Re: Blockchain Technologies Feature Analysis

On 8 October 2016 at 02:49, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> This is a follow up from the Blockchain CG face-to-face meeting at W3C
> TPAC. At the meeting, I noted that we had performed some security,
> privacy, and performance analysis of various Blockchain technologies. We
> have just gotten clearance from the Department of Homeland Security to
> release this analysis (attached).
>
> We analyzed Bitcoin, Ethereum, Stellar, IPFS, Blockstack, and Hashgraph.
> The most interesting portions of the report are the "Security Principles
> Summary Chart" and the "Performance Principles Summary Chart".
>
> This analysis helped us decompose the blockchain technologies analyzed
> into modular components, such as consensus algorithms, data structures,
> APIs, and other "standardizable bits". Those bits helped us design the
> Flex Ledger spec (which we'll be updating later this month):
>
> https://web-payments.github.io/flex-ledger/
>
> We may want to expand the analysis tables in this group and use them to
> break down other blockchain technologies and the strategies that they
> use to achieve security and performance principles like integrity,
> confidentiality, information availability, etc.
>

Excellent work!

Are the terms in this attachment a basis for a vocabulary?

I'm very reluctant to criticize the work in any way, because I am basically
in awe of it.

But I think different users will have different takes on which types of
URIs to use, which I think is under the flexibility of the spec, but not
always conferred in the examples.

e.g. urn:sha256:7fa3b9eaa8d92d2b87abf83d88a92ff23

Could this be an ni: URI?

Similarly there seems to be a wide mixing of HTTP document URIs, HTTP data
(fragid) URIs (lack thereof!), and content addressable strings.   e.g.
design choice here will have different levels of protocol coupling, and
decentralization features.  Turns out that decentralization can be a make
or break in such initiatives, for example pay pal originally started out (i
am told) wanting to create a decentralized currency.  But design decisions
(being tied to a central website) forced them to become a bank.  Bitcoin
OTOH by having protocol agnostic identifiers was able to become a digital
currency.

I think programmers building systems with this spec are going to have to
have to do a lot of trial and error (as I have been for a few years) or
somehow get some insights into the trade offs on using different URIs in
each part of the data structures.

Hopefully over time this will become more apparent, and feed back into the
specs, or complimentary material.

In any case, amazing work, what's next steps for this?


>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: Rebalancing How the Web is Built
> http://manu.sporny.org/2016/rebalancing/
>