If one were to assert control over bitcoin, it would probably start with miners. Hopefully, new developments will make mining more resistant to centralization, rather than less. Unfortunately the Litecoin and dogecoin approach doesn't seem to have worked, as scrypt ASICs have since been developed and deployed. That said, my understanding is that Assange is talking about the decentralized ledger. Of course, if you control the mining, you control the ledger... A decentralized git repo would do the trick. Looks like someone is working on something called gitchain.
k, just watched the vid for Gitchain. This scheme is addressing availability and per Brewer's CAP theorem, full availability and consistency* in a distributed system is impossible. [Shades of momentum/position here, btw .. ;)] Even (or specially) in a P2P system, CAP holds. Partitions are unavoidable. One must either pick full consistency (but sacrifice availability), or, insist on full availability but sacrifice consistency (which in case of a Git like system, means you may not have access to the latest commits.) Vector Clocks or BC type systems, carry the entire state and thus face the same issues that keeps insects down to a certain size. It can not scale indefinitely.
(Thanks for the gitchain link.) | decentralized ledger I'm not sure I quite understand. If the aim is to have a system where there is an immutable record of changes to a (set of) digital objects, then any content addressable based system, e.g. Mercurial, Git, CamlStore, would do the job. Taking Git as a most familiar system, the DAG of Git affords both 'attribution' and 'timeline' datum. Can the proverbial Uncle Joe or NYT go and change commit records in Github? Let's discuss "decentralized". (I'm on and off the net as you know but will be following up! :)]
No, but someone could at Github could, correct? Isn't the requisite for an immutable record the distribution of the consensus on the validity of the record? My interpretation of the decentralized ledger, is the distribution of not only the data on the ledger, but also the distribution of the consensus mechanism required for changes of the ledger.Can the proverbial Uncle Joe or NYT go and change commit records in Github?
The plan is not only for Gitchain to run across myriad machines, but for it to store some Git metadata–user names and permissions, for example–in a cryptographically verifiable format similar to the bitcoin blockchain. This would allow software developers to prove that their code hasn’t been tampered with–just one example of how the project could be expanded in new ways.
Github personnel can truncate records (as in remove certain commits past time t. They can not go and cherry pick a prior commit's content.). Having mirrors that periodically pull from Github would address that trivially. The consensus bit goes back to my earlier comment re Vector Clocks and the CAP matter posted today. Perfect consensus in the material world is impossible.