Blockchain

Full Title or Meme

Block Chain will solve all problems, provided you have the energy of a small sun available to power it.

Context

The technology for Block Chain itself has been around for at least 20 years. These simple chain allowed non-revocable commitments by

Simple Chains

Block chains were first commercialized by Bellcore

Proof of Work

• The first successful block chain with distributed ledger was created by the pseudonymous
• Mark Russinovich did an interesting calculation that showed that this pow scheme would

Problems

• The current problem that many architects are fixated on solving relate to the concentration of user information in a small number of very large companies.
• There are some efforts to reduce the power consumption. If those work, it looks like the solution will just be some other trust framework, but with a different name. For example the proposal of Hardjono et al. goes to a resilient system like the internet, which is, of necessity, single rooted even though nearly all components can work independantly for a time, just as the internet itself functions today.

Solutions

• Proof-of-Stake solutions use a random selection process, but maintain the value on the chain as the incentive for the selected updater to continue the chain.
• Pure Proof-of-Stake block chain systems. Also has some good comparisons against other schemes.
• ALGORAND the block chain for business contains a good collection of block chain papers.