Re:It is difficult for the average person to conceive of how...
by jdmichal on Monday January 10, 2022 @07:04PM
(#29885039)
Please correct anything below:
There's a couple points: low- vs high-trust, and distributed vs centralized. Blockchains have in turn two mechanisms to match: proof-of-work to handle low-trust environments, and public cryptographic ledgers to handle distributed work. In this case, games are high-trust, centralized services. There is a single controller that authoritatively owns the current game state. So this does not seem a good match for blockchain technology.
If you're not in a low-trust environment, you don't need proof-of-X. You just a public cryptographic ledger written to by a set of trusted keys. Any party can extend the blockchain by just creating and signing the next block. (Would need some contention resolution for simultaneous write attempts -- could be as simple as whoever got the lower signature hash wins.)
There's a couple points: low- vs high-trust, and distributed vs centralized. Blockchains have in turn two mechanisms to match: proof-of-work to handle low-trust environments, and public cryptographic ledgers to handle distributed work. In this case, games are high-trust, centralized services. There is a single controller that authoritatively owns the current game state. So this does not seem a good match for blockchain technology.
If you're not in a low-trust environment, you don't need proof-of-X. You just a public cryptographic ledger written to by a set of trusted keys. Any party can extend the blockchain by just creating and signing the next block. (Would need some contention resolution for simultaneous write attempts -- could be as simple as whoever got the lower signature hash wins.)