
Russian spy boasts the Internet belongs to the Americans, the blockchain is ours - rmason
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/29/technology/blockchain-iso-russian-spies.html
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donttrack
I think it’s okay. They can have “the blockchain”...

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blueprint
They're patenting it, you see.

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alistproducer2
If a public blockchain can belong to a single entity than it really isn't
satisfying the moat sacred responsibility of a blockchain: to be trustless.

The fact that the times ran with this story despite the headline meaning very
little just shows how hollow so much journalism is.

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Bluestrike2
If the article seems messy, it's because it's about political rumblings rather
than blockchain technology itself. Leaders are looking at it as a sort of
"mechanism of the future" that they need to get in on. Per a quote from
Gilbert Verdian, head of the British delegation at the ISO:

> To get behind it and back it now is going to put people at an advantage,
> either politically or economically.

That's pretty much politician catnip. "Yes, please. We'd like some of that."
And that's how the people being discussed in the article are looking at
"blockchain" (I'm using quotes intentionally here) rather than a technical-
oriented perspective. The article isn't about a blockchain implementation.
Think of the people in the article as similar to a _stereotype_ of investors
talking about the latest buzz-worth startup. They're excited about X, have
some ideas on what X could mean, but don't necessarily have a deep
understanding of X itself or how it's implemented. That's how some nation
states are looking at future blockchain possibilities. The quoted Russians are
basically saying "America won the internet, but we'll win the future (i.e.,
"the blockchain").

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cryptoz
Surely this is just political grandstanding and nothing more.

The statement makes so little sense that either it 1) makes clear the spy does
not understand the Internet, America, or Russia as the entities that they are
in the real world, or 2) he is merely trying to make Russia sound good.

The internet does not belong to the Americans. If anything, the way the
Russians have used the internet to subvert democracy and wage a new kind of
war, I would say that if the internet belonged to anyone at the moment it
belongs to the Russians! (using similar terminology as 'owned boxes' from the
old hacker/cracker/scripts cultures)

And second, there is not one blockchain. If he means the entire branch of
computer science and mathematics that makes up the workings of a blockchain,
he's obviously a madman anyway.

I'll go with assuming the statement is meaningless grandstanding meant to
achieve nothing but make Russia sound good to people who don't know anything
about the topics discussed.

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vbezhenar
What can US do to disrupt the Internet? Turn off root DNS servers, stop
issuing SSL certificates (let's encrypt is US entity and many other CA),
undelegate a lot of domains, mess with BGP, cut the backbones. I know that
many of those services are duplicated, but I think that US can wreak a huge
havoc onto Internet. And Russia can't really do anything of that scale. They
even struggle to ban Telegram, there's too much dependency on foreign
services.

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cryptoz
> And Russia can't really do anything of that scale.

I think they already have, though, and that is my point. I think Russia has
done something far more damaging to the internet (and by extension our
society) than anything you listed above. Everything you listed above are
technical issues that any major player could overcome.

Russia has created false realities on the internet, something far more
dangerous than rerouting or shutting down technical services.

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homero
Which one? Every citizen can have one too.

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adjkant
I'm really saddened that the NYT couldn't even understand what they were
covering here...

