Tech Thinks It Has a Fix for the Problems It Created: Blockchain

The health care industry should start using blockchain technology as a decentralized method of storing and selectively sharing medical records. As genomic information starts to be incorporated into medical records it will be critical to secure medical records beyond the pitiful level of security most hospitals and providers currently offer.

Faceblockchain? I can see it now. A Super Block that is automatically generated every time a new block is generated in a chain, where the block is a subset of a Super Block containing the newly generated block's data within without the victim knowing it. The Super Blocks look like regular blockchains and links to the next Super Block that contains the another blockchain. Each Super Block keeps a copy of his/her key and other pertinent data from each blockchain. The Super Block chain growing at the same rate as the blockchain with a purpose, is now compromised and available for the owner of the Super Block to cash in all the keys collected - even those the user forgot. It is a matter of time until a flaw is found and the weakest link in a blockchain will see the rest of the blocks tumbling down.

What we're learning is that technology cannot solve every problem there is and that it creates new problems. But we know that. There are ways that things could be improved. We could stop posting pictures of our children on social media. We shouldn't be asked for our birthdays, our SSNs, our mother's maiden name to create any accounts online. If we apply for jobs online we shouldn't be required to create an account with the agency or the company advertising the job. In other words, we should not be asked to disclose personal information online that can be used to steal our identities. And until our ISPs and others can do a better job protecting our privacy and our data, we ought to refuse to do our banking, paying our bills, or ordering prescriptions online. Or, if that's not feasible, businesses should be held responsible for and heavily fined when they don't take the appropriate steps to protect our personal data.

So they make the world insecure and paranoid and reliant on tech, and now they happen to have just the tech that’ll lock everything down. Putting everything on the blockchain with not make us feel better. It will be to someone’s advantage, though.

Blockchain is quite suitable for many cross-enterprise transactions. Voting, however, is a stretch because what voters are demanding is personal transparency; i.e. the ability of the voter to verify that their vote is being properly counted. While blockchain may be a strong candidate for recording and transmitting votes, it may not be good at letting voters, who have no access to readable blockchain information, verify their vote. Voting is a social issue more so than a tech issue. In addition to the concern over hacking a voting system, voters are beginning to distrust authorities who are engaging in various voter suppression and gerrymandering schemes. One can foresee the day when voters demand a recount, or even a re-vote, with the voters themselves involved. It's a shame that our democracy has arrived at such a point, but until we cleanse our system of bad actors, foreign and domestic, trust is at a premium.

how is block chain more secure than a paper ledger?

If you put cheese in the better mouse trap the rats will always find a way to get in.

The IT industry is first and foremost a potent marketing machine with the sole objective of cycling you through successive generations of technology. The benefits of the next big thing are always over stated. Under stated are the costs of dealing with its inefficiencies and shortcomings which are used as opportunities to drive follow-on sales once a customer is hooked. Blockchain was designed as a tamper-proof distributed ledger with high resilience to the loss of individual nodes to support the Bitcoin Ponzi scheme. It is best suited for maintaining a record of data that is written once, never updated, never deleted, read infrequently and never restructured. It is not designed for high volume data storage or high volume transaction processing. It is computationally highly inefficient and does not provide guaranteed performance levels despite the enormous energy consumption of the underlying compute resources. In respect of security, it is designed to make it extremely difficult to fraudulently tamper with historical data and to obscure the personal identity of the owner of the data. The core security model does not provide owners of data with granular control of who can read which portions of their data. After all the early stage investors are tapped, the lunches and dinners are eaten and the ICO contributors are ripped off, blockchain may survive the hype-cycle and emerge from its likely deep trough of disillusionment. However the lemmings could all be wrong.

Fundamentally, the issue with this whole approach is that it doesn't break away from the tech industry's core problem: its preferred solution to every problem it creates is more of itself. The solution to transparency problems that stem from people not understanding the mechanisms and use of their data? Put it in a system that's even harder to understand and even more tech-y! There's no other industry in which we view this problem-solving paradigm as acceptable (the NRA tries with guns, and gets rightly mocked for it), and it's baffling to me that our polities have been so willing to let tech get away with it.

