the one put forward by the Slock.it team on their page), according to which everything that went on the blockchain according to the DAO code was legitimate.
      - mannykannot 10y ago
        >Now this is more a matter of dispute, but I wouldn’t say the hacker stole the funds... Verification is Ethereum's Achille's heel. Everyone seems to trust that someone else will verify that the contracts they participate in will work securely as intended, and the DAO showed how well that works. If Ethereum ever gets used as its proponents imagine, with multiple interacting contracts in progress at any given time, rolling back an error will not be nearly as easy as it was in the DAO case (and that was not particularly easy.)
        aminok 10y ago
        That's every system's Achille's Heel. It's a human fault.
        mannykannot 10y ago
        The point is that in Ethereum's case, the extent of the problem is vastly underestimated by almost all of the participants. In most other cases, it is a risk that can be mitigated or accepted, but in Ethereum's case, it undermines the fundamental premise ('trustless' contracts.)
        aminok 10y ago
        It's something that will change with experience.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      Nobody forced anything. A bunch of people agreed to use new rules with old data, which is why the new chain is in common use. Democracy in action. The same could happen to literally any cryptocurrency you could think up, unless you can come up with a way of invalidating past state to a point where nobody can use it with a new set of rules - which is impossible unless you can somehow cryptographically encode the rules into the chain to a point where you can't access the data without adhering to the rules. (I think a zkSNARK could help with this if it's something that people actually desire.)
      - duozerk 10y ago
        > Democracy in action For a weird definition of "democracy" where one person has 25% of the votes and the vote itself is badly/too quickly announced and organized to the point where almost no one votes. This doesn't even take into account the incredible amount of shitty actions or plain incompetence from the Ethereum Foundation guys at that time or since then. A quick (tongue in cheek and quite partial in its tone, but also pretty accurate) recap of the events leading to the HF: https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/the-complete-story-of-ethereum-so-far-b85ba182bb35 https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/the-complete-story-of-ethereu...
        vertex-four 10y ago
        People could've kept using a continuation of the old chain without breaking anything. In fact, some did - see Ethereum Classic. People decided to use the forked Ethereum because they believed it was the correct choice, not because someone made them.
        duozerk 10y ago
        Oh, absolutely. I'm still an interested watcher/user of ETC. And indeed, people "voted" in the end with their mining power (which is why the original chain hasn't disappeared). I just believe that their actions basically destroyed any future that ETH (and likely ETC too) might've had - it's dead; if the initial hard fork wasn't enough to remove all credibility in the project, the circus since then (subsequent forks, attacks, incredibly mismanaged communication...) certainly is.
- Terr_ 10y ago
  > blockchain only works as a currency. Except it has not worked... Not as a currency. Instead, you're most likely to see it used as a fungible commodity that appreciates and encourages hoarding.
  - ogig 10y ago
    > Except it has not worked... Not as a currency. Bitcoin is working as a currency. You might not like, or been aware of it, but plenty of drugs users and criminals use bitcoin everyday. It works.
    - abritinthebay 10y ago
      No, there it works as a tradable commodity. Different. Similar, but different. It's an important difference too.
      - TelmoMenezes 10y ago
        Because you say so? Commodities are goods or services, bitcoin is neither.
        csomar 10y ago
        I don't want to get into this discussion but everything is an asset. Bitcoin is an asset, so is the coffee you bought today at starbucks. It doesn't really matter as long as you can bridge it for your needs.
        abritinthebay 10y ago
        No, a commodity is a marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs, usually fungible. Bitcoin is all of those. It's for this reason that the USCFTC ruled that Bitcoin is a commodity. So not because I say so; because the people whose job it is to say so, say so.
    - Canada 10y ago
      I can't imagine the majority of users are criminals. I've recently tried it out as a means of receiving payment for completely legitimate work. The client was in a different country. The contract was signed in USD. Client sends half at then exchange rate, which arrived very fast. After accepting the delivered work the client sends the other half, which was less BTC because the price went up by that point. But it didn't matter because the first half I was holding appreciated so it's all the same. Turned out one of my vendors likes Bitcoin so I used some of it to settle an outstanding bill with him, then sold the rest at an exchange. Opening that account for the company was a pain in the ass, though less painful that opening a typical brokerage account. I had to pay a fee to the exchange to sell and another fee for them to wire the funds to my bank. It was faster and cost less than a credit card. It was more expensive than a check, but way way way faster. It was cheaper than SWIFT overall, but a few dollars more expensive to me because I bore the costs of selling while the client only bore the tiny costs of the Bitcoin transaction fees. If the contract was for a much larger amount then SWIFT would have been better. For accounting purposes I'm just treating BTC as a foreign currency. I would accept it again, it's great to actually receive payment that fast.
- eigenrick 10y ago
  Not quite. _Bitcoin_ (and other coins) operate as a currency. Blockchain is a distributed ledger which can store _any_ information for all time. Contracts, fulfilments, ascii art, whatever.
nickonline 10y ago
What do you mean by Why? Why did they make a private ethereum? - Because private blockchains are a solution to a network problem, unless everyone is working on something similar you end up back in the problem space we are in now where everyone is using different technologies Why did they release it? - It's a similar approach to what IBM is doing with Hyperledger, but producing and releasing the blockchain they're hoping to position themselves as the consultants that know everything about implementing this private blockchain.
