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Is there any proof that a competently run system can not be as secure as a blockchain? > You can't just bribe your way to its DBA Instead you bribe the person

Is there any proof that a competently run system can not be as secure as a blockchain? > You can't just bribe your way to its DBA Instead you bribe the person that has the court's keys. Or whoever that declares what keys are "special" and granted the special permissions.

fastball 5y ago
Again, the benefit is not that the system is impossible to exploit in some way, the main benefit is that these actions are all recorded transparently, so you can have a complete picture of what exactly happened. That seems better than a database which at a fundamental level cannot have immutable guarantees.
- vel0city 5y ago
  In at least many places in the US land ownership is transparent. If you know a parcel of land you can search the county records office's website and find out who owns it. It doesn't take a blockchain to make a dataset public.
- Arelius 5y ago
  You can have the advantages of a publicly verifiable blockchain without the hassle of distributed consensus if you have a trusted entity that can perform consensus. QLDB is a corporate owned example, no reason the government can't do the same thing.
didibus 5y ago
> Or whoever that declares what keys are "special" and granted the special permissions. Yes, that be the "network". Which is a quorum of all nodes running the code base. In most cryptocurrencies, everyone who has a computer can become a "node". So, in an ideal scenario, each person has a computer running a node of the network. Thus "whoever declares" would be a vote amongst everyone. They vote by choosing what version of the code to run. The code tells you what "keys" are special. That's the idea behind decentralization. There's no longer just one person that chooses, instead its got to be a multitude of people all agreeing. The nice thing here too is that you could see the court's key owner was bribed in the ledger itself.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  So nodes elect other nodes to have power to decide the rules for the shared community. Those nodes will probably need additional nodes to handle the computation needed so they will elect certain other nodes to act on their behalf. Now replace nodes with people. Does this not sound exactly like modern democracies but expressed in terms that are tech friendly? What is the actual difference? What is it solving?
  - didibus 5y ago
    It's like snail mail Vs email. Same thing, but yet not the same, one allows you to run things using computers, the other doesn't. Most of software is simply finding ways to model real life processes with computers so you can manage those with computers instead of whatever non-computer based approach was there before. The hope is that computers can make managing those processes more efficient and potentially allow for more optimizations. One such thing is scarcity, that has always been hard to model in a computer when things can be freely copied. Another challenge was double spend, making sure that something is transfered without copying or duplication, it's a challenge to model things with computers that needs this property. Another challenge is trust in a system involving parties that don't trust each other. All these have always been difficult to model, now we have a technology that could model these, so the question is are there use cases that being able to do this now opens up to digitize and by doing so can it reduce the cost to manage the process and increase its scale and efficiency, lowers its defects, etc.

fastball 5y ago

Again, the benefit is not that the system is impossible to exploit in some way, the main benefit is that these actions are all recorded transparently, so you can have a complete picture of what exactly happened. That seems better than a database which at a fundamental level cannot have immutable guarantees.

vel0city 5y ago
In at least many places in the US land ownership is transparent. If you know a parcel of land you can search the county records office's website and find out who owns it. It doesn't take a blockchain to make a dataset public.
Arelius 5y ago
You can have the advantages of a publicly verifiable blockchain without the hassle of distributed consensus if you have a trusted entity that can perform consensus. QLDB is a corporate owned example, no reason the government can't do the same thing.

didibus 5y ago

> Or whoever that declares what keys are "special" and granted the special permissions. Yes, that be the "network". Which is a quorum of all nodes running the code base. In most cryptocurrencies, everyone who has a computer can become a "node". So, in an ideal scenario, each person has a computer running a node of the network. Thus "whoever declares" would be a vote amongst everyone. They vote by choosing what version of the code to run. The code tells you what "keys" are special. That's the idea behind decentralization. There's no longer just one person that chooses, instead its got to be a multitude of people all agreeing. The nice thing here too is that you could see the court's key owner was bribed in the ledger itself.

SahAssar 5y ago
So nodes elect other nodes to have power to decide the rules for the shared community. Those nodes will probably need additional nodes to handle the computation needed so they will elect certain other nodes to act on their behalf. Now replace nodes with people. Does this not sound exactly like modern democracies but expressed in terms that are tech friendly? What is the actual difference? What is it solving?
- didibus 5y ago
  It's like snail mail Vs email. Same thing, but yet not the same, one allows you to run things using computers, the other doesn't. Most of software is simply finding ways to model real life processes with computers so you can manage those with computers instead of whatever non-computer based approach was there before. The hope is that computers can make managing those processes more efficient and potentially allow for more optimizations. One such thing is scarcity, that has always been hard to model in a computer when things can be freely copied. Another challenge was double spend, making sure that something is transfered without copying or duplication, it's a challenge to model things with computers that needs this property. Another challenge is trust in a system involving parties that don't trust each other. All these have always been difficult to model, now we have a technology that could model these, so the question is are there use cases that being able to do this now opens up to digitize and by doing so can it reduce the cost to manage the process and increase its scale and efficiency, lowers its defects, etc.