Hardware Not Hard Forks: How Accenture Plans to End the Business Blockchain Security Debate
The ethereal world of blockchain tech is increasingly being tethered to more tangible, saleable solutions. As major institutions have sought software concepts that rethink or remove bitcoin's proof-of-work mining mechanism, so too have the firms involved with those products needed to seek hardware solutions that provide a similar level of security to their desired distributed ledgers. Most recently, the $75bn consulting firm Accenture unveiled a patent-pending security layer integrated with a hardware security module (HSM) made by Thales – a global security firm already protecting the....
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Accenture has debuted a new blockchain-focused hardware solution for storing private keys. The professional services firm partnered with Thales, a French company that works in the fields of cyber security, aerospace and defense, to develop the solution. It relies on hardware security modules (HSMs) to store the private keys – pieces of digital information that are used to sign blockchain transactions – in a bid to shore up security around enterprise-facing blockchains. Specifically, the Accenture solution relies on the nShield HSM product developed by Thales. In statements, Accenture....
Hard forks are a rather contentious issue in Bitcoin. The controversy surrounding hard forks can be seen most prominently in the context of Bitcoin XT 's implementation of BIP 101. While there have been successful Bitcoin hard forks in the past, the problem with hard forks of the Bitcoin blockchain is that they're, well, hard. Any change to the Bitcoin protocol that requires a hard fork essentially requires near-complete consensus to avoid a potential blockchain split. For example, there are many individuals in the Bitcoin development community who do not believe that BIP 101's use of a 75....
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has summarized the implications of soft and hard forks amid growing tensions surrounding Bitcoin’s future. “...There is an essential difference between hard forks and soft forks: hard forks are opt-in, whereas soft forks allow users no “opting” at all,” he wrote earlier this week. The Bitcoin price was under downward pressure Friday as the community awaits Chinese regulatory announcements and indecisiveness over SegWit and Bitcoin Unlimited continues. After Unlimited succumbed to a bug earlier in the week, rhetoric between the opposing sides became even....
Bitcoin Core, an “open source software project that is a direct descendant of the original Bitcoin implementation”, released a statement late last week on its website. The main focus was how Bitcoin consensus rules were changed, which is typically through soft forks and hard forks. Hard forks and soft forks do virtually the same thing, so Bitcoin Core argues that soft forks are to be preferred as they do not cause the amount of harm on the Bitcoin network as a hard fork can potentially do since users can choose to upgrade to new features when they want to, or remain or the current Bitcoin....
Bitcoin developers are probing deeper into how best to execute a so-called hard fork, a contentious upgrading tool that's been at the heart of the nearly $16bn network's most divisive debate for years now. The issue is that to be used cleanly and without unintentional consequences, a hard fork requires all the digital currency's miners to move to a new blockchain, or version of its transaction history. One case study of what can otherwise happen came last summer, when ethereum inadvertently split into two networks after executing a hard fork some users disagreed with. That's not to say....