- dperfect 10y ago
  > Because private blockchains are a solution to a network problem Would someone mind explaining more specifically how private blockchains do anything that a traditional shared database or network doesn't already do? Without the incentives, distributed computing power, and public participation in a blockchain like Bitcoin, what does a private blockchain actually do? If it's "private", does that imply that, like Ethereum, the blockchain could be forked at any time by those who claim ownership of it? Doesn't that essentially undermine the validity of many of the selling points associated with blockchain technology? I've heard cases made about things like smart contracts, cryptographic authentication, and other "exciting applications", but I don't understand how these are any more effective in the context of a private blockchain than they would be directly relying on certain cryptographic primitives and traditional networks - especially in the absence of a public, globally distributed network with incentives that are aligned with improving the strength of the blockchain itself.
  - patrickk 10y ago
    >Without the incentives, distributed computing power, and public participation in a blockchain like Bitcoin, what does a private blockchain actually do? Proof of Work, public networks make most sense for low trust scenarios where you wish to move actual money with people you don't know or trust at all. There are other scenarios however. A few examples: Scenario 1: Large Banks eliminating middlemen and making settlement for more cost effective Quoting from another comment I made: > It takes some financial assets 3-5 days to settle after the initial transaction goes through, weaving its way through many database systems (some many decades old) and middlemen who each take a cut, e.g. clearing houses. Any established industry has lots of cruft that builds up. > For this reason Santander estimates that banks can save $15-20bn per year collectively by using blockchain technologies to make their infrastructure more efficient[1][2] [1] http://www.coindesk.com/santander-blockchain-tech-can-save-banks-20-billion-a-year/ http://www.coindesk.com/santander-blockchain-tech-can-save-b... [2] http://santanderinnoventures.com/fintech2/ http://santanderinnoventures.com/fintech2/ From another comment: > Since with a private banking settlement blockchain you know in advance who the players are (individually-invited banks) you can give them a percentage of the network and have each node verify the transactions across the network. You could even give nodes to regulators or consumer advocacy groups to achieve regulatory compliance or consumer oversight if required. > As for cost, you could technically run a PoS node with a raspberry pi, a large USB drive, a wifi connection, powered by a solar panel and an old car battery on the roof of a building. Proof of stake only needs minimal computing power and a persistent internet connection. Saving billions in costs at a time when banks are struggling to increase revenues is a powerful incentive to consider blockchains. You don't need a public blockchain because you know in advance who the players are. Scenario 2: Streamlining KYC data, therefore improving data quality and massively reducing costs I sat at a presentation where a startup outlined a product roadmap being offered to large financial institutions such as banks or insurance companies. A big problem is KYC data gathering- often the customer data goes stale, therefore data quality is poor, and it's expensive, costing about €200 per account to process. In the proposed product, a private blockchain is implemented to gather and manage customer data, hosted collectively by the institutions that are interested in cost savings and efficiency improvements. The customer decides when, with who and how their data is managed - a big improvement over today. If you update your address for Bank A - then your insurance company, your second bank, etc all get your updated, verified address. If your car insurance is a 12 month contract, you can terminate access to your personal data after the contract is up. If you decide to get car insurance with a second company, you grant permission to that company, who then doesn't need to see any form of ID because your identity is cryptographically verified (technically they don't even need to know your name!) The cost to gain access to the customer data is borne by the company getting access, a fee which they're happy to pay because it's vastly cheaper to pay that rather than gathering and securing customer data themselves, paying a company to verify your ID, and so on. These are the early days of blockchain technology. There's lots of potential advantages of a distributed database over a SQL database, and we're only starting to figure out what those are, and what scenarios where is doesn't make sense.
SonOfLilit 10y ago
> Of course old-school financial institutions get hacked too; blockchains have some features (good cryptography, distributed ledgers) that make them harder to hack, and some features (anonymity, irreversibility) that make them easier to hack. But I've said before that the main advantage of the blockchain over other ways to store financial information is not so much technological as sociological: It's not that it was technologically impossible to quickly settle financial transactions using shared computer databases before; it's that no one cared enough to do the work of coordinating a bunch of banks to set up the databases. The word "blockchain" has managed to make that boring back-office coordination work sexy, which means that it might actually get done. Matt Levine, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-11/executive-pay-and-blood-trouble https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-11/executive...
- bogomipz 10y ago
  >"and some features (anonymity, irreversibility) that make them easier to hack" Can you explain how the property or "irreversibility" makes something easier to hack?
  - wolf550e 10y ago
    If someone socially engineers a bank employee to transfer money in a bank's computer, the transaction can be reversed if the bank decides it was fraudulent. You can't reverse blockchain transactions without one of: (1) the other party agrees to return the money or (2) a majority of the people controlling the blockchain agree to fork the blockchain.
    - alexeldeib 10y ago
      Wouldn't a bank be able to do a hard fork a la ethereum? Since it would be a completely private system, they would have total control and it seems this would fulfill (2) in your comment. Or am I confusing the purpose of the technology?
      - wolf550e 10y ago

