Privacy: At worst, our analog parents could be prevented from meeting each other. Our digital children are prevented from talking about particular subjects, once the conversation is already happening. This is a horrifying development.
When our digital children are posting a link to The Pirate Bay somewhere on Facebook, a small window sometimes pops up saying “you have posted a link with potentially harmful content. Please refrain from posting such links.”
Yes, even in private conversations. Especially in private conversations.
This may seem like a small thing, but it is downright egregious. Our digital children are not prevented from having a conversation, per se, but are monitored for bad topics that the regime doesn’t like being discussed, and are prevented from discussing those topics. This is far worse than preventing certain people from just meeting.
The analog equivalent would be if our parents were holding an analog phone conversation, and a menacing third voice popped into the conversation with a slow voice speaking just softly enough to be perceived as threatening: “You have mentioned a prohibited subject. Please refrain from discussing prohibited subjects in the future.”
Our parents would have been horrified if this happened — and rightly so!
But in the digital world of our children, the same phenomenon is instead cheered on by the same people who would abhor it if it happened in their world, to themselves.
In this case, of course, it is any and all links to The Pirate Bay that are considered forbidden topics, under the assumption — assumption! — that they lead to manufacturing of copies that would be found in breach of the copyright monopoly in a court of law.
When I first saw the Facebook window above telling me to not discuss forbidden subjects, I was trying to distribute political material I had created myself, and used The Pirate Bay to distribute. It happens to be a very efficient way to distribute large files, which is exactly why it is being used by a lot of people for that purpose (gee, who would have thought?), including people like myself who wanted to distribute large collections of political material.
There are private communications channels, but far too few use them, and the politicians at large (yes, this includes our analog parents) are still cheering on this development, because “terrorism” and other bogeymen.
Privacy remains your own responsibility.
(This is a post from , obtained via RSS at .)
We realized early on that to deliver our vision for we’d have to build from the ground up. Every blockchain must include a consensus implementation, and given how central consensus is, we began research in the early stages of building Interbit in late 2016.
Consensus, for those unfamiliar with the general concept, is how a blockchain keeps its entire network of nodes in sync: the state of the blockchain updates when (and only when) consensus is reached.
There is a particular consensus characteristic, known as Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT), that is usually required for most practical applications. In short, if your consensus algorithm is BFT, your overall distributed system—your blockchain—is protected from both benign faults (e.g. network problems) and malicious activity on individual nodes. For those curious about the history, the paper “” by Leslie Lamport (a luminary in this field) popularized the problem first identified by NASA research at SRI.
As we investigated our options for consensus, we immediately dismissed inventing our own consensus algorithm, for several reasons, but most importantly: creating your own algorithm is like creating your own language or cryptographic algorithms — difficult. In addition, you need substantiated mathematical proofs, and you inherently accept more risk in anything that is built upon a new technology, as opposed to something established and proven.
Interbit does not have a native token or cryptocurrency, so the most common types of consensus algorithms (e.g. Proof-of-Work) are not applicable. The blockchain within Interbit is permissioned, so the most appropriate class of algorithms are (Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) variants.
“Creating your own consensus algorithm is like creating your own language”
Amongst a small number PBFT variants, one caught our eye – Tendermint. Unfortunately the Tendermint implementation was not appropriate for Interbit for two big reasons:
It was written in the Go programming language, while Interbit is pure JavaScript;
The implementation does not only provide consensus – it is intertwined with other concerns of distributed computing, such as network and gossiping.
Despite the Tendermint implementation not being suitable, we found inspiration in the original consensus algorithm (), documented independently of the other features of Tendermint, in Ethan Buchman’s Master’s thesis. It is this algorithm that has guided our consensus implementation. It satisfies the criteria we were after:
BFT
Mathematically proven
Proven implementation available online
Designed for blockchain
Our own JavaScript implementation of that original algorithm will be included shortly after our first public milestone.
There will undoubtedly be confusion about our inspiration from Tendermint. It is important to be clear that our implementation of the algorithm implies no relationship, dependency, or coordination between our companies, products, or software.
We owe our thanks to, and have great respect for, Mr. Kwon and Mr. Buchman, as well as their contributions to the community at large.
The first public milestone of Interbit is approaching fast on April 23rd, when you can download the SDK and test out the platform for yourselves. Sign up on to be notified. In advance of that event you can expect to see more postings explaining the next generation of blockchain – Interbit.
Author: Brent Benton,
Brent is the Platform Team Lead for Interbit, our next-generation blockchain platform. Following over a decade at IBM, Brent is enjoying being nimble and responsive once more.
Author: Mark Barber,
Mark Barber, PhD is the Head of Product Enablement for Interbit. Mark has been with BTL through the development of Interbit and is passionate about learning, community building and helping Interbit help those it will benefit most: developers.
