I was present at this event yesterday:
http://digitalchamber.org/dcsummit.html. In attendance, among many others: Jeff Garzik, Vitalik Buterin, Sam Cole (KnC Miner), Stephen Pair (BitPay), Blythe Masters. People from FBI, FCC, Homeland Security; Citibank, Nasdaq, Deloitte, etc. Also Jamie Smith from BitFury (
@SysMan -- excellent to have you here).
Here is a short report of information that surfaced that seems most salient to me (but if interested feel free to ask questions and I will try to answer).
1. Private blockchains (permissioned ledgers if you wish) are here now. IBM is launching a massive initiative, to be marketed to their industry clients, with the purpose of helping them streamline business end to end. Database security not discussed. Masters' company (Digital Asset Holdings, focused on wholesale financial services), is building a ledger for the Australian stock exchange. Nasdaq developing their own. R3C is well on its way. Startups like Chain, Bloq, Blockstream are consulting and developing software for this space.
2. Perceived benefits of the above vs. using the bitcoin blockchain: (a) ability to directly digitize existing asset classes and put them on a shared ledger, without going through a network-issued currency; (b) privacy: some transactions not suitable to be encoded in a public chain, e.g. ones that would reveal sensitive info. to your competitors, similarly for contracts; (c) sense of risk/taboo involved in adopting private currency (d) legal and practical obstacles to settling trades of securities and similar assets on a public chain whose security is provided by unknown parties in many jurisdictions (miners).
3. Sam Cole of KnC said his company was already consulting with businesses on how to set up mining operations to secure these private blockchains. I asked privately for a bit of elaboration. Said he: Step 1: securing servers for an in-house, single institution blockchain (presumably against attacks by their own IT). Step 2: setting up mining rigs for a multi-institution permissioned ledger (like R3C). This involves schemes such as geotagging mining data so that participants can ensure each party's mining is done in-house and does not exceed pre-determined hashing limits, in order to prevent 51% attacks. I said this seems silly. He agreed, but said this is what businesses are prepared to do at this point with this tech. In the long run, he expects them to fall back on the open protocol (gave an analogy with SMTP, and how institutions attempted to create their own systems only to eventually return to the original standard). Right now he'll take the business.
4. Asked Garzik privately about blocksize limit. Said he: (a) limit will increase (b) but bitcoin blockchain, no matter how it scales, will not be able to hold all transactions in the world. So alternative chains will arise, some permissioned (this has already happened as per 1), some interoperable with bitcoin blockchain. (c) It is necessary to establish a bitcoin kernel (d) many forces at play right now trying to influence how this gets settled, Blockstream is one but equally powerful others are counterbalancing. (d) His conclusion: market will work things out.
PS.
@cypherdoc, I feel it is getting hard to read you with so many acronyms and abbreviations. Twitter is crimping your style.
