Comment by miki123211
14 days ago
And then there's the third super-special category of shared data with no central server, and where only certain users should be allowed to perform certain operations. This comes up most often in p2p networks, censorship resistance etc.
In most cases, the easiest approach there is just "slap a blockchain on it", as a good and modern (think Ethereum, not Bitcoin) blockchain essentially "abstracts away" the decentralization and mostly acts like a centralized computer to higher layers.
That is certainly not the only viable approach, and I wish we looked at others more. For example, a decentralized DNS-like system, without an attached cryptocurrency, but with global consensus on what a given name points to, would be extremely useful. I'm not convinced that such a thing is possible, you need some way of preventing one bad actor from grabbing all the names, and monetary compensation seems like the easiest one, but we should be looking in this direction a lot more.
> And then there's the third super-special category of shared data with no central server, and where only certain users should be allowed to perform certain operations. This comes up most often in p2p networks, censorship resistance etc.
In my mind, this is just the second category again. It’s just a shared data system, except with data validation & Byzantine fault tolerance requirements.
It’s a surprisingly common and thorny problem. For example, I could change my local git client to generate invalid / wrong hashes for my commits. When I push my changes, other peers should - in some way - reject them. PVH (of Ink&Switch) has a rule when thinking about systems like this. He says you’re free to deface your own copy of the US constitution. But I don’t have to pull your changes.
Access control makes the BFT problem much worse. The classic problem is that if two admins concurrently remove each other, it’s not clear what happens. In a crdt (or git), peers are free to backdate their changes to any arbitrary point in the past. If you try and implement user roles on top of a crdt, it’s a nightmare. I think CRDTs are just the wrong tool for thinking about access control.