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Atomically buying digital information with digital foreign money is an concept that has an extended historical past on this house. Digital items, digital cash, the 2 seem to be an ideal pairing collectively. Digital items, i.e. info, are additionally huge markets. Take into consideration all of the video, audio, textual content, video games, and different types of digital content material that folks buy and eat regularly. These are markets price billions and billions of {dollars} that folks work together with each day.
A lot of the severe makes an attempt at implementing paid file sharing have gone down unhealthy roads. Filecoin was an try to do that on prime of IPFS, however finally the venture is absurdly over engineered. BitTorrent (the corporate, not the protocol) was purchased by Justin Solar and built-in its personal cryptocurrency and blockchain. Each of those initiatives have successfully gone nowhere productive, with extraordinarily overengineered programs on the technical aspect, and really doubtful incentives on the financial aspect.
BitStream is a proposal by Robin Linus (ever think about slowing down and taking a break Robin?) to aim to deal with the necessities of atomicly buying information with out the pointless addition of altcoins and over engineered technical protocols for the change.
All information may be uniquely recognized by a single hash, it is a crucial element on this scheme. Promoting a file atomically requires encrypting the file utilizing a operate that permits the person to confirm what’s encrypted, and after having achieved so the person atomically purchases the encryption key for the file. The issue is the verification course of, and extra importantly proving if you happen to have been cheated and the file decrypts to incorrect information, is dear. Naively achieved, you would wish to provide your entire encrypted file and the decryption key so others may decrypt it and confirm the decrypted information didn’t match the anticipated hash worth when hashed.
File-sharing programs like BitTorrent often break information up into commonplace sized chunks and construct a merkle tree out of them, which permits the foundation hash to operate as a file identifier in a magnet hyperlink and to confirm every particular person chunk of a file you obtain is a sound piece of that file. This can be a property that may be taken benefit of to drastically enhance the effectivity of fraud proofs displaying a file distributor cheated you.
The vendor of the file can generate a random worth and use this to encrypt every file chunk utilizing a XOR operation towards that random worth. They’ll then signal an attestation of the encrypted file root hash and the hash of the encryption worth. The encrypted file tree is about up in a particular solution to facilitate easy fraud proofs.
As a substitute of constructing the merkle tree out of simply the conventional file chunks, however encrypted, the tree creates pairs of leaves that consist of 1 encrypted file chunk and the hash of the unencrypted file chunk subsequent to it. Now at this level the client can obtain the encrypted file, and after verifying by taking all the hashes of the unencrypted chunks and making a merkle tree from them to make sure they match the foundation hash of the unencrypted file, can atomically buy the decryption worth. That is achieved by the vendor utilizing it because the preimage to an HTLC over the Lightning community or a chaumian ecash mint like Cashu which helps HTLCs.
If the file doesn’t decrypt accurately, both as a result of the encrypted information is a unique file or the preimage isn’t the precise encryption key, the merkle path within the encrypted file tree to any two leaves can present the vendor cheated the client. Offering simply the trail to any encrypted file chunk and its corresponding unencrypted chunk hash with the preimage the client bought will show definitively the vendor didn’t present the client with the file they claimed they have been.
Any file vendor utilizing the BitStream protocol can deposit a bond that may be slashed with a fraud proof as designed above in the event that they cheat a buyer. This may be enforced by merely depositing a bond at a chaumian mint within the easiest case. Platforms like Liquid provide various strategies of constructing a bond that may truly be enforced trustlessly with performance like OP_CAT. Scripts might be constructed that truly take the BitStream fraud proof and validate it on the stack, permitting the creation of a UTXO that might be spendable by anybody who had a sound fraud proof. If OP_CAT ever grew to become out there on the mainchain, this might even be achieved fully trustlessly while not having a federated execution setting.
BitStream is an extremely promising protocol for atomically promoting digital info with a really environment friendly scheme for proving fraud, no shitcoins required.
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