bləʊk ʧeɪn Noun: any technology which attracts clueless men User Stories are great! A simplified snippet to help you understand the problem you're facing. There are, of course, a vanishingly small number of genuine use-cases for the Blockchain. So cryptobores have to resort to ever more baroque explanations to sell their wares. I recently stumbled on this absolute gem of a user story, and feel …
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One of the problems with the BlockChain goldrush is that it attracts a lot of people who don't necessarily have the required technical skill to safely run a service. This in turn reduces trust in the ecosystem. I'd like to discuss ArtChain.info - "Certifying Art Using the Bitcoin Blockchain" - and the some of the security issues I found there. XSS This is one of those simple bugs which every…
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Yesterday at the CogX conference, I sat in a room listening to companies pitch their blockchain based startups. Because I hate myself. One in particular caught my attention. On the surface it seems to solve an important economic problem - art forgery and provenance. By putting your artwork on the "BitCoin Blockchain", Verisart will ✨hand wavy magic✨ increase the trust in art dealers and reduce f…
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In most civilised countries, there is a central authority which inspects restaurants for hygiene and safety. Their job is, broadly, to stop people getting poisoned, falling sick, or dying. That's a pretty good feature of civilisation, I'd say. We think that most restaurant owners are probably good people - but it seems sensible to have someone check that they're not dropping rat shit in our…
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Every time someone mentions BlockChain, I have to down my drink. Those are the rules. You see, most uses of Distributed Ledger are really just a way to get people interested in cryptographic signing. There's lots of money and attention flowing to projects which have no need to publish to an energy-inefficient global database. They would be better suited to public-key cryptography. Let me give…
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I went to an event a few weeks ago where some leading BlockChain organisations were showing off the power of Distributed Ledgers and how they will transform society. Not one of them mentioned users. There was talk of investors, stakeholders, corporations, smart-contract-backed entities. But no users. No real people who have to interact with their services. That's par for the course at this…
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