This may be an unusual question, but why?

by xigency 10y ago

This may be an unusual question, but why?

kylebenzle 10y ago

Because they still don't get that the blockchain only works as a currency.

rexpop 10y ago
It does? I am hoping I'll be able to use it as a public, distributed ledger, and so, too, are many major financial institutions — if they can be said to "hope". Are you suggesting that this aspiration is naive?
- tigershark 10y ago
  Ethereum worked very well with the DAO...for the hacker that stole several million and that forced them to fork. I will never trust a system where they can decide arbitrarily to void all the transactions that everyone made after several days.
  - nickonline 10y ago
    So, the current banking system?
    - stonogo 10y ago
      You can get insurance with the current banking system.
      - vxNsr 10y ago
        As long as you have the money to prove the law is on your side.
        stonogo 10y ago
        That's not relevant. A bank account is an insurable device. An ethereum implementation is not. Until that changes, nobody will take it seriously.
    - tigershark 10y ago
      I never heard that all the transactions in the world got rollbacked after days, and I don't think it is even technically possible. Doing that in ethereum and all the other similar currencies is as easy as pressing a button.
      - patrickk 10y ago
        > Doing that in ethereum and all the other similar currencies is as easy as pressing a button. The rollback was (and still is) very controversial. It required the agreement of the large mining pools to support the fork, which they eventually agreed to. It wasn't quite as simple as "pressing a button". Banks get hacked all the time, eat the loss, keep it quiet and move on, e.g. http://www.businessinsider.de/how-to-hack-a-bank-mikko-hypponen-f-secure-mandiant-fireeye-bangladesh-swift-banking-north-korea-2016-6?r=UK&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.de/how-to-hack-a-bank-mikko-hyppo... http://www.dataiq.co.uk/news/20141107/banks-keeping-quite-despite-swathe-customer-data-breaches http://www.dataiq.co.uk/news/20141107/banks-keeping-quite-de...
  - pYQAJ6Zm 10y ago
    The way I recall it, they didn’t void past transactions; they added “irregular state changes” that would “return” the “stolen” funds to their “legitimate“ owners. Nor were they forced to fork; it was a voluntary decision of a group of people with enough social power over the platform. Now this is more a matter of dispute, but I wouldn’t say the hacker stole the funds. They simply followed the DAO contract (not the “smart-contract”, mind you, but the one put forward by the Slock.it team on their page), according to which everything that went on the blockchain according to the DAO code was legitimate.
    - mannykannot 10y ago
      >Now this is more a matter of dispute, but I wouldn’t say the hacker stole the funds... Verification is Ethereum's Achille's heel. Everyone seems to trust that someone else will verify that the contracts they participate in will work securely as intended, and the DAO showed how well that works. If Ethereum ever gets used as its proponents imagine, with multiple interacting contracts in progress at any given time, rolling back an error will not be nearly as easy as it was in the DAO case (and that was not particularly easy.)
      - aminok 10y ago
        That's every system's Achille's Heel. It's a human fault.
        mannykannot 10y ago
        The point is that in Ethereum's case, the extent of the problem is vastly underestimated by almost all of the participants. In most other cases, it is a risk that can be mitigated or accepted, but in Ethereum's case, it undermines the fundamental premise ('trustless' contracts.)
        aminok 10y ago
        It's something that will change with experience.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    Nobody forced anything. A bunch of people agreed to use new rules with old data, which is why the new chain is in common use. Democracy in action. The same could happen to literally any cryptocurrency you could think up, unless you can come up with a way of invalidating past state to a point where nobody can use it with a new set of rules - which is impossible unless you can somehow cryptographically encode the rules into the chain to a point where you can't access the data without adhering to the rules. (I think a zkSNARK could help with this if it's something that people actually desire.)
    - duozerk 10y ago
