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bluesky - Re: distributed immutable namespace

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Subject: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

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  • From: Adam Back <adam AT cypherspace.org>
  • To: Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems <bluesky AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: distributed immutable namespace
  • Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2001 00:48:51 -0400


On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 07:59:30PM -0800, hal AT finney.org wrote:
> > > Better to set up some kind of global fund and let buyers pay real money,
> > > then distribute the proceeds to everyone on earth. Or maybe use the
> > > money to reduce global warming, or to save the whales. Anything is
> > > better
> > > than flushing the money down the toilet, which is what hashcash does.
> >
> > But hashcash doesn't need any centralized authority to work. Find
> > something else that doesn't.
>
> Well, this could be a DEcentralized authority, similar to what Adam
> was proposing. But authority it is.

You would want the ability to buy names strongly
anonymously; so you want a payer anonymous ecash system
which you can pay for with credit cards, or perhaps with
checks as credit cards have too high a fraud rate to
risk selling strongly anonymous ecash for.

In the short term the payment system would be the system
weak point because it's an identifiable central server.
Censors would close down the mint, much as the RIAA is
having an easy job getting courts to rule that Napster's
central servers have to shut down.

Even though ecash to pay for names in a namespace is
several steps removed from content some of which RIAA
may dispute, I doubt a court will feel this any reason
not to rule that the mint be shut down. Perhaps there
is even a precedent of sorts in the MPAA decision
ruling that links to DeCSS source code should be
removed.

Either way we have a problem with DoS against both the
namespace and the distributed content store itself.


It may be interesting to investigate how well the name
resolution, auditability and revision recovery protocols
can be made to scale with number of name servers and
percentage of modified values.


Hashcash may burn resources, but it appears to be all
that we have in the way of distributed DoS resistance.

Also hashcash would typically burn resources that would
be revving away idle anyway (modulo the difference in
power saving state some hardware may switch to if the
processor is idle). Unless it got really heated and
people started building expensive custom hardware purely
to escalate the race on desirable namespace. Another
risk for hashcash apart from custom hardware races is
virii -- imagine a virus or worm with a payload which
computed hashcash collisions.

If names are richer there may be less pressure to land
grab names to re-sell. Internet domains are basically a
single word in .{com,net,org}; if the name space had an
arbitrary Top Level Domains and 2nd level domain like
namespace it would be easier to find nice sounding
names.

Whether or not owning a names gives ownership of all
names which contain it as a left substring is another
question. In eternity USENET http://foo.eternity/
could have completely different ownership to
http://foo.eternity/bar/, and there was no support for a
link between them. The ownership of foo.eternity just
gave the ability to choose which sub-URLs to link from
the index.html file. Other people could have sub-URLs
which you don't link to (or even which you do), either
way authorship signatures describe authorship, and
hypertext references provide links. I did think
eternity USENET style names might be less vulnerable to
land grabbing because the owner of the virtual domain
name doesn't automatically own URLs under that. But
perhaps that's undesirable anyway because it violates
expectations that the URLs which look like they are on
the same virtual domain are somehow under related
ownership.

Adam




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