2 ms·
"we do not claim to support decentralisation" What a strange statement to make. I feel like such an apparent preference should be accompanied by a very clear
by dane-pgp 8y ago
"we do not claim to support decentralisation"
What a strange statement to make. I feel like such an apparent preference should be accompanied by a very clear explanation of the disadvantages of decentralisation (other than "it's hard and we don't know how to do it").
Ideally, a page discussing the relative merits of centralisation and decentralisation would start with a threat model too, so the reader knows what problems are attempting to be solved, and which are out of scope.
- ur-whale 8y agoYou need to take into account who is behind the paper. Ben Laurie has had a bug in his bonnet for all things blockchain since day one because he missed the boat. Since then he's been constantly bashing on Bitcoin and anything that doesn't have a central authority regulating it. Trillian is basically a Merkle-Tree remarketed as something new.
- dane-pgp 8y agoIf the people who downvoted me thought that I was being disparaging with my comment of "we don't know how to do it", let me clarify that this was not my intent. What I meant was that there are genuine difficulties in trying to decentralise trust, and I don't think anyone knows how to solve them all right now. For example, we could store transparency data in a blockchain, which might have independent economic incentives to keep it operating beyond the life span of any individual log provider (and without an individual log provider being able to rewrite history), but how does a piece of software check a value on a blockchain without receiving that piece of information from a trusted intermediary (or better a configurable list of mutually-independent semi-trusted intermediaries)?