      > Democracy in action For a weird definition of "democracy" where one person has 25% of the votes and the vote itself is badly/too quickly announced and organized to the point where almost no one votes. This doesn't even take into account the incredible amount of shitty actions or plain incompetence from the Ethereum Foundation guys at that time or since then. A quick (tongue in cheek and quite partial in its tone, but also pretty accurate) recap of the events leading to the HF: https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/the-complete-story-of-ethereum-so-far-b85ba182bb35 https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/the-complete-story-of-ethereu...
      - vertex-four 10y ago
        People could've kept using a continuation of the old chain without breaking anything. In fact, some did - see Ethereum Classic. People decided to use the forked Ethereum because they believed it was the correct choice, not because someone made them.
        duozerk 10y ago
        Oh, absolutely. I'm still an interested watcher/user of ETC. And indeed, people "voted" in the end with their mining power (which is why the original chain hasn't disappeared). I just believe that their actions basically destroyed any future that ETH (and likely ETC too) might've had - it's dead; if the initial hard fork wasn't enough to remove all credibility in the project, the circus since then (subsequent forks, attacks, incredibly mismanaged communication...) certainly is.
Terr_ 10y ago
> blockchain only works as a currency. Except it has not worked... Not as a currency. Instead, you're most likely to see it used as a fungible commodity that appreciates and encourages hoarding.
- ogig 10y ago
  > Except it has not worked... Not as a currency. Bitcoin is working as a currency. You might not like, or been aware of it, but plenty of drugs users and criminals use bitcoin everyday. It works.
  - abritinthebay 10y ago
    No, there it works as a tradable commodity. Different. Similar, but different. It's an important difference too.
    - TelmoMenezes 10y ago
      Because you say so? Commodities are goods or services, bitcoin is neither.
      - csomar 10y ago
        I don't want to get into this discussion but everything is an asset. Bitcoin is an asset, so is the coffee you bought today at starbucks. It doesn't really matter as long as you can bridge it for your needs.
      - abritinthebay 10y ago
        No, a commodity is a marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs, usually fungible. Bitcoin is all of those. It's for this reason that the USCFTC ruled that Bitcoin is a commodity. So not because I say so; because the people whose job it is to say so, say so.
  - Canada 10y ago
    I can't imagine the majority of users are criminals. I've recently tried it out as a means of receiving payment for completely legitimate work. The client was in a different country. The contract was signed in USD. Client sends half at then exchange rate, which arrived very fast. After accepting the delivered work the client sends the other half, which was less BTC because the price went up by that point. But it didn't matter because the first half I was holding appreciated so it's all the same. Turned out one of my vendors likes Bitcoin so I used some of it to settle an outstanding bill with him, then sold the rest at an exchange. Opening that account for the company was a pain in the ass, though less painful that opening a typical brokerage account. I had to pay a fee to the exchange to sell and another fee for them to wire the funds to my bank. It was faster and cost less than a credit card. It was more expensive than a check, but way way way faster. It was cheaper than SWIFT overall, but a few dollars more expensive to me because I bore the costs of selling while the client only bore the tiny costs of the Bitcoin transaction fees. If the contract was for a much larger amount then SWIFT would have been better. For accounting purposes I'm just treating BTC as a foreign currency. I would accept it again, it's great to actually receive payment that fast.
eigenrick 10y ago
Not quite. _Bitcoin_ (and other coins) operate as a currency. Blockchain is a distributed ledger which can store _any_ information for all time. Contracts, fulfilments, ascii art, whatever.

nickonline 10y ago

What do you mean by Why? Why did they make a private ethereum? - Because private blockchains are a solution to a network problem, unless everyone is working on something similar you end up back in the problem space we are in now where everyone is using different technologies Why did they release it? - It's a similar approach to what IBM is doing with Hyperledger, but producing and releasing the blockchain they're hoping to position themselves as the consultants that know everything about implementing this private blockchain.

