<story><title>Show HN: Hyperledger – Open Payments Protocol</title><url>http://hyperledger.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>nessence</author><text>Hyperledger&amp;#x27;s home page talks about a protocol, pools, consensus, security, and decentralization, however, none of those features exist in the codebase. Proof of work and distributed networks are why bitcoin and others are more complex than a list of node URLs and a simple database model.&lt;p&gt;After looking through code, a number of concerns are also raised:&lt;p&gt;- key pairs use RSA
- identities are based on MD5 of RSA public key
- no p2p protocol for nodes
- lack of proof of work (more on that below)&lt;p&gt;As-is, the project is a rails application which references accounts by MD5 of the public key, a postgresql database, and a REST client. In other words -- basic rails ledger app plus some PKI.&lt;p&gt;I see a significant issue with hyperledger, in that the pools are, by nature, private. The only verification a client can perform is the SSL certificate. A pool owner, if they wish, could change the account balance on all of their private nodes and there would be no public record of the change or the previous history. Yes this would require collusion of some kind, but even for 10k nodes, such data can be changed in seconds. Without a blockchain, how could anyone prove otherwise?&lt;p&gt;I see the potential for companies like quickbooks, paypal, or even banks, to create public REST interfaces for their account ledgers. This seems inexpensive for a bank to do (compared to a p2p network), and, we&amp;#x27;d have the trust of the bank. This is money after all, so, I&amp;#x27;d trust the bank over a psuedo-private network.&lt;p&gt;Looking forward to see how hyperledger will approach the problems described above. I would be surprised if the end-result isn&amp;#x27;t similar to bitcoin.</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: Hyperledger – Open Payments Protocol</title><url>http://hyperledger.com/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>drcode</author><text>Haven&amp;#x27;t looked into the product yet, but I have to say the web page itself is one of the most beautiful I&amp;#x27;ve seen, from a pure aesthetic standpoint- No dumb animation, uncluttered, distinctive, consistent theming with appropriate use of color, full use of  available viewport space, thumbs up to the designer!</text></comment>