Tag: blockchain

Bookmarked Forget erasure: why blockchain is really incompatible with GDPR by Elizabeth Renieris

Elizabeth Renieris’ Hackylawyer blog is a very read worthy blog I’ve recently come across and added to my feedreader. This article takes the core principles of the EU GDPR and compares them to how this might play out in blockchain usage, or not. A good reference list for conversations I am bound to end up in with clients.

The [post] is not meant as a commentary on the suitability of blockchain or GDPR, taking either in isolation. Rather, it is meant as an assessment of blockchain against the GDPR’s core principles. In this way, it is intended to provide a higher-level entry point into the conversation about the compatibility (or incompatibility) of blockchain and the GDPR, as well as a tool for reconsidering bold, an often unfounded, compliance claims.

Elizabeth Renieris

The number and frequency of 51% attacks on blockchains is increasing. Ethereum last month being the first of the top 20 cryptocoins to be hit. Other types of attacks mostly try to exploit general weaknesses in how exchanges operate, but this is fundamental to how blockchain is supposed to work. Combined with how blockchain projects don’t seem to deliver and are basically vaporware, we’ve definitely gone from the peak of inflated expectations to the trough of disillusion. Whether there will be a plateau of productivity remains an open question.

Posted on
by

Some links I thought worth reading the past few days

Posted on
by

This is an interesting article on how the drop in Bitcoin (BTC) versus US dollar rate may mean that a 51% attack on the bitcoin network is getting easier. According to the article 90% of mining capacity has gone offline, as it is no longer profitable at the current BTC price. It argues that if you buy just part of that now worthless (because single purpose) equipment cheap, you can effectively double the mining capacity of the network in a way that gives you more than 51% of the capacity (at least temporarily). Then that entity would be able to influence the ledger.

Of course the big Asian elephant in the room that is left unmentioned is that such a 51% attack is likely to have taken place already. As the article itself states ‘most miners’ were in China, where you can now get all that mining equipment cheap ‘by the pound’. As most mining was already running on a handful of Chinese superclusters, and given what we know about the data driven authoritarian model China geopolitically pursues, the conclusion is rather obvious: The 51% threshold had been reached in China already. So it’s not an emerging 51% attack risk, it’s just that there now may be a window of opportunity for somebody else to do it.

I still wonder in what instances blockchain is actually really useful, meaning that having a distributed database/ledger AND a transparant log of transactions AND a permanent immutable record are needed for such a use. But where that is the case, I am convinced it is, other than maybe for public records, not needed and even risky (see above) to have it run on a global network or platform. As then others, not invested in your actual use case, may have influence on the validity and stability of your use case.

It makes much more sense to me to have use case specific blockchains where the needed computing nodes are distributed across the network of people invested in that specific use case. For instance I can easily imagine a local currency or exchange trading system (LETS), to use blockchain. But only if it is run by the members of that LETS for the members of that LETS. Meaning a small computing node attached to your home router as part of your membership contribution.

Technology needs to be ‘smaller’ than us, run and controlled by the socially cohesive group that uses it for some specific purpose, otherwise it more likely undermines agency than provides agency.

Posted on
by

Some links I thought worth reading the past few days

Posted on
by

Some links I thought worth reading the past few days

  • On how blockchain attempts to create fake scarcity in the digital realm. And why banks etc therefore are all over it: On scarcity and the blockchain by Jaap-Henk Hoepman
  • Doc Searl’s has consistently good blogposts about the adtech business, and how it is detrimental to publishers and citizens alike. In this blogpost he sees hope for publishing. His lists on adverts and ad tech I think should be on all our minds: Is this a turning point for publishing?
  • Doc Searl’s wrote this one in 2017: How to plug the publishing revenue drain – The Graph – Medium
  • In my information routines offline figures prominently, but it usually doesn’t in my tools. There is a movement to put offline front and center as design principle it turns out: Designing Offline-First Web Apps
  • Hoodie is a backendless tool for building webapps, with a offline first starting point: hood.ie intro
  • A Berlin based company putting offline first as foremost design principle: Neighbourhoodie – Offline First
  • And then there are Service Workers, about which Jeremy Keith has just published a book: Going Offline
  • Haven’t tested it yet, but this type of glue we need much more of, to reduce the cost of leaving silos, and to allow people to walk several walled gardens at the same time as a precursor to that: Granary