This article doesn't seem to understand blockchain technology. Blockchain is robust because the design is redundant. As mentioned, you would find it difficult to alter a well designed blockchain. The entire thing is basically an accounting ledger where each transaction lives in the cloud. This is why the immediate application is accounting. That doesn't mean the system is unhackable though. Indeed, the system is quite easily hacked. You just have to change how you think about "hacking." In the broadest sense, hacking simply means attacking the vulnerabilities of a system in order to create behavior other than intended by system design. Technically speaking, cutting the cafeteria line is a hack. Queuing in the food line is designed to assign priority to students based on order of arrival. You want to assign yourself a higher priority by cutting. If you cut, you've hacked the food line. That doesn't mean you won't get caught. There are probably better ways to get food. Ducking out of class early to an get earlier spot for instance. However, cutting at least attempts to hack the system. So back to blockchain. How would you hack a system reliant on private keys in order to maintain system design? Steal the private keys obviously. The brute force option for Bitcoin was actually a literal mugging. A robber in China made off with about $180,000 just this January. However, I can't imagine waiting long for more sophisticated, or violent, techniques to develop. Blockchain isn't safe.

As good as this sounds the advances of AI may well provide a way to compromise the Blockchain. There will always be people and/or governments who will seek ways to infiltrate Blockchain. Computers are both a blessing and problem as we learn on a daily basis.

Blockchain technology is not the same thing as mining for cryptocurrency. The algorithm for mining is modified by a difficulty factor to ensure that a specific number of blocks are solved per minute, that is, the more people that contribute to the calculations (hashrate), the harder they become. This is only necessary with a currency to maintain valuation, it wouldn't apply to a user database. Hence blockchain technology could be used to power a variety of applications with very little power consumption.

Today's solution is ALWAYS tomorrow's problem. Duh. Anyway, quantum will kill encryption and blockchain soon enough.

I’ve read a number of articles describing how blockchain works and confess I still don’t get the notion that this will make the internet as we know it obsolete. But ask me what my confidence level is that this technology will make all our personal data secure and immune to hacking and my answer will be around zero %.

Sell your Facebook shares and invest in cryptocurrencies like Substratum and others that are paving the way to the future. An investors dream confluence: the time to get out of the stock market before it makes a dramatic correcion coinciding with the Bitcoin dip that makes it the ideal time to get in to crypto.

There is a better solution to keeping your personal data out of the hands of social media giants: Do not sign up. People forget that someone does not give you something for nothing.

Blockchain is the antithesis of a perpetual motion machine where endless amounts of energy are expended performing virtually no work.

This does not explain how Dan gets paid. Alice has his bike and someone with mega computing power get a bunch of bitcoins.

When will these geniuses start concocting stuff that helps us, and not their corporate friends?

Given our collective propensity to use technology for the wanton dissemination of lies and propaganda, a decentralized system that makes it harder for "data" to be altered or hacked sounds like it will have no unintended consequences whatsoever. As an added benefit, we'll finally be able to find a use for all this extra energy that's been lying around. Why do I have the sense that these geniuses are asking us "Here, hold my beer?"

It sounds like a swap for the "devil you know vs the one you don't".

Current Blockchain payment systems use 35 terawatts of electric power per year doing nothing productive, more than any of 150 individual countries. In a world that needs to become more energy efficient, Blockchains place an enormous strain on our resources and climate. While there are potential technologies in development to reduce energy use by Blockchain transactions, none have yet put a dent in the current upward curve of energy wasting, earth warming electric power consumption by Blockchain systems. https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Blockchain is all the rage because everyone is sick & tired of their personal information being hacked such as in the Equifax debacle. They see that no one is doing anything to punish those companies who don’t protect customer data. Tired of companies making money off their personal information. It is a classic internet solution to an internet problem and I for one am all in. The move to blockchain will significantly improve data security which is why in 5 years it will be everywhere. Because it works.

A podcast called "Reply All" claimed it found someone who hacked someone else's Bitcoin account in 30 minutes. With minimal personal information. From the wifi on a transcontinental flight. That made me think the security promises are a little overstated.

"...in theory..." Those two little words should send a chill down the spines of anyone if such unproven and highly complex systems are employed for things like voting. Technology has produced some real world marvels and improved much of our lives, but it has frequently come at an unrealized cost, sometimes not fully realized until the damage is done. The current uproar over social media and privacy is only the latest example. We are often now offered technology seeking a use for itself, even for problems that don't really exist. Despite the "cool" factor, for example, do you really have a need to control the thermostat in your house from your phone, or have your refrigerator suggest shopping list items? All with the caveat that any such very minor actions become part of a monitored stream by potentially anyone. Toss in the burning yen for autonomous cars and another mess arises. So we are urged by these same people to vote and be assured that block chains will make it secure. Sorry, I love tech (in its place) as much as the next average person, but there is no way I would really have confidence in such a system. It may be far more clumsy to still have paper records of votes cast, but ultimately it doesn't depend on complex mathematical algorithms that may or may not (who can tell? certainly not you or me) be valid and protected from manipulation. We would be wise to proceed very cautiously.

How much power would ubiquitous blockchain use consume?