Re: Introducing Flex Ledger

On 3 June 2016 at 17:14, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:

> We're releasing some preliminary R&D work on generalized Web-based
> decentralized ledgers today. This is the first public announcement about
> the technology that we've made.
>
> Problem Statement: Current Blockchain solutions (aka decentralized
> ledgers) are fairly rigid, coupling many implementation details to the
> data model. This results in various hacks to shoe-horn data into the
> blockchain, side-chains, and a very high barrier to entry to when
> launching new decentralized ledgers.
>
> We claim that it would be useful to decouple:
>
> 1. the data model (what is stored)
> 2. the operational model (how you decide what is stored - e.g.
>    consensus/proof-of-work mechanisms), and
> 3. the access protocol (how you access/append to the ledger)
>
> The work we're publishing today is primarily about #1 above (the data
> model). We're loosely calling this technology "Flex Ledger", or "Flex"
> for short. It is incredibly rough and experimental, but we're releasing
> early and often in order to keep this community in the loop.
>
> By decoupling data, operations, and access, we hope that decentralized
> ledger technology becomes more modular and thus easier to configure and
> deploy for different use cases. This enables a world where ledgers are
> very modular, letting people independently choose the best type of data
> to store in the ledger, the best consensus algorithm, and various other
> configurable options based on specific use cases. There may be thousands
> of different types of ledgers, just as there are millions of different
> types of websites that exist today.
>
> If there are no significant objections from the Web Payments Community
> Group, we'd like to fold this set of Ledger specifications into the work
> we're doing here (transferring ownership of the documents from Digital
> Bazaar to the Web Payments Community Group).
>
> The introductory portion of the Flex Ledger specification may be useful
> to those that want to get an overview of decentralized ledger
> technologies in general:
>
> http://digitalbazaar.github.io/flex-ledger#introduction
>
> There is also a Linked Data Vocabulary that formally defines what can be
> placed into the data model:
>
> http://digitalbazaar.github.io/flex-ledger/vocabulary.html


Looking at :

      "source": "https://example.org/accounts/jane/7",
      "destination": "https://foo.com/accounts/bob/3",
      "remoteLedger": "https://foo.com/ledgers/blah/3445",
      "transfer": {
        "amount": "23.45",
        "currency": "USD"
      }


Having coded in this area Im super nervous about sending money to documents
(ie without a fragment ID).  In this case ... jane/7

I strongly suspect this is an anti pattern and perhaps should be considered
harmful.  Just consider, all possibly http headers (present and future)
that apply to this entity also apply to the entity you are transferring
money to.  Is this not an accident waiting to happen?


>
>
> These specifications, a part of the "Credentials on Public/Private
> Linked Ledgers" project, has been funded in part by the United States
> Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate.
> The content of these specifications do not necessarily reflect the
> position or the policy of the U.S. Government and no official
> endorsement should be inferred.
>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: The Web Browser API Incubation Anti-Pattern
> http://manu.sporny.org/2016/browser-api-incubation-antipattern/
>
>