Re: blockchain and linked data questions

to add to the mix, here's another way of doing scalable secure
decentralized "blockchains": https://github.com/ssbc/docs. my favorite
characteristic of this design versus the more popular blockchains (Bitcoin,
Bittorrent, Ethereum, etc) is that the network topology of SSB is based on
local (private) networks where only those you trust can talk to you, as
opposed to a global singleton network where anyone can talk to anyone.

and here's a working system you can use to communicate using these
"blockchains": https://github.com/ssbc/patchwork.

:)

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 1:22 PM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> 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/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>