The TWIST development team have been busy working on our next, highly anticipated, feature — data storage on the blockchain. In simple terms, TWIST DATA will enable users to store small amounts of information (things like passwords, contact information, text files, a list of private keys, etc.) on the TWIST blockchain.
But why store information on a blockchain?
The internet is undergoing a fundamental shift away from centralised services and towards decentralised open ones. With a centralised information storage services such as pastebin, the user’s data is always at the mercy of the service provider — information is stored in a database, and if one day the company decides they no longer want to pay the hosting fees, the database is taken down and the user’s data is lost forever. This is where blockchain storage has a huge advantage — the data is stored on a decentralised, distributed ledger (the TWIST blockchain), so everyone running a TWIST node has a full copy of the data — there is no centralised point of failure. And since our coin, which operates via a proof of stake consensus, requires a node to be running for staking, anybody wishing to stake their coins is storing a copy of the blockchain and helping to secure and strengthen our network.
How secure is the data?
All data written to the TWIST blockchain is first encrypted using industry standard AES 256 bit symmetric encryption (using your private key as the encryption key). This ensures that your data is completely secure and only accessible to you.
Private vs Shareable data?
TWIST DATA allows for users to store their data privately (only they can access it), or semi-publicly, where anyone with the link can access it (similar to YouTube’s ‘unlisted’ feature). In both private and shareable transactions, the data is encrypted using identical encryption techniques but with different encryption keys. For private data, the encryption key is derived from the user’s private key — if a user wanted to share this encrypted data with another party they would have to expose information about their private key.
Shareable data transactions, on the other hand, use a randomly generated key to encrypt the data. This key can be shared to others since it exposes no sensitive information about the owner and it only decrypts the data it was generated for. Since the data in a shareable data transaction is intended to be shareable (the owner can choose who can access it) rather than public (everyone can access it), the shareable keys are encrypted with the owner’s private key before being written to the blockchain. This ensures that the owner of the data is the only one who can initially access it, and they consequently have the ability to share it with others. Our whitepaper covers this aspect of TWIST DATA more extensively.
Extending TWIST DATA to enhance the user experience
The core functionality TWIST DATA provides is the ability to store and retrieve information on the blockchain. However, we intend to enhance usability by offering different UI experiences for different types of data — for example, when storing or viewing your passwords, your UI experience will be similar to that of password management software. If you want to view some contact information you’ve stored, the results will be displayed in an intuitive and easy to navigate ‘address book’ layout. Et cetera…
Fundamentally, we envision TWIST DATA being more than just a pastebin like service on the blockchain; we want to provide a usable and familiar interface for accessing your data that will make our platform a viable decentralised alternative to current leading information utility software. The first release scheduled for the end of Q3 may not feature all these extensions, but the development team will be continually updating and enhancing the TWIST DATA platform as the project progresses to provide a more usable and streamlined user experience.
Let the development continue!
