Some blockchain implementations – public, non-permissioned ones in particular – have a really interesting property: Nobody owns them. As a sentence, it’s a simple statement. There is no owner. As I’ve considered it, however, this is far more subtle and powerful than merely having a…
Another day, another data breach. The Swedish government has apparently exposed personal identifying data on nearly all of their citizens. The dataset came from the ministry of transportation. It included names, photographs, home addresses, birthdates, and other details about citizens – as well as maintenance…
Public key encryption, or PKE, is one of the oldest techniques in the blockchain toolbox. PKE dates from the 1970s and has a lineage of being “discovered” by both military and civilian researchers. It’s powerful stuff: One of the early implementations of a PKE system,…
The blockchain data structure (which is a part of, but distinct from the larger Blockchain ecosystem) consists, perhaps unsurprisingly, of an ordered series of “blocks.” In addition to a payload of data and a few other housekeeping values, each block (except the first one, the…
The blockchain technology ecosystem brings together a diverse set of codes and algorithms that have been developed over the past 50-ish years. It includes decades old cryptographic techniques like hashing and symmetric/asymmetric key encryption, and also includes relatively recent innovations related to distributed consensus. The…
Over the summer, I have the opportunity to think deeply about the ecosystem of technologies that go by the name “Blockchain.” I’m focusing particularly on how these might apply in a couple of different scientific and healthcare contexts. I plan to post snippets here from…