The Public ETH Network: a double-edged sword
DID and other Blockchain projects are moving away from the public ETH network. And there are reasons why …
At DID, we have decided to move to a permissioned, private ETH replica. i.e. moving off the main public ETH network. The decision took us a while and initially it felt like going back on our promise of openness. We made the decision primarily to make sure that people couldn’t be tracked and their “login histories” couldn’t be checked on a public ledger.
And, it’s just not us. I had the opportunity to speak and discuss with banking technologists all over Eurpoe. And they were facing the same problems as us. The openness of the ETH network is a blessing and a curse at the same time. There is a brand-new Blockchain project from the UK which we are a part of and the DID V3 is being “hosted” on that chain.
- Cost-prohibitive:
Goes without much introduction. But at least in our case, one login would cost us $0.06 (in peace-time when the transactions are cheap). The DID users actually ended up paying $0.069. This is for a single login only and don’t forget that we already knew this — the DID V2 uses logs to squeeze the maximum out of the ETH smart contract capabilites in terms of dollars spent. Let’s not even go into issuing an ID. An ID request with our V3 of the software is a smart contract as well. While on the public ETH chain, we could never even imagine this because of the associated costs.
2. Inconsistent “Billing”:
Imagine running an app on the Internet, you need to be able to forecast the costs associated as you scale. While hosted on the ETH network, you do not get this facility and luxury. Rather the rates for usage fluctuate between the time of the day. As a business, as an app-maker, you do want to be able to rely on a consistent billing to forecast and grow. At the moment, every transaction causes panic!
3. Too much sharing:
This is the main reason why we are moving off the public chain. For DID (and for a banking network), there is too much info available to the public and therefore it is susceptible to inspection and ultimately; a hack. While we understand that it’s all anonymous, the situation is that every time you use your ID, you leave a track or a cookie. The bankers also complained saying “there is too much sharing” with every transaction visible to the public. Given a small user-base (Blockchain technologies are new), it is pretty easy to use social engineering and tracking the chain to point to a user. This user may be totally anonymous, but all of his transactions are readily available on the Blockchain. The user can be tracked exactly like the “bad” cookies on the internet. We want to hide these user tracks and provide anonymity with a DID ID issuance and ID transfer. Giving a person’s usage history for the world to see is not only counter-productive but also dangerous.
DID V3 is being moved to a new UK-based Blockchain project which is also housing a few other serious projects. We are fans of the ETH network and opted for an exact ETH replica where costs will be lower and people’s IDs will be more protected from introspection. Have a look at DID V2 — the BOCA, the ID tuples, the app, AVP … all concepts remain the same. With implementation on a permissioned Blockchain, we have been able to truly push the agenda forward and have now started using the real potential of Ethereum network to the users’ advantage.
