blockchain

Mike Kerner MikeKerner at roadrunner.com
Tue Aug 16 16:44:32 EDT 2016


This isn't about connectivity.  This is about surviving a catastrophic
failure at a central authoritative data source, by eliminating the need for
a central data source.  Blockchains are not used to distribute data.
Blockchains are, in effect, streams of timestamped checksums.  Embedded in
them are all the other timestamped checksums for the chain.  Therefore,
blockchains enable you to determine who has the most current data (or, who
has the most recent copy of some piece of it).

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 10:20 AM, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com
> wrote:

> Mike Kerner wrote:
>
> > Richard, think Delta Airlines outage.
>
> If you hire IT staff that doesn't set up failover or practice disaster
> recovery, I'm not sure that's a technology problem. :)
>
> > Blockchains don't just give you distributed storage, they give you
> > distributed trust.  Being cheap, I turned dropbox, and google
> > spreadsheets, and Box, and a couple of other services into online
> > data repositories, i.e. crude DBMS's, because I can do it on the
> > cheap.  But what if one or all of those go down?  What if my pipe
> > goes down?
>
> I'm at the edge of completely ignorant about blockchains so forgive me if
> this question is naive, but if blockchains are a distributed system how can
> they counter loss of connectivity?
>
> > If I have my mobiles on the same network, and a blockchain, maybe I
> > don't even need a central server.  If I have a blockchain, maybe a
> > cell phone that is on my network can be communicating with the outside
> > world when the wifi or wired-only devices can't.
>
> Don't most carriers allow Internet data over cell networks these days? The
> connectivity method would seem independent of the distributed storage
> system, no?
>
> The security aspect is indeed interesting.  Looking at how banks are
> increasingly exploring blockchains for document storage is inspiring for
> many practical applications beyond Bitcoin.
>
> What libraries are you wrapping?
>
>
> --
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World Systems
>  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
>  ____________________________________________________________________
>  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com
>
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