
NIST: Blockchain Technology Overview [pdf] - infodocket
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2018/NIST.IR.8202.pdf
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meow_mix
I found the blockchain use case flow chart here to be excellent. pg 42

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andrewflnr
Haha, that's brutal. By which I mean brutally accurate. I would be happy to
show that to anyone considering a blockchain.

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darawk
You think conditions that satisfy that flow chart don't exist?

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BenoitP
In my opinion, very little _current_ business practices fall under a positive
answer to this:

"Are the entities with write access having a hard time deciding who should be
in control of the datastore"

Because by definition, if the business practice exists in the first place it
is because they already found a solution to collaborate.

I'm almost tempted to add a snarky: "for further information, please refer to
this article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law")

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darawk
I understand why you might think that that isn't an issue, but it absolutely
is. Think about stagnant systems that persist for seemingly incomprehensible
reasons. SWIFT payments, paper stock settlement, do you know how bond trading
works? Paper. Someone has to physically sign it over.

Do you know why these legacy methods persist? They persist not because the
people involved don't know there's a better way. They persist because _nobody
can agree on who should control the new way_.

This is _exactly_ the problem that blockchains solve. This point is subtle,
but it is extremely important, and it absolutely needs to be taken seriously.

I should point out, that Git solves exactly the same problem, by the way. You
don't want a centralized entity hosting your project? Great, use git. Git, by
the way, is a blockchain.

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dreamcompiler
Git is not a _secure_ blockchain. It's quite easy to rewrite history in git to
change the true order of events (after all, that's the whole purpose of
rebase). A true blockchain has to be protected by cryptographic signing
protocols; git is not.

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darawk
A) What is your point?

B) Git is perfectly secure if you don't accept pushes.

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dreamcompiler
My point is that it cannot solve the problems a blockchain can. You could not
build a digital currency on git.

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darawk
Cryptocurrencies are just git + proof of work. Git, on its own, is a
blockchain. Adding proof of work to a blockchain solves the timestamping
problem, which allows you to use that blockchain as a currency (i.e. prevent
double spends). Many times that property is useful (more than just in
currencies, e.g. trading stocks), but not always, and it is not an essential
property of a 'blockchain'.

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eksemplar
I think we should stop wasting public funds on blockchain and here is why.

Records are important in the public sector, but what’s more important is how
we handle changes. This is because changes to a record in one system, might
affect changes in a range of other systems, and what most governments are
building to handle this is advanced observer patterns, where a central
messaging bus keeps tracks of alterations and informs subscribers.

Like if you get sick with depression, a case worker will register this and a
range of things will happen where different departments and systems are
notified to build a case flow for your way back to work. Other systems will
ensure you get your welfare and so on.

Or if you trade property, a ton of systems needs to be notified about it.

Blockchain suck at this because they are extremely inefficient.

Now the records are important too, but today, bi temporal data is playing an
ever increasing part in the public sector.

What this does is keep every change on record. Allowing case workers to look
up something, and get a timeline representing every state of your record.

Blockchains are surprisingly bad at this as well. It keeps the records, but
trolling through them and finding the relevant ones is just incredibly bad
compared to traditional databases.

Decentralisation is probably never going to happen. Especially because the
public sector will never do a proof of work concept since the environmental
cost would be political suicide. If you’re doing a voting blockchain, then the
public sector will never relinquish control, and if you don’t do that, then
you might as well not use blockchain.

So I think you can actually go through the use case chart on page 53 of the
pdf and still find a lot of areas where you should say no.

I’m danish and I think half of our muniplacities as well as our government and
all of our banks (banking IT is extremely similar to public sector IT except
its narrow focus/range) have done proof-of-concepts on blockchain for the past
decade. No one has found a good use case that couldn’t have been run without
blockchain yet. I sometimes wonder how much money we’ve wasted trying to find
a usecase, and it’s a lot, and I can’t tell you why we’ve done that.

I mean, if only we’ve spend all those resources on something useful.

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fartcannon
Are there not more than one blockchain? Shouldn't it be blockchains?

"Blockchain(s) suck at this because they are extremely inefficient."

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eksemplar
Probably, English is my third language so I’m kind of bad at it. You should
see how it looks without the autocorrect. :p

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fartcannon
Incredible for a third language. Motivational, really.

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TheAceOfHearts
I haven't read this paper yet, but I'm a fan of many things published by NIST.
If you're a software engineer I'd suggest browsing their website [0]. They
have a lot of great high quality content freely available.

They run the US stations for (almost? not 100% sure) everything related to
time-keeping [1] [2].

In particular I've found many of their publications on identity management and
authN / authZ very helpful in helping me understand the needs of the
enterprise. They have some great primers on role-based access control [3] with
examples of some of the different kinds of edge-cases one runs into and how
they can be solved. It's far too common to read an explanation that just tells
you: you can do whatever you want! When you're getting started in a domain it
can be incredibly helpful to know how others solved the same problems.

Here's the publication link [4] on the NIST website. I was going to say that I
thought it'd be better to link there so people could read the abstract without
having to download the full PDF... But I just checked and the website and all
its resources weight in over 1MB while the PDF is around 0.77MB. The state
we're in is quite unfortunate; I remember their older website being quite nice
and fast.

Abstract:

Blockchains are tamper evident and tamper resistant digital ledgers
implemented in a distributed fashion (i.e., without a central repository) and
usually without a central authority (i.e., a bank, company, or government). At
their basic level, they enable a community of users to record transactions in
a shared ledger within that community, such that under normal operation of the
blockchain network no transaction can be changed once published. This document
provides a high-level technical overview of blockchain technology. It
discusses its application to cryptocurrency in depth, but also shows its
broader applications. The purpose is to help readers understand how blockchain
technology works, so that they can be applied to technology problems.

[0] [https://www.nist.gov/](https://www.nist.gov/)

[1] [https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-
se...](https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-services)

[2] [https://www.time.gov/aboutB.html](https://www.time.gov/aboutB.html)

[3] [https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/role-based-access-
control](https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/role-based-access-control)

[4] [https://www.nist.gov/publications/blockchain-technology-
over...](https://www.nist.gov/publications/blockchain-technology-overview)

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User23
NIST is wonderful, government at its best. Thank you for the links.

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zuttton
Great! I'm glad to see blockchain is actually being recognized by a part of
the U.S department of commerce. I think in the next few years we could see a
superior blockchain based currency dominant global markets.

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eksemplar
You should probably look at page 53 before you interpret this as praise.

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darawk
You should probably actually understand the flowchart before interpreting it
as criticism.

