Meanwhile, on LinkedIn...
Basically the article proposes using a private distributed ledger to syncronize users between different Drupal installations within an organization.
Interesting idea, but I can't see why you couldn't bridge all of these installations together without a blockchain to effectively accomplish the same thing?
@deadsuperhero Yeah within a single organization that makes no sense; a shared LDAP or PostgreSQL install would be fine. Blockchain makes a lot more sense ACROSS administrative domains. I think a blockchain makes a lot of sense for something like claiming usernames, though without a desktop/mobile app to help with key management, the admin of whatever node you use can still hijack your username in that case.
@seanl The other thing is that I don't think blockchains are particularly known for supporting mutable data? What happens if an employee leaves an organization? Does the blockchain have to be regenerated to account for the person's departure?
@deadsuperhero @seanl You can delete files with git right? And git is an awful lot like a blockchain.
However, without checkpointing, you can't *recover the space of* the file (or employee data) you deleted in git or a blockchain.
IMO distributed ledgers have some good uses but right now people are kinda blockchain crazy because hype hype hype
@deadsuperhero @seanl Yep, they're both merkle-tree distributed ledgers. "Blockchain" is a fuzzy term... one could argue that maybe blockchains are signed distributed ledgers with consensus and *possibly* proof of work.
@joeyh said recently in person "Blockchains and git came out around the same time, and a lot of people who think they want blockchains really want git" <- I agree!
@cwebber @deadsuperhero Inability to recover a space isn't necessarily a problem for metadata, since it tends to grow an order of magnitude more slowly than the related data. It's not OK for say block storage metadata, but for user accounts it should be fine since total data for a given user should dwarf AAA data.
@deadsuperhero You can use multisig for that sort of thing, where a key can be revoked either using its own private key or n of m other keys. It's also a good idea to have some kind of expiration.