blockchain

[Richard Gaskin]

Jerry Daniels wrote:

 > On Aug 17, 2016, 5:12 PM -0500, Richard Gaskin wrote:
 >>
 >> What is the business benefit for this application to go P2P rather
 >> than client-server?
 >
 > Richard, cost savings, security, privacy. Costs are drastically
 > reduced without hosting and its (hidden) labor/maintenance. Just
 > think about the long record of exploitation of hosted SQL data.
 > Not in the models were discussing here.

I like the idea* of P2P for some applications, but with the explosion of 
cloud services the client-server model seems to have merit as well.

On the one hand, there are the risks of managing (hopefully redundant) 
server farms.  On the other hand there are the risks of having every 
client also be a server, but without a team of professionals hardening 
and monitoring it.

All systems are hackable.  Ideally prevention, monitoring, and recovery 
are budgeted for in the business plan with any architecture.

I believe there's a role for both client-server and P2P, and federated 
models as well.  Each has its own benefits and tradeoffs; like 
programming languages, there'll always be more because use cases where 
they can add value only grow and diversify.

Back to blockchains, from my reading it's becoming clear that the 
distributed trust is a compelling feature, along with the increased 
speed with which transaction ledgers can be conveyed faithfully.  Like 
the early days of railroads, networks outside of Bitcoin employ 
different standards, each with its own kinks to work out but worth the 
effort. Over time it seems likely they'll impact global quality of life 
as significantly as the invention of compound interest.

Lots to learn....


 > Richard, Mike...sorry for my butting in here. Feel free to ignore my
 > interruption.

Au contraire, mon ami.  Always good to have you around.



* I've been paranoid for years, and enjoying Mr. Robot has only made 
that worse. :)  For the last several years I've run my main laptop and 
workstation with no open ports (easy to do with Ubuntu since it ships 
that way; took some work to harden my Mac). This has meant that as 
eagerly as I used to visit openp2p.com and read the other things, these 
days P2P is an interesting set of ideas but not something I focus on; 
all collaboration systems here use only outbound connections.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com