Private Blockchains, Enigma, and Chicken Nuggets
Please don’t put your SSN anywhere near a blockchain.
At least, not yet.
Just to step back, let me implant the idea in your mind that popular blockchains as they stand today, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, are pseudo-anonymous. Sure, you can purchase LSD off some obscure anarchist website, but your public address has been written to an immutable ledger available for all of us to see — including Mr. FBI.
This may be a good thing, but when it comes to inclusivity, Bitcoin is like your annoying little brother who only eats chicken nuggets, he’s missing a larger part of a balanced diet.
The philosophy behind a “private-blockchain” is to allow data that originally would have not been able to leverage blockchain tech — whether it be, smart contracts, decentralized storage, aggregate computing, etc. — because of its inherently sensitive components. A proper private-blockchain implementation could be revolutionary. It would open the floodgates to sectors of the market that were originally not keen on the tech due to privacy constraints, including healthcare, finance, and government. These are not small chunks of our economy.
Let’s say, for an example, that I run a fast food chain that happens to have an amazing chicken nugget recipe that my competitors are trying to recreate. In order to create a stable supply of my nuggets, I have to import multiple ingredients from around the world. To ensure the quality and transparency of my supplies coming in (and to keep my little brother happy — he’s my biggest customer), I would like to use a distributed and immutable ledger to make sure my suppliers aren’t substituting my chicken for pigeons and double-charging me. However, because it is publicly distributed and immutable, the data uploaded on-chain may be particularly sensitive, and posting your secret sauce online would make it too easy for my competitors.
To implement this and get around the default nature of a blockchain’s pseudo-anonymity, I may use something like the Enigma Protocol.
What is the Enigma Protocol, you may ask?
Without entering the nuances of it’s underlying technology, the Enigma Protocol is a data exchange market running on top of a blockchain. Quite simply, the “data” in the “exchange market” can be anything of value. Let’s say the data is a smart contract that I have programmed and is intended to transfer funds from my wallet to my suppliers wallet . This smart contract, when the conditions are met, will execute. Let me specify these conditions:
- Chickens have been shipped
- Chickens are in fact chicken, and not pigeon
- Chickens are free-range and have led a good, fulfilling life in the The French Riviera
Now, these are very abstract, but let’s say that my recipe relies on these conditions to be met, and my competitors cannot know that the secret sauce is allowing the chickens to roam free around the French Riviera. The Enigma protocol allows me to deploy a Secret Contract, much like Ethereum allows me to deploy a Smart Contract. The key difference is that these Secret Contracts are encrypted before I send them out and the nodes that run the computations are incentivized to keep them a secret through their stake of the ENG token (Enigma’s native token, running on Ethereum). In addition, out of all the nodes on the network, only a small subset perform computations of chunks of my data, increasing speed and reducing redundancy.
My example may have taken you a bit out of reality, but imagine the implications if the Enigma Project were implemented globally. We would be able to implement a peer-to-peer trust-less credit system to create decentralized lending, run aggregate computations that can sequence genomes to predict future diseases, ensure the reliability and transparency of global supply chains, and ultimately liberate our data while keeping the benefits of blockchain tech and the core constituents of our privacy intact. These are far from the only benefits a project such as Enigma can bring. It is ultimately up to the enthusiasts, developers, and users to bring these ideas into fruition.
The Badger Blockchain club at UW-Madison (sponsored by the Blockchain Education Network), is grateful to have had the Enigma Project present on our campus, and wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors. You can visit their website at https://enigma.co/
