I continue to hammer the point that I believe Blockchain is the DNA of Web3. As such, it is important that we figure out what should and what shouldn’t be done with the blockchain. Note the use of the word “should”. Sometimes as computer scientists we believe that we should, simply because we can. The recent story of the Taproot Wizards (the pic is clickable) on Twitter really drives the point home. Â
Why the Taproot folks did what they did is not really important, what is important is that sometimes living in the wild, wild west means that the road to a more civilized society will be paved with many choices that will help all the locals and the authorities involved (even if self proclaimed) figure out how to live with each other and the choices that they make.
So … for me, the real question from this incident is really “What should be stored in the Blockchain?”
Think of a Real Estate transaction, where is the “transaction” stored?Â
Well that’s a matter of how you define the transaction, we could think of all the documents that go with buying a house as the “transaction”; maybe there’s a mortgage and a construction loan, that’s certainly part of the transaction; and then there’s all those crazy documents we have to sign when we go to a title company and they have all those disclosures and compliance documents including the title insurance. All those, in my mind, are part of the transaction, but no single one could be said to capture the entire transaction. The most relevant event of the transaction which is the exchange of the ownership papers and related asset, and the money paid by the buyer, after all most of the time who cares about the paper work as long as i’m cozy in my house.Â
The Blockchain is supposed to be a transactional ledger, plain and simple. And in the case of Real Estate there are multiple ledgers documenting different parts of “the transaction”. In fact, those individual papers often get recorded in separate ledgers, but the ledger itself contains mainly the record that an even happened, not the entire contents from the event. And in this case I’m taking a long time to make the case that Blockchain is not intended to be a general purpose storage medium. So back to the question …Â
What should be stored in Blockchain, and how should blockchain related content be securely stored and associated with a ledger entry?
I think the big question is not really about security. Secure storage has existed in many different forms for many years, however, the big question is whether the security model is tied to some “centrally” controlled system like a corporate network, say Google’s, Microsoft’s, Apple’s, Amazon’s, etc. or whether the security model is decentralized, meaning based on some public trust model. I suppose some people would call this the difference between DeFi and Centrally managed security model. Â
The problem with decentralized, distributed models is the issue of trust. Many parties in a distributed system may be sophisticated in terms of understanding security issues in an open environment, while other’s may be less sophisticated, and even naive at times … and other’s they just simply don’t care.
This is a very old argument, these topics have been discussed many times:Â check out this old yahoo finance story.
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To me, the answer is simple: keep the ledger lean and mean. Not only is it not meant to sustain heavy operations and content, it is expensive. Imagine all that gas cost or mining cost every time you have to check out the content? Â
I mean, maybe I’m wrong and over simplifying things, but to me, secure the references and the access key to the payloads in the blockchain and use systems like IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) to store the actual contents in secured storage. After allÂ
IPFS content addressing enables you to store large files off-chain and put immutable, permanent links in transactions — timestamping and securing content without having to put the data itself on-chain.
There’s the question of the content being “off-chain”, but then again, even I don’t keep all my car keys in one key chain. Call me crazy, but that’s just me.
Back to the question posed as the topic of this rant: should the chain be censored? Meaning should there be some discretion used in deciding what to put on the chain or not? I say it can’t be helped, otherwise the Taproot’s of the world will continue to have fun at other’s expense.
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