blockchain and linked data questions

Hi all,

 I have started researching the blockchain in the last year, and coming
from the semantic web I have a few questions that perhaps folks here may
be able to help with.

As I understand the blockchain is a distributed database. Therefore it 
contains  records. What is stopping those records being in RDF, or being
interpreted as RDF? I don't mean to get hung up here too much on how things
are actually working, but also to consider if one could build an RDF 
( json-ld perhaps ) based blockchain.

Btw is there a readable description of what those records look like somewhere?
As folks are thinking of putting smart contracts in the blockchain, it 
seems to make sense to use a language that knows how to deal with global
namespaces. [1]

One could I suppose imagine each record having a URL. Suppose then one 
placed those all on a web site in different documents, one should then 
have linked data of these records. 

If one then wanted to distribute them one could put each record in some
distributed hashtable I suppose and use a uri for each of them, then
one would have a linked data based block-chain no? Perhaps that would solve
the problem of the size of the blockchain then.

As I understand currently the blockchain is about 50 GB large. So folks
like Ethereum don't actually put the data in the blockchain, it would grow
too fast and be too unwieldy. They tend to link to data. Of course it would
help to link to data in RDF. Then one would have self describing data, making
it easier to understand what was being referred to, and making it much
easier to create human interfaces [2].

Finally things are moving very fast in the Blockchain. Toni Arcieri wrote
an interesting blog post "The Death of Bitcoin". He points to quite a few
other algorithms that could replace the current ones. 

   https://tonyarcieri.com/the-death-of-bitcoin

Any thoughts on that?

Thanks,

    Henry Story
    http://co-operating.systems/


[1] I asked Gavin Wood, CTO of Ethereum, about this at the redecentralise conference in London last October, where he presented
    https://youtu.be/1uiwMPabR5o?t=2039
But he did not quite seem to understand the question, nor that well what semantics was
about. This is odd because the Ethereum global computer he describes contains data, and
if that data is not correctly name spaced then there will be naming conflicts.

[2] http://hi-project.org/

Received on Sunday, 10 January 2016 00:13:17 UTC