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- How complicated is setting up a Blockchain
- If the effort is too high then we may not haveresourcesto implement
- Do we have the resources?
- Take a look at https://hyperledger.org/projects/fabric - good students should be able to handle this - since it's an open source project, there should be a good resource for questions/support;
- Also see: https://www.ccn.com/google-cloud-launches-blockchain-toolkit-for-app-developers/
- The transition cost could be large:
- we would need to demonstrate how access to blockchain content is accomplished - clearly adding data to a blockchain is only half the model;
- Do all MAs have to participate,
- this is probably not practical since many MAs have little or no resources for this type of effort/transition.
- If only say Gzhu, Ubru and SLAC MAs participate, is this sufficient redundancy?
- On the otherhandmaybe we could provide a blockchain script as part of the pinger2.pl measurement script, so each MA would automatically save the data in the blockchaineach30 minutes.
- this is probably not practical since many MAs have little or no resources for this type of effort/transition.
- It might simplify the data deployment
- Tieing PingER to Blockchain could increase the interest and resources in the PingER project
- Blockchains are a hot topic today.
- Stanford has created a Blockchain Institute, see https://www.bitrates.com/news/p/stanford-has-announced-their-new-world-class-center-for-blockchain-research
- Many universities are pursuing Blockchain see https://www.accounting-degree.org/college-cryptocurrency-blockchain-courses/
- Get students interested and writing papers
- get access to MS andPhDstudents
- What is Saqib's situation (Saqib can you weigh in here):
- Duration at Gzhu: Post-doc finishes Feb 2019
- Access to students to work on blockchain for PingER: He does not have any students. However, he will try and find someone interested inblockchain.
- Interest in working on Items 1 or 2 (or both) above? He is interested in both items.
- How to transition from today's centralized on SLAC to a more distributed Blockchain implementation
- Will need to continue current PingER while new Blockchain implementation is being developed, made robust and complete
- Will need web interfaces to the data and new mechanisms
- What about the analysis, presentation?
- How long does it take to validate a transaction? This may be important if each transaction contains the results from a set of 10xnByte pings, and each transaction needs validating to save the block. For SLAC, in 30 minutes, the number of transactions would be ~1600 and today it takes about 20 minutes.
- From https://blockgeeks.com/guides/what-is-blockchain-technology it appears that the bitcoin network reconciles every transaction that happens in ten-minute intervals. Presumably, the results are not available until the transactions are validated. Thus if we were to validate say every 30 minutes, the individual sets of 10 pings are anyway not available until the 30 minutes are over and the validation completed. So it appears there is no advantage in the complexity of individually adding each ~10 nByte ping result to the blockchain. Instead simply make the complete set of ping measurements made each 30 minutes by each MA into a transaction.
- Bebo suggests using permissioned networks see https://monax.io/learn/permissioned_blockchains/ since unpermissioned blockchain networks are not very performant and are public spaces, that are slow to innovate.
- How is the permissioning achieved for first class citizens in a permissioned network ? It says it is out of band and hints at using VPN, or possibly with public/private keys? Presumably this information (public key?) has to be shared somehow. Typically how?
Also for a permissioned blockchain network is the validation of a transaction before it is put into a blockchain just the out-of-band information and thus very fast? Or is some consensus required? What is the consensus, how is it achieved?
Do we start off with say 3 nodes (SLAC, GZHU and possibly UBRU)? Is this enough nodes for consensus.
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