Re: blockchain and linked data questions

On 10 January 2016 at 01:12, Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net> wrote:

> 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.
>

Nothing except it's less compact.  I did this already.


>
> 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?
>

I did the data modeling already.  Not the DHT tho.

https://w3id.org/cc

My current line of thinking is around private block chains (with a slight
twist) ... more soon!


>
> 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/
>
>
>
>