Re: blockchain and linked data questions

On 10 January 2016 at 10:30, Michael Williams <michael.williams35@gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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.
>

Thanks for sharing.  The privacy aspect is really nice, especially for, as
I alluded to earlier, use cases surrounding private block chains.

You can now do this using the plain old web, with standards such as Solid
(which is what I am using)

https://github.com/solid/solid-spec

One advantage of using the web over, say ethereum, is that it comes with a
turing complete scripting language (JavaScript) that already has ubiquitous
adoption.


>
> :)
>
> 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/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>