Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by routerman 3061 days ago
As for your second question, it depends on what kind of platform the diamond industry builds on. If the diamonds are tracked using a smart contract on the public Ethereum chain, there may be special functions in the contract that allow certain entities to edit data in the contract. The problem with this is that consumers have to trust that the companies use this write access honestly. A partial solution might be to only allow certain data in the smart contract to be edited IF at least X number of companies in the consortium agrees to it. Still requires trust, but less of it.

If they're building their own blockchain to track the diamonds, and consensus is simply maintained by a small group of entities in the industry, then it's trivial to edit the data. But of course, if this is the case, then it begs the question of why a blockchain is even needed. Just use a shared database.

1 comments

>But of course, if this is the case, then it begs the >question of why a blockchain is even needed. Just use a >shared database.

Two issues regarding your second observation.

1) A change that requires a consensus among some non-tiny group of participants is not trivial thing to accomplish in practice. You will have to wait before every one from a group of N (say, 20) representatives will agree with your change.

2) Why a blockchain is needed? Because no other "shared database" provides the same trust model which is "everyone trusts no one". Every other database "security model" in existence assumes that every admin trusts every other admin. If it is not so, then things quickly become complicated and impractical.

Good points. From a consumer's perspective, I do hope that they would eventually choose to build on a public blockchain. The fact that consensus is provided by miners worldwide (or stakers in PoS chains) instead of a couple of diamond-related companies means that there is one less thing for me trust.