Comment by rbanffy
4 years ago
If the ledger is not public, why would I trust it? If someone else claims they are you, how would I differentiate the conflicting claims?
4 years ago
If the ledger is not public, why would I trust it? If someone else claims they are you, how would I differentiate the conflicting claims?
Keys are identities. Someone claiming to be you doesn't matter. Always defer to keys.
A non public ledger would be something agreed upon by participants only. So you and I and 5 other people for example could run some type of organization using some private way to keep track of state. You choose to trust it, if you don't, then don't use it.
If it doesn’t need a public ledger, why do you need a blockchain in the first place?
It doesn't have to be a blockchain. All these people selling "blockchain" are selling hype, the only reason you need a blockchain is if you're in an adversarial, permissionless environment and need consensus on state, and possibly need a record of historical state.
In a private system, you just need consensus among participants, potentially in an adversarial environment, but decidedly not a permissionless environment. As long as state can be kept, depending on the constraints of the system any sort of consensus and canonical state keeping mechanism would work. Could be a blockchain or something resembling one, could just be a document and it's hash kept by all participants and updated when the participants agree to a change. How complex you make consensus in a permissioned system depends on the goals and constraints of the system.
Messages are signed by cryptographic signatures so nobody can claim to be you.
This is how JWTs and many other protocols ensure message authenticity.
> nobody can claim to be you.
Nobody can claim to have your private key, but they can sure as hell claim to be you.
We won't know who the real numtel ever is without some real-world proof and verification. This is where a lot of this crypto-based stuff starts to crumble: sure the mathematics of the cryptography works well on chain, but there is a very limited set of things that exist 100% purely on the blockchain - as soon as you need to go off of the blockchain for anything (e.g. proving human identity, proving ownership of a physical asset like a house etc) then you're back to the same old problems we've always had of having to prove identity/ownership/whatever, and you cant use a cryptographic hash to prove that I own the apple I am eating right now ... perhaps you can prove that I own an apple, but can you prove I own this apple?
Nobody can claim they own the key you claim you owned, but, unless you have a person-to-key map somewhere, my claim I'm you is as good as yours.