If you prefer to have a immutable database that is anchored to a blockchain, rather then a permissioned blockchain, I suggest looking at the Politeia toolkit. Time stamping the sum content of any data repository makes it censorship resistant.
This article is assumes that attacking a blockchain would be just the classical 51% attack scenario of bitcoin. Innovation from coins such as Decred show an evolution in blockchain technology that makes a 51% attack exceedingly more challenging to pull off.
"Apples to apples, Decred is 20x more expensive to attack than Bitcoin"
https://blog.usejournal.com/apples-to-apples-decred-is-20x-m...
It would be more convincing, or at least easier to take this comment in good faith, if you were to provide some part of your understanding of the innovation rather than to simply name drop a token and a link to a blog.
The paper does mention "But, the use of “stakes” instead of computational work may open new possibilities for thwarting
attacks, e.g., confiscation of an attacker’s stake".
It looks like Decred doesn't use slashing, so I don't know if it's accurate to include the size of stake in the cost of an attack since the attacker would still have that stake afterwards; the price might go down but it might not be much if people say "that wasn't my money that was stolen; I didn't see anything".
Bitcoin demonstrated that is is possible to dis-intermediate the storage and transmission of value, an area that is the mainstay of the banking industry.
Ethereum allows for open experimentation, and has brought about the emergence of arbitrary tokens.
Decred has demonstrated that is it possible to dis-intermediate the process of political decision-making for a cryptocurrency.
zkc, zero knowledge communications, was released today. It is just the first release, and a minimal tool with minimal features, but its exactly the solid foundation I have been waiting for.
"zkc is a blending of what we consider to be the best parts of both of these projects, Signal and Pond"
"The UI is text-based and emulates the appearance of irssi, in order to keep UI-related complexity low and avoid large GUI toolkits as a dependency."
"intended to provide the highest level of communications security balanced with minimal complexity in its code, configuration and usage."
How does two factor authentication address they don't use end to end encryption, and instead store the entire plaintext history of every message you've ever sent or received?
"So they keep trying to re-inject points of control, and thus points of vulnerability, into blockchains, e.g. through 'permissioning'; but this nullifies their main benefits, which come from removing points of vulnerability."
It makes sense what Sa.... (cough) Szabo says in that article... If the big guys really want to build a true "Internet of Money/Assets" two basic things will be required:
1. A common standard
2. Global openness
Surely they can build their own walled garden, but I think they're missing the point with this. With a walled garden you're just taking 1/100000 of the HUGE pie, improving current financial processes but not coming up with new radical innovations. A simple payment/monetisation standard embedded in objects (IoT) would be an example of a bigger piece of pie.
IMO they should just push for an open standard and use private ledger contracts on top of Ethereum, but I doubt they'll go this way. Most likely they'll just fork and run with it.
What's the iot reference for? How does putting Bitcoin implementations into random pieces of plastic (like a "smart cup") figure into your analysis at all?
If you've been following the crypto 2.0 space you'll know that a lot of ideas have popped up for IoT and embedded smart contracts. For instance, washing machines or fridges that detect that are running low on X and automatically place an order for delivery. IBM and Samsung have been exploring this kind of IoT applications with Ethereum's blockchain [0].
A private blockchain (like the one the banking industry presumably would deploy) can do 1 of 1000000 possible applications for the technology, but a global and open blockchain could channel all under the same protocol (something like TCP/IP), maximising interoperation among player in several industries.
I'm just trying to reflect that these 9 big guys could be making a short-termed shortsightedness mistake trying to protect their business placing a fence. As Szabo said, it's the moment to be more open.
https://blog.decred.org/2017/10/25/Politeia/ https://github.com/decred/politeia