[MatthewKernerMS]

Richard Gendal Brown has a great post on the difference between a distributed database and a distributed ledger: https://gendal.me/2016/11/08/on-distributed-databases-and-di...

The Coco team shares Richard's view that the distinguishing factor is where the trust boundary exists within the system. In the case of Coco, we assume a lack of trust among consortium participants, but we leverage the attestation and anti-tampering features of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) to establish trust between the enclaves: assuming that the TEEs themelves are trustworthy, the TEEs can provide cryptographic proof of the software and configuration running on each enclave. In other words, I don't trust you, but my enclave has decided it can trust your enclave based on mutual attestation exchange and mutual authentication. In other words, we've transitioned from a byzantine failure mode (adversary can replace the expected remote code with arbitrary code at will) to a crash failure mode (adversary can shut the remote enclave down at will, but not alter what runs on it).

Once there is trust between enclaves, Proof of Work seemed inefficient as a consensus mechanism, although it's certainly one choice that is available and that can be used with Coco (in this case Coco would provide governance and confidentiality, but scalability and latency would be limited by PoW). Instead we can use any one of many distributed systems techniques such as Paxos or Raft to achieve consensus.

[ghthor]

This is an amazing development for enterprise as it removes the major risk of being cheated after the fact. This is largely why it's so difficult to establish trust between enterprises and had lead to this situation where the best trust is authoritarian centralization.

If we can lose this barrier to establish trust from a human one to a code audit that would be and outstanding achievement for our civilization.