Blockchain and Networking

[jk at ip-clear.de (Jörg Kost)]

New devices like the former Brocade SLX even has its own hypervisor on 
x86-intel and runs an Ubuntu VM for management and monitoring. You can 
even install your own things,  therefore new applications and purposes 
will rise in the future.

I also believe that dockerization will come to the networks and we will  
handle routing protocols more like containers that will be linked to the 
host-os, adding  reseller and namespace capabilities and so on.

There will be room for blockchain typeof-handlers that does not need to 
be a "full node" or a "miner". It could just be a "wallet"-type, that is 
linked to companies-internal-"light" nodes, to exchanges or registries 
or $y for purposes, that we might not even think of right now or still 
need to write PoC for (remind me in $x years).

Jörg


On 9 Jan 2018, at 16:31, Naslund, Steve wrote:

> Sure but there are lots of blockchains other than bitcoin.  A lot of 
> real smart people do not even suspect that bitcoin is a long term 
> survivor due to its long transaction times.  Which blockchains do you 
> want to support?  150GB may not seem like a lot (although a lot of my 
> gear does not have the memory to cache that) but 10 of those is beyond 
> the memory on the vast majority of network gear I am aware of.  That 
> sure looks like a slippery slope to me.   Now that a lot of network 
> switching and routers can support applications, you could just host 
> all of your apps on them just like you could do all of your routing in 
> your servers.   The question for you is what responsibilities do you 
> want to take on.   That probably depends on what business you are in.
>
>> There is absolutely no reason that the networking equipment itself 
>> can't both operate the blockchain and keep a full copy.  It's a 
>> pretty good bet that your own routers will probably be online;Â  if 
>> not, you have bigger problems.
>>
>> The storage requirements aren't particularly onerous.  The entire 
>> Bitcoin blockchain is around 150GB, with several orders of magnitude 
>> more transactions (read: config changes) than you're likely to see 
>> even on a very large network.  SSDs are small >enough and reliable 
>> enough now that the physical space requirements are quite small.
>
> Steven Naslund
> Chicago IL