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You can replace the term “distributed ledgers” with “shared Excel sheets” in about 90 percent of talk about blockchain and finance. – Tracy Alloway363
The data would still be entered by local humans under the auspices of “trusted” local NGOs who pay monthly for the software. The assumption seems to be that commercial operations engaging in illegal overfishing or human rights abuses will carefully document their illegal activities on the blockchain and not just lie, or bribe the “neutral” inspectors or adjudicators – as happens in current supply chain monitoring.
Do they have present-day working blockchains that do every one of the things they’ve claimed you can get from blockchains?
Will the system scale to the size of your data? How?
How do you deal with human error in t...
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now, how are they assuring the security of the chain
If it’s for working with people you can already trust to that degree, why are you bothering with a blockchain?
What does this get you that a centralised database can’t? How, precisely?
If you have enough hashpower on a Proof of Work chain, from 25% up you can conduct an attack on the system, as described in the Bitcoin mining chapter. In Bitcoin, this attacks the transaction ledger; in a business blockchain, the integrity of the information.
But even then, a “permissioned” blockchain is otherwise known as “the most inefficient possible centrally-administered database cluster.” All
simply a new type of replication algorithm for a database cluster. That’s it. Vitalik Buterin: Correct. Plus Merkle trees. The Merkle trees are actually important. Andrey Zamovskiy: Merkle trees have not been invented with bitcoin, they’ve just got an adoption.
Real businesses don’t in fact want the world seeing all their transactions, which is where the idea of private blockchains comes from.
Total sales of “Tiny Human” through Ujo Music on the Ethereum blockchain were … $133.20. Not $133,200 – but one hundred and thirty-three dollars and twenty cents: 222 sales at 60 cents each.
It didn’t help that buying it was almost impossible even for a blockchain advocate,412 let alone an ordinary human music fan. You went to the page, clicked “Download”, followed the instructions to create an Ethereum wallet, and went off to a Bitcoin exchange to buy bitcoins then exchange those for ether, as ETH wasn’t widely traded directly to dollars at the time.
No single blockchain can possibly scale to the whole music industry. There were an estimated 35 million songs in iTunes in 2013417; Spotify played a billion streams a day by mid-2015.418 If you use multiple blockchains, they will need reconciliation.
Apart from the metadata itself being huge, there’s the encoded details of all the hundred-page contracts.
And who will pay for the computing resources to execute all the smart contracts for each song played?
How is your blockchain kept secure against hostile attackers, e.g., someone who has the money to bring 51% of mining resources to bear against a Proof of Work secured chain?
How will you clean up the mess after an attacker uses bugs in your smart contract platform that they knew existed and you didn’t?
A cryptographic hash won’t prevent copying.
Who enters the data? How is the data verified? (The oracle problem.)
Credit and splits are often negotiated well after the wri...
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Which blockchain does all this run on,
the blockchain can’t do for you: DRM, which still can’t work. Storing large amounts of data, e.g., song files. Doing all this for free. You’ll need some way to pay for all the computing resources this will need,
Global Repertoire Database-type proposals fail when everyone realises they’re about to give the metadata maintainer a natural monopoly.
This is the poison pill: it runs on their token, and they control the software that reads it. If they get greedy — and really, when has anyone with power in the entertainment industry ever gotten greedy? — your “immutable” and “decentralised” ledger may turn out to be neither, as happened with The DAO.
