[Cryptography] Is ASN.1 still the thing?

[James A. Donald]

On 11/16/2017 2:47 AM, Nico Williams wrote:
> I don't know of any cases where one does this, but I can imagine one:
> replicating a logical stream of operations on a Merkle hash tree DB,
> with a hash/MAC/signature of the final Merkle hash tree root.  The
> logical stream being a compression of the block-level stream, this is
> worthwhile just on account of that when the goal is to replicate the
> same Merkle hash tree on the recipient side.  (Of course, one should
> also integrity-protect the logical stream in this case.)  This would,
> indeed, be a legitimate application of canonical encodings.
> 
> (I can't think of any such DBs or filesystems.  And in a distributed,
> highly concurrent DB/FS world, a single Merkle hash tree root is
> basically unobtainium. 

Append only file systems, in particular cryptocash, depend on such hash 
tree roots.

Decentralized append only file systems have several use cases, one being 
crypto cash, and one being squaring Zooko's triangle.  Namecoin, of 
course is a fork of bitcoin intended to apply the technology to square 
zooko's triangle.

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