3 ms·
You keep saying that there are many alternatives, but I don't know what you mean. I'd like to outline a scenario and you can tell me which technology you think
by __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
You keep saying that there are many alternatives, but I don't know what you mean. I'd like to outline a scenario and you can tell me which technology you think would scratch the itch:
Suppose you're a journalist in a place with an oppressive government. You have information about government behavior that you expect will cause protests. You're not an activist though, so you don't want to actually plan those protests.
Suppose I'm an activist in the same country--I'll plan the protest--but we don't know each other. We've got a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend... kind of relationship.
Ideally you could post the information somewhere, and then our mutual friends could post annotations which validate it. They'd be attaching "I was there and I saw this happen" kind of information. I would then see this information because I explicitly/transitively trust people who have validated it. The government can inject disinformation about it, but it just gets ignored unless they manage to get us to explicitly trust their agents about this kind of thing (presumably this will be prohibitively expensive).
The government will find us and hurt us if they catch three or four of us coordinating in this way. But if there are thousands of us, it will be a different story. So we need to collect a critical mass of validations, and we need to plan the protest, and we need to do it in a way that the government can't prevent and which doesn't betray our actual identities to the government--at least not until we all show up at the protest site.
I'm working on this app, by the way. I intend to have pluggable backends so it won't be coupled to a specific blockchain--you could use it over ssh for instance, or a thumb drive, or via a shared S3 bucket--but it's the blockchain backends that I expect to be most useful in situations with many stakeholders and truly aggresive adversaries because it's not realistic to expect users to maintain the system of file transfers necessary to ensure that the annotations dataset converges in a way that gets the message and its validations from journalist to activist, or from activist to other activist.
Sneakernet / file transfer will be the first backend that I support. What should I support second?
What is tamper-resistant enough that the government can't remove the data, lacks dependency on a naming system which can be tampered with to hide the data, and is also public enough that all parties can access the data and know that the version they're accessing is the real one, if not a public blockchain?
Granted, there may be solutions that are not technically a blockchain. I'm curious about Kademlia DHT's, for instance. I wonder if SSB can be used here. But so far as I can tell, all serious contenders are, if not blockchains, blockchain-like.