Bitcoin Masterclasses Series 2 with Dr. Craig Wright: Building better cloud services with multicast
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Can you use the blockchain to build a better, more robust version of Twitter? Can we have better file sharing services than the central server-based ones we use now? The answer is: absolutely. In Session 5 of Dr. Craig Wright’s The Bitcoin Masterclasses Series 2, the nChain Chief Scientist describes how we could use IP2IP, IPv6 multicast, and distributed hash tables to create new and improved models for sharing information.
The full video for The Bitcoin Masterclasses Series 2, Day 2 is available above. If you want to catch up on the previous sessions or get more background on using Multicast, Day 1 is also available for viewing on the CoinGeek channel.
Dr. Wright talks about the terms “cloud” and “fog” computing. Existing examples of both, he says, are usually run by companies for corporate funds. Their users may be decentralized, but most data is stored centrally at whichever company operates the service. What if there was a way to truly decentralize the network, ensuring that all information remained available, to anyone who wanted it, without using Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN ), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT ), Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL ) or other other companies data center?
“There’s a reason none of these companies want to talk about this,” he says. Storing everyone’s data is an important part of them maintaining control.
“You have a concept here that is based on both push and pull technology,” he added.
Most cloud services we use today have a “pull” structure, while “push” has been neglected. With multicast, you have a service where you retrieve information when you are disconnected from a group you may wish to be a part of. That doesn’t mean you’re missing out, though—it could be a monitoring microservice that “goes online” for you, to retrieve any information you missed while you were offline.
For an example of such a service, he points back to the days of IRC, where users had to choose a name (or “nickname”) for each session. For people who wanted to maintain a consistent name/identity across different sessions, there were bot programs that could continuously run and maintain your name. (Trivia: this is where the term “chatbot” started to come from; when other users tried to chat with the bot program that held your nick. Sometimes they could be programmed to talk back, sometimes in very random ways.)
You can (theoretically) add as many nodes as you want, and this is a key element of “network resilience” mentioned in previous sessions. However, there are diminishing returns from this, so when we design these systems, we need to think about how quickly we need information sent to different individuals and what information needs to be sent.
Storing and accessing information like this reduces the likelihood of having multiple versions of the same file stored on different central cloud servers, and also reduces the risk of data leakage (for example, leaking your private or confidential chat logs). You’re also not “locked into” using a specific, account-based business service, as your data is more portable.
With distributed hash tables (DHT) we have something similar to a NoSQL database, but a table where individual files are represented by their hashes. With double hashing, it is possible to prove that you have access to specific data without revealing it, similar to how zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) works. He also talks about how all this information can/should be indexed to make it accessible and keep it private, searching for attributes.
Dr. Wright then notes that he has been researching these topics in depth for many years now and will be publishing his articles on nChain’s website for anyone interested in learning more.
“Cloud” applications can be more efficient and more secure, says Dr. Wright, but we need to start thinking about different structures and models. The BSV blockchain, along with IPv6 Multicast addresses, gives us a way to start imagining these new services. Don’t listen to big companies who want you to think their data center-based services are essential…because they’re not.
See: Bitcoin Masterclasses with Craig Wright – Confidentiality, Privacy, Anonymity, Party to Party
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