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I have never understood how blockchain will solve the "I lost my key" problem. I also don't understand how it will solve the "once I gave them access to my data

I have never understood how blockchain will solve the "I lost my key" problem. I also don't understand how it will solve the "once I gave them access to my data, company X saved a record in a traditional database and now that database was compromised, thereby leaking all my information" problem. This article does not answer either of these fundamental questions.

freehunter 9y ago
I've never understood how blockchain will solve anything it's popularly claimed to be able to solve. Every week for years now we've heard "we're betting big on blockchain" and "blockchain will solve everything" and it's done... what? It's enabled... what? Other than enabling cryptocurrencies and a specific type of accounting ledger, what good has or will come out of the massive hype around blockchain?
- na85 9y ago
  I bet that if I wrote a bot to post randomly generated comments to HN in the vein of "I wonder if blockchain would be a good fit for this application?", I would be bathing in karma.
zodiac 9y ago
1. If in your use-case it's important to let the user recover from lost keys, you can have some multisignature recovery (I designate n trusted parties like friends, family, governments etc, if I lose my key they are allowed to together designate some new address as me, and I trust them to verify me offline if I lose my key; we can do m-of-n multisignature, letting me trade of risk of them colluding to falsely verify someone vs risk of them not verifying me; using secret-sharing we can do this off-chain too). 2. If my use-case requires me to give someone access to my data in order to do their job (eg a hospital needs to see my medical records), then I think it's mathematically impossible to defend against what you said. (barring unlikely advances in homomorphic encryption and the like). Using public-key crypto allows us to eliminate having a intermediary party and the risk that the intermediary party gets hacked. Blockchain then allows us to credibly prove that our data existed at a certain point in time. Also there are use-cases where I maybe need not disclose all my data (eg maybe for some use-case my bank does not need to have access to my payslip, just a proof signed by my employer that it exists)
- rgejman 9y ago
  On #1: I hear you and I think this is a totally valid approach for a society where we don't have little old ladies and gents who lose the piece of paper on which they've written their key and all their friends are old and they urgently need their secure key so that the doctor can access their health records. Or the kid who comes into the hospital in a coma and you can't get their secure key. Or for the recent immigrant family with no friends and their house burns down with all their secure keys inside. Or for the gay kid who gets kicked out of his house without taking his key and the people that blockchain "trusts" are his parents who just threatened to kill him if he comes home. The "use case" here is people's lives. People's lives are messy. Blockchain doesn't solve that mess, it pretty much just makes it worse. We should focus on using blockchain to solve "neater" problems like who owns what and who is contractually obligated to do what, etc. Those problems don't have edge cases that involve a parent who loses their memory or a kid who gets thrown out of his house.

freehunter 9y ago

I've never understood how blockchain will solve anything it's popularly claimed to be able to solve. Every week for years now we've heard "we're betting big on blockchain" and "blockchain will solve everything" and it's done... what? It's enabled... what? Other than enabling cryptocurrencies and a specific type of accounting ledger, what good has or will come out of the massive hype around blockchain?

na85 9y ago
I bet that if I wrote a bot to post randomly generated comments to HN in the vein of "I wonder if blockchain would be a good fit for this application?", I would be bathing in karma.

zodiac 9y ago

1. If in your use-case it's important to let the user recover from lost keys, you can have some multisignature recovery (I designate n trusted parties like friends, family, governments etc, if I lose my key they are allowed to together designate some new address as me, and I trust them to verify me offline if I lose my key; we can do m-of-n multisignature, letting me trade of risk of them colluding to falsely verify someone vs risk of them not verifying me; using secret-sharing we can do this off-chain too). 2. If my use-case requires me to give someone access to my data in order to do their job (eg a hospital needs to see my medical records), then I think it's mathematically impossible to defend against what you said. (barring unlikely advances in homomorphic encryption and the like). Using public-key crypto allows us to eliminate having a intermediary party and the risk that the intermediary party gets hacked. Blockchain then allows us to credibly prove that our data existed at a certain point in time. Also there are use-cases where I maybe need not disclose all my data (eg maybe for some use-case my bank does not need to have access to my payslip, just a proof signed by my employer that it exists)

rgejman 9y ago
On #1: I hear you and I think this is a totally valid approach for a society where we don't have little old ladies and gents who lose the piece of paper on which they've written their key and all their friends are old and they urgently need their secure key so that the doctor can access their health records. Or the kid who comes into the hospital in a coma and you can't get their secure key. Or for the recent immigrant family with no friends and their house burns down with all their secure keys inside. Or for the gay kid who gets kicked out of his house without taking his key and the people that blockchain "trusts" are his parents who just threatened to kill him if he comes home. The "use case" here is people's lives. People's lives are messy. Blockchain doesn't solve that mess, it pretty much just makes it worse. We should focus on using blockchain to solve "neater" problems like who owns what and who is contractually obligated to do what, etc. Those problems don't have edge cases that involve a parent who loses their memory or a kid who gets thrown out of his house.