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(Your first link is broken.) My main problem with blockchain is the excessive energy consumption of PoW. I know there are PoS efforts, but they seem problemati

(Your first link is broken.) My main problem with blockchain is the excessive energy consumption of PoW. I know there are PoS efforts, but they seem problematical. I like the recent CertLedger paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1071.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1071.pdf

westurner 8y ago
My mistake. How ironic. Everything depends upon the red wheelbarrow. Here's that link without the trailing ": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19181362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19181362 > My main problem with blockchain is the excessive energy consumption of PoW. I know there are PoS efforts, but they seem problematical. One report said that 78% of Bitcoin energy usage is from renewable sources (many of which would otherwise be curtailed and otherwise unfunded due to flat-to-falling demand for electricity). But PoW really is expensive and hopefully the market will choose less energy-inefficient solutions from the existing and future blockchain solutions while keeping equal or better security assurances. >> Proof of Work (Bitcoin, ...), Proof of Stake (Ethereum Casper), Proof of Space, Proof of Research (GridCoin, CureCoin,) The spec should be: DDOS resiliant (without a SPOF), no one entity with control over API and/or database credentials and database backups and the clock, and immutable. Immutability really cannot be ensured with hashed records that incorporate the previous record's hash as a salt in a blocking centralized database because someone ultimately has root and the clock and all the backups and code vulnerable to e.g. [No]SQL injection; though distributed 'replication' and detection of record modification could be implemented. git push -f may be detected if it's on an already-replicated branch; but git depends upon local timestamps. google/trillian does Merkle trees in a centralized database (for Certificate Transparency). In quickly reading the git-signatures shell script sources, I wasn't certain whether the git-notes branch with the .gitsigners that are fetched from all n keyservers (with DNS) is also signed? I also like the "Table 1: Security comparison of Log Based Approaches to Certificate Management" in the CertLedger paper. Others are far more qualified to compare implementations.

westurner 8y ago

My mistake. How ironic. Everything depends upon the red wheelbarrow. Here's that link without the trailing ": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19181362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19181362 > My main problem with blockchain is the excessive energy consumption of PoW. I know there are PoS efforts, but they seem problematical. One report said that 78% of Bitcoin energy usage is from renewable sources (many of which would otherwise be curtailed and otherwise unfunded due to flat-to-falling demand for electricity). But PoW really is expensive and hopefully the market will choose less energy-inefficient solutions from the existing and future blockchain solutions while keeping equal or better security assurances. >> Proof of Work (Bitcoin, ...), Proof of Stake (Ethereum Casper), Proof of Space, Proof of Research (GridCoin, CureCoin,) The spec should be: DDOS resiliant (without a SPOF), no one entity with control over API and/or database credentials and database backups and the clock, and immutable. Immutability really cannot be ensured with hashed records that incorporate the previous record's hash as a salt in a blocking centralized database because someone ultimately has root and the clock and all the backups and code vulnerable to e.g. [No]SQL injection; though distributed 'replication' and detection of record modification could be implemented. git push -f may be detected if it's on an already-replicated branch; but git depends upon local timestamps. google/trillian does Merkle trees in a centralized database (for Certificate Transparency). In quickly reading the git-signatures shell script sources, I wasn't certain whether the git-notes branch with the .gitsigners that are fetched from all n keyservers (with DNS) is also signed? I also like the "Table 1: Security comparison of Log Based Approaches to Certificate Management" in the CertLedger paper. Others are far more qualified to compare implementations.