Shards of Sharing

1satoshiOur small group of blockchain researchers has been investigating how to reward one another for hosting each others encrypted data, 1Satoshi at a time.

What the hell are we suggesting?

It’s a proposal to store and share information and media in common, by processing data into small blocks or torrent ‘shards’, which are recorded on a 1Satoshi blockchain and shared amongst network peers. Sounds familiar?

The 1Satoshi application is a file wallet that will co-ordinate the tasks of processing the files you want to store and retrieve. It will also manage the sorting and reprocessing of data shards for reassembly, respond to file requests, and account for exchanges.

The shards are homogenised into a cryptographically secure torrent ‘sludge’ and pumped between peers, securely seeding all the available data to the network, whilst providing the originators co-ordinates for later full retrieval.

Bittorrent technology is a highly optimised, well established and useful system for managing the sharing of files. Each file is split into a number of identically sized shards for transportation and listed in the torrent file in hashed format. This list is then used to reassemble the file once all the parts are together. Any peers with shards of the file can offer delivery on request. Peers with full copies are ‘seeding’ and those with shards ‘leeching’. The torrent client application monitors the state of ‘interest’ and ‘choking’ of the exchange and reports each file transfer completion.

The Bitcoin network reports on transactions in a similar way, locking and unlocking a payload of information using cryptographic keys called Satoshi, so named after the inventor of Bitcoin. There are 100,000,000 Satoshi per Bitcoin, that’s a lot of cryptographic potential and the root of its valuation as currency! A minimum transaction fee of 5460 Satoshi has been set to cover the ‘cost of work’ overheads. The dust of other exchange is therefore not being recorded in the Bitcoin blockchain. Announcements to the network for smaller transactions still result in an OP Return which we will utilise for our 1Satoshi initiative.

So what is the value of a universal secure storage commons?

As a 1Satoshi peer, you make spare drive space available, which is then filled with a sludge of 1Satoshi torrent shards, each holding a block of encrypted data, each from different origins. Peers successfully responding to a shard retrieveability test from other peers, collect the 1 Satoshi in credit.

The 1Satoshi wallet processes, tracks and relays your data. So for example, a one gigabyte file is processed into 62,400 shards, each containing 16kb of data. It also creates a hash for each shard then shared amongst the 1Satoshi peers. The essential location, assembly and metadata information that allows for full retrieval and reassembly into your file, is written securely to the 1Satoshi blockchain.

Some amazing online resources exist to explain in detail the role miners, relays and routers play in the Bitcoin process. Our 1Satoshi wallet will feature a Block Explorer to monitor the flow and illustrate the state of play. Other views of the system in use, it’s trackers, statistics and innovations on the blockchain will feature in a suite of open source software.

More , much more needs to investigated and understood. We would like to acknowledge the inspirational work continuing at Coinspark, StorJ and Namecoin as well as the many hands at play on both torrent and blockchain futures. see more

This entry was posted in Report. Bookmark the permalink.