[Cryptography] A quicker block chain? ... Thunderella

[Howard Chu]

Tom Mitchell wrote:
> Block chain is vastly bigger than a crypto currency.
> It is evolving into a distributed ledger system and has potential
> in the secure (cryptographicly secure) foundation of supply
> chain management and even banking.
> 
> It does not need to obfuscate and hide transactions or the identity.
> However reliability and correctness does mater for business systems.

Those two requirements have nothing to do with blockchains though. Blockchains 
only make sense when multiple mutually untrusted parties must collaborate. 
That is not the case in typical "distributed ledger" scenarios. Also, a 
blockchain only works when there is a reward attached to the block mining 
activity, otherwise there's no incentive for the multiple parties to spend 
their resources maintaining the chain. Aside from application to 
cryptocurrency there's pretty much nothing that blockchain technology is 
suited for (and even currency is still ... questionable) that doesn't already 
have superior solutions using conventional databases.

-- 
   -- Howard Chu
   CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
   Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
   Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/