4 ms·

I'm not disagreeing with any of that. All I'm saying is that a chain of hashes is not a blockchain. Also, we do care what paypal’s certificate was in the past.

by Canada 7y ago

I'm not disagreeing with any of that. All I'm saying is that a chain of hashes is not a blockchain. Also, we do care what paypal’s certificate was in the past. That’s why we have CT to catch CAs that mess up. We just don’t need to use a blockchain for it to work.

jasode 7y ago
>All I'm saying is that a chain of hashes is not a blockchain. And to be clear, I wasn't claiming that "chain of hashes" was equivalent to a blockchain. (E.g. bitcoin-like blockchain.) Instead, I extracted one particular property of a blockchain -- the chain of dependent hashes -- to contrast your proposed broadcast solution. To add to the confusion, it turns out the authors may be implementing your non-Bitcoin suggestion anyway. (See further down in my comment.) >Also, we do care what paypal’s certificate was in the past. I understand the nitpick but I mean that web browsers don't care what the particular values were several years ago (especially anything before 2013 since CT didn't exist until then while SSL/TLS existed since 1995). They check existence in a CT log. >Less like Bitcoin, more like Certificate Transparency. It looks like the authors propose a architecture more similar to CT than Bitcoin anyway. Excerpt from their proposal: >We chose to give data storage control to the regulator, as opposed to distributing data storage to nodes across participants in the network like in Bitcoin applications. We preferred this design because the trial regulator is the only party that can and must be trusted, since this party is the one having final approval over success or rejection of the treatment. It is a central authority that cannot be eliminated. We feel implementing distributed storage to everyone in the network (such as that used for Bitcoin) does not fit this regulatory context well, and is also impractical as all parties would also have to locally store data pertinent to the clinical trial on their machines. I believe this means the remaining issue is that you disagree with the authors calling something "blockchain" that doesn't have a distributed consensus mechanism to prevent double spending.
- ska 7y ago
  relabeling everything "blockchain", especially things with lots of established use before the existence of blockchains doesn't seem to have an real value outside of marketing obfuscation, at least to me.
  - FreakLegion 7y ago
    Block chaining -- that specific wording, used in cryptography -- has been around for almost 50 years and is widely known. It's not relabeling and it's not going away.

by Canada 7y ago

jasode 7y ago

>All I'm saying is that a chain of hashes is not a blockchain. And to be clear, I wasn't claiming that "chain of hashes" was equivalent to a blockchain. (E.g. bitcoin-like blockchain.) Instead, I extracted one particular property of a blockchain -- the chain of dependent hashes -- to contrast your proposed broadcast solution. To add to the confusion, it turns out the authors may be implementing your non-Bitcoin suggestion anyway. (See further down in my comment.) >Also, we do care what paypal’s certificate was in the past. I understand the nitpick but I mean that web browsers don't care what the particular values were several years ago (especially anything before 2013 since CT didn't exist until then while SSL/TLS existed since 1995). They check existence in a CT log. >Less like Bitcoin, more like Certificate Transparency. It looks like the authors propose a architecture more similar to CT than Bitcoin anyway. Excerpt from their proposal: >We chose to give data storage control to the regulator, as opposed to distributing data storage to nodes across participants in the network like in Bitcoin applications. We preferred this design because the trial regulator is the only party that can and must be trusted, since this party is the one having final approval over success or rejection of the treatment. It is a central authority that cannot be eliminated. We feel implementing distributed storage to everyone in the network (such as that used for Bitcoin) does not fit this regulatory context well, and is also impractical as all parties would also have to locally store data pertinent to the clinical trial on their machines. I believe this means the remaining issue is that you disagree with the authors calling something "blockchain" that doesn't have a distributed consensus mechanism to prevent double spending.

ska 7y ago
relabeling everything "blockchain", especially things with lots of established use before the existence of blockchains doesn't seem to have an real value outside of marketing obfuscation, at least to me.
- FreakLegion 7y ago
  Block chaining -- that specific wording, used in cryptography -- has been around for almost 50 years and is widely known. It's not relabeling and it's not going away.