On 11/13/24 10:45 PM, Seth David Schoen wrote:
Matt Corallo writes:
I see where you're going - blockchains are an audit log (eg Certificate
Transparency) and cryptocurrencies generally use something expensive to
perform anti-sybil to gate appending to the audit log, but allowing the
largest ISPs to randomly assign or re-assign resources doesn't solve the
problem, it only makes it worse (and we can't do the thing cryptocurrencies
do where resource holders have keys which are required to move the
resources, because its legitimate for a RIR to reclaim resources for
non-payment).
Having a cryptographic audit log of RPKI changes (published by the RIRs,
presumably) isn't the worst idea in the world, but it doesn't really buy us
a lot so its just kinda added complexity.
There are some tools out there either directly using or inspired by
Certificate Transparency that facilitate transparency logging of other
kinds of events. It might be interesting to put RPKI events into one
of those.
The big difference between blockchains and systems like CT is that the
latter do have single points of failure (an operator can shut down the
log completely, or break it in other ways), or at least relatively
small numbers of organizations that together have this power. But
participants in the system who cheat will generally get caught doing so
(that is, they'll leave records showing that they cheated).
A blockchain doesn't have the single point of failure, because new parties
can always come in and start mining on it even if previous miners cheat
or stop. (Like in real life, the government of China apparently somewhat
abruptly told the huge community of mining companies there to stop
mining Bitcoin, and miners elsewhere seamlessly picked up the slack.)
But a blockchain may have extremely high overhead in order to achieve
that property, whereas a system like CT doesn't.
We might say that a blockchain is tamper-proof (if its economic
assumptions hold!) while CT is more tamper-evident. CT logs can and
do fail
Eh, semantics. Many people (including myself!) refer to CT as a blockchain. What you're referring
to, where there are many entities collaboratively advancing a blockchain, I'd call a cryptocurrency :).
In any case, my point in the prior email was that a non-decentralized blockchain is probably the
only relevant design in this space, as there is a natural operator already, so there's no need for
any of the (attempts at) decentralized approaches.
Matt
