Re: Blockchains and the Web of Things?

On 8/31/16 2:08 AM, Drasko DRASKOVIC wrote:
> Hi Peter,
> Thanks a lot for joying the discussion. You are really well positioned
> to give us the clarifications on the topic ;).
>
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 10:29 PM, Peter Saint-Andre - Filament
> <peter@filament.com> wrote:
>
>> There is no native blockchain support in telehash itself. At Filament we use
>> telehash for all of our communications (whether over radio or over IP), but
>> we don't need blockchain for that. It's true that we've explored using
>> blockchain for alternative resolution (basically replacing the 13 root DNS
>> servers with a blockchain for resolving certain names), but for small
>> networks or private communities you can simply discover your neighbors and
>> communicate with them based on hashnames.
>
> I guess you have a predefined list of hashnames. Is it possible to
> dynamically add/remove participants? How do you handle discovery?

Right now (for pilot projects), we configure each device/hashname into a 
predefined community. Obviously that won't scale, which is why 
eventually we'll use something like blockname or blockstack.

>> The DHT aspects of telehash got removed before v3. Something like that still
>> seems useful in certain situations, but it's not a feature that the little
>> telehash community has focused on in the last 12+ months.
>
> Would it be fair to conclude that Telehash does *not** use blockchain
> and does **not** use any form of DHT?

That's correct. At this point telehash is purely a transport-agnostic 
protocol for end-to-end encrypted communication. (Well, there's also the 
TMesh stuff for self-forming networks, but that's kind of off to the 
side a bit.)

The DHT aspect enabled you to discover endpoints to communicate with, 
but because of separation of concerns that's better covered by something 
outside telehash (which could be a DHT, something like blockstack, or 
any number of other discovery mechanisms).

The blockchain aspects of IoT systems come in when you want to do things 
like micropayments (at Filament we've been working on something called 
blocklet, which as mentioned is a JWT-based approach that acts as a 
micropayment channel) or when you want data gathered from IoT devices to 
go into a blockchain ledger because that's essentially a 
cryptographically strong time-series database.

Or so it seems to me. :-)

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://filament.com/

Received on Wednesday, 31 August 2016 14:28:00 UTC