Great article! Any interesting intersections with blockchain that show any promise to help? I am only somewhat familiar with origintrail (decentralized knowledge graphs); "AI-powered Verifiable Web" -- seems interesting. It's going to be a wild future!
I think the Bitcoin blockchain is an expensive but reliable neutral timestamping server which will occasionally be used to prove the existence of extremely high value / sensitive information with or without revealing it. I'd be surprised if any other blockchain was especially worth it, and I'd be surprised if Bitcoin was worth paying for very often. For most use cases I think it will be faster/cheaper/easier/more flexible to use centralized authentication/witness services, possibly a federation of them. Timestamping data just isn't that difficult to do with a reasonably functional degree of trustworthiness.
People have a tendency to ascribe a higher subjective 'truth' value to data associated with a blockchain but the only thing blockchains are meaningfully defending is the formatting and the order of confirmation. Data on a blockchain isn't more trustworthy, it's just harder to delete. You're still ultimately trusting whatever authority originated/uploaded the data, so for most use cases there is no need to pay top dollar for a decentralized time stamp.
I like the idea that the era for “truth” being an objective, verifiable thing was actually an exception, not the rule.
Or at least I think it’s an interesting idea… I’m not sure I *like* it.
Agreed! It's fascinating ... but probably not ideal. 😬
Great article! Any interesting intersections with blockchain that show any promise to help? I am only somewhat familiar with origintrail (decentralized knowledge graphs); "AI-powered Verifiable Web" -- seems interesting. It's going to be a wild future!
I think the Bitcoin blockchain is an expensive but reliable neutral timestamping server which will occasionally be used to prove the existence of extremely high value / sensitive information with or without revealing it. I'd be surprised if any other blockchain was especially worth it, and I'd be surprised if Bitcoin was worth paying for very often. For most use cases I think it will be faster/cheaper/easier/more flexible to use centralized authentication/witness services, possibly a federation of them. Timestamping data just isn't that difficult to do with a reasonably functional degree of trustworthiness.
People have a tendency to ascribe a higher subjective 'truth' value to data associated with a blockchain but the only thing blockchains are meaningfully defending is the formatting and the order of confirmation. Data on a blockchain isn't more trustworthy, it's just harder to delete. You're still ultimately trusting whatever authority originated/uploaded the data, so for most use cases there is no need to pay top dollar for a decentralized time stamp.
I like the idea that the era for “truth” being an objective, verifiable thing was actually an exception, not the rule.
Or at least I think it’s an interesting idea… I’m not sure I *like* it.