[Sovereign Keys] NameCoin

[Peter Eckersley]

BitCoin and the Sovereign Keys design share an important common component,
which is a decentralised, append-only data structure.

When I first told Ben Laurie about the SK idea, he went and wrote a paper
arguing that a SK-like data structure would be a good way to implement digital
currencies:

http://www.links.org/files/distributed-currency.pdf

The main advantages of the SK approach are:

 - no exposure to attacks by botnets that have more CPU than the legitimate
   users of the system
 - no need to do proof-of-work at all (it's wasteful!)
 - (as I understand it) the append-only data structure is significantly
   smaller; we aim to keep it smaller than 2TB for the forseeable future.

One advantage of the BitCoin/NameCoin approach is that it doesn't have the
10-20 timeline servers.  Although timeline servers aren't much of a security
risk in the SK design, they /are/ an availability bottleneck.  If someone
could succeed in compromising all of them or DOSing most of them for an
extended period, that would be pretty bad for SK clients.

It seems to me that in practice BitCoin has come to depend on a bunch of
important servers even though the protocol itself doesn't require it.  So I'm
not sure how big an advantage the lack of Timeline servers is for BC/NC.

A solid advantage of BitCoin/NameCoin is that there is an implementation.  We
don't have one yet :)

On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 09:03:28AM +0700, Левашев Иван wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> There is a project having something in common with Sovereign Keys.
> 
> NameCoin is a distributed DNS or, more generally it's a
> cryptocurrency with a built-in JSON storage. For instance, it can be
> used to store GPG keys as well. It took me 3 month to mine 1 NMC on
> CPU, and I can buy ~5 entries now. Pretty affordable, I think. Of
> course, NMC can be bought, the price is low. Entries expire but
> renewal is free.
> 
> All the history of operations is available on every node. However,
> merkle trees make it possible to omit detailed information in a
> particular NameCoin implementation.
> 
> NameCoin has a built-in SSL verification method: issue self-signed
> certificate and store hash in the NameCoin blockchain. However,
> browsers and other software are not modified to operate this way.
> 
> I think NameCoin might be useful for Sovereign Keys as well.
> NameCoin is also an append-only database and there are lots of nodes
> around already. Timeline servers are still needed to ensure evidence
> of control in the DNS.
> 
> If there will ever be a browser supporting this feature, I'd like it
> to support .bit native SSL verification method as well. .bit domain
> owners are going to have first-class service. Conventional TLD
> owners ought to rely on trusted 3rd party servers to verify evidence
> of control.
> 
> 
> P. S. Please mirror this mailing list in GMANE. It is inconvenient
> to read from mail or web. NNTP is better. Even with regards to web,
> GMANE interface is superior.



> 
> -- 
> If you want to get to the top, you have to start at the bottom
> 
> 

-- 
Peter Eckersley                            pde at eff.org
Technology Projects Director      Tel  +1 415 436 9333 x131
Electronic Frontier Foundation    Fax  +1 415 436 9993