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> Can you show me one of these blockchain-based mesh networks in production? How many users do they have? Why does it need to be in production? The technology
by lend000 8y ago
> Can you show me one of these blockchain-based mesh networks in production? How many users do they have?
Why does it need to be in production? The technology is 10 years old, and it has been widely known by researchers for less than half that time. Just trying to find any hole you can pick? This is by a respected researcher who has recently shifted his focus to blockchain with the potential it has for IoT and mesh networks: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324005919_SENATE_A_Permissionless_Byzantine_Consensus_Protocol_in_Wireless_Networks https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324005919_SENATE_A_...
> As for voting and trade records, how do you deal with the fact that developers can fork the chain and invalidate past transactions like they did with Bitcoin in 2010 and 2013, or like they did with Ethereum in 2016? Why do you trust the developers more than your own government? And if you live in an oppressive regime, what makes you think your government will allow your blockchain to be used for voting?
The credentials you tried showing off made it sound like you would have a good understanding of the various blockchain technologies in play... You should know that proof-of-stake and master nodes allow a semi-centralized network to be created where the transactions are still public and verifiable, but important parties (i.e. the government, in the case of some of the examples I provided) have a significantly stronger influence on the outcomes of the network. Sure, any developers can fork the blockchain or create invalid blocks, but why would you switch your software to use that chain?
> If your government wants transparency, why don't they simply expose a read-only API to their database?
They probably don't want transparency but that's a separate issue. Let's use the example of voting -- an election running on a public blockchain protocol with all of the votes can be verified and summed, and by knowing your private key you can see how your vote was counted without decrypting that vote to anyone else (even the government). With an API and a database, you could authenticate and get the value they stored for how you voted, but obviously it's a violation of privacy to see how everyone else voted so you can't verify the system as a whole. Most prominent example in this space: https://followmyvote.com/online-voting-technology/blockchain-technology/ https://followmyvote.com/online-voting-technology/blockchain...
These are pretty basic examples to be honest and you are allegedly quite involved in the space, so I assume you just don't want it to be true.
- kristjansson 8y agoThe hard problem with voting systems isn’t counting the votes, but insuring that each eligible person casts at most one vote. Blockchain based voting systems might help prevent the rare case of multiple voting, but AFACT, do nothing to protect an unscrupulous government from stuffing the ballot box with fabricated votes. Ultimately, like the other issues GP raised, the technology seems to do little to solve the underlying social problems.
- lend000 8y agoI am not sure how the popular implementations address this, but generally speaking you can add arbitrary additional plaintext to each transaction in the block, and contribute that extra data to the signature with the private key. For example, full name or social security number (not applicable in the US since socials are private info, but feasible in asymmetric key ID systems such as Estonia's. Which brings up another potential application of blockchain: identity verification and management).