Greg McMullen
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

Hi Curt, thanks for the thoughtful comment.

This post is only about how much it will cost to store data on IPDB, not how to make the network more censorship resistant. You’re correct that at the outset, there will be just one organization accepting payment. We agree that it’s a centralized vulnerability. I’ve been concerned about this problem ever since Visa and Mastercard tried to choke the life out of Wikileaks. We’re not ignoring it here — it’s just not within the scope of this post.

We will be exploring the questions of payment, censorship resistance, and further decentralization in more detail in the coming months, but for now I can share a few thoughts.

As a starting point, we believe that with current technology, you can only have any two points of the DCS Triangle: scale, consistency, or decentralization. We think eventually you’ll be able to have all three, but no one has solved it yet.

Different networks are taking different approaches. Ethereum and Bitcoin have consistency and decentralization, but are still working out scale. IPDB has scale and consistency at the price of full decentralization. We think all three are possible in a single network, but there is work to do before anyone gets there.

With that in mind, the IPDB Foundation Articles (Article 2) require that IPDB work toward dissolving and becoming fully autonomous. We considered launching as a DAO, but decided the technology was too immature and the law was not ready for it.

In the meantime, we are exploring options for greater decentralization and censorship resistance. For the physical hardware, we have already selected Caretakers based in a number of countries around the world, and will be announcing more in other jurisdictions in the coming months. If a single Caretaker or a few Caretakers become targets, the others will be able to pick up the slack.

We are also exploring options to get around the payment issue. A few of the ideas we’re working with:

The Hydra Model: Create a large number of organizations around the world, with the same Caretakers as members of each and funds distributed evenly between organizations. If one is targeted, the others survive.

The Reseller Model: Patterned after domain registrars. Third parties could be given the ability to sell usage credits and pay the expenses of the Caretakers.

The Tokenized Model: As we become more decentralized, we can tokenize the network to incentivize Caretakers and avoid a central payment model entirely.

Clearly there is still a lot of work to be done, but we are working toward answers and are really excited about the possibilities. Happy to continue to discuss if you have other thoughts or questions!

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    Greg McMullen

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    I’m a lawyer. I like the internet.