dperfect 10y ago
> Because private blockchains are a solution to a network problem Would someone mind explaining more specifically how private blockchains do anything that a traditional shared database or network doesn't already do? Without the incentives, distributed computing power, and public participation in a blockchain like Bitcoin, what does a private blockchain actually do? If it's "private", does that imply that, like Ethereum, the blockchain could be forked at any time by those who claim ownership of it? Doesn't that essentially undermine the validity of many of the selling points associated with blockchain technology? I've heard cases made about things like smart contracts, cryptographic authentication, and other "exciting applications", but I don't understand how these are any more effective in the context of a private blockchain than they would be directly relying on certain cryptographic primitives and traditional networks - especially in the absence of a public, globally distributed network with incentives that are aligned with improving the strength of the blockchain itself.
- patrickk 10y ago
  >Without the incentives, distributed computing power, and public participation in a blockchain like Bitcoin, what does a private blockchain actually do? Proof of Work, public networks make most sense for low trust scenarios where you wish to move actual money with people you don't know or trust at all. There are other scenarios however. A few examples: Scenario 1: Large Banks eliminating middlemen and making settlement for more cost effective Quoting from another comment I made: > It takes some financial assets 3-5 days to settle after the initial transaction goes through, weaving its way through many database systems (some many decades old) and middlemen who each take a cut, e.g. clearing houses. Any established industry has lots of cruft that builds up. > For this reason Santander estimates that banks can save $15-20bn per year collectively by using blockchain technologies to make their infrastructure more efficient[1][2] [1] http://www.coindesk.com/santander-blockchain-tech-can-save-banks-20-billion-a-year/ http://www.coindesk.com/santander-blockchain-tech-can-save-b... [2] http://santanderinnoventures.com/fintech2/ http://santanderinnoventures.com/fintech2/ From another comment: > Since with a private banking settlement blockchain you know in advance who the players are (individually-invited banks) you can give them a percentage of the network and have each node verify the transactions across the network. You could even give nodes to regulators or consumer advocacy groups to achieve regulatory compliance or consumer oversight if required. > As for cost, you could technically run a PoS node with a raspberry pi, a large USB drive, a wifi connection, powered by a solar panel and an old car battery on the roof of a building. Proof of stake only needs minimal computing power and a persistent internet connection. Saving billions in costs at a time when banks are struggling to increase revenues is a powerful incentive to consider blockchains. You don't need a public blockchain because you know in advance who the players are. Scenario 2: Streamlining KYC data, therefore improving data quality and massively reducing costs I sat at a presentation where a startup outlined a product roadmap being offered to large financial institutions such as banks or insurance companies. A big problem is KYC data gathering- often the customer data goes stale, therefore data quality is poor, and it's expensive, costing about €200 per account to process. In the proposed product, a private blockchain is implemented to gather and manage customer data, hosted collectively by the institutions that are interested in cost savings and efficiency improvements. The customer decides when, with who and how their data is managed - a big improvement over today. If you update your address for Bank A - then your insurance company, your second bank, etc all get your updated, verified address. If your car insurance is a 12 month contract, you can terminate access to your personal data after the contract is up. If you decide to get car insurance with a second company, you grant permission to that company, who then doesn't need to see any form of ID because your identity is cryptographically verified (technically they don't even need to know your name!) The cost to gain access to the customer data is borne by the company getting access, a fee which they're happy to pay because it's vastly cheaper to pay that rather than gathering and securing customer data themselves, paying a company to verify your ID, and so on. These are the early days of blockchain technology. There's lots of potential advantages of a distributed database over a SQL database, and we're only starting to figure out what those are, and what scenarios where is doesn't make sense.

SonOfLilit 10y ago

> Of course old-school financial institutions get hacked too; blockchains have some features (good cryptography, distributed ledgers) that make them harder to hack, and some features (anonymity, irreversibility) that make them easier to hack. But I've said before that the main advantage of the blockchain over other ways to store financial information is not so much technological as sociological: It's not that it was technologically impossible to quickly settle financial transactions using shared computer databases before; it's that no one cared enough to do the work of coordinating a bunch of banks to set up the databases. The word "blockchain" has managed to make that boring back-office coordination work sexy, which means that it might actually get done. Matt Levine, https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-11/executive-pay-and-blood-trouble https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-07-11/executive...

bogomipz 10y ago
>"and some features (anonymity, irreversibility) that make them easier to hack" Can you explain how the property or "irreversibility" makes something easier to hack?
- wolf550e 10y ago
  If someone socially engineers a bank employee to transfer money in a bank's computer, the transaction can be reversed if the bank decides it was fraudulent. You can't reverse blockchain transactions without one of: (1) the other party agrees to return the money or (2) a majority of the people controlling the blockchain agree to fork the blockchain.
  - alexeldeib 10y ago
    Wouldn't a bank be able to do a hard fork a la ethereum? Since it would be a completely private system, they would have total control and it seems this would fulfill (2) in your comment. Or am I confusing the purpose of the technology?
    - wolf550e 10y ago