The Archeologist in Sarcophagus

What do they do? How do they preserve your data?

Miguel Saldana

Published in

Sarcophagus Community

5 min readSep 24, 2021

A Dead Man’s Switch

A key role in understanding what the Archaeologist does in Sarcophagus is to understand what a Dead Man’s Switch (DMS) is.

A DMS was created as a physical safeguard in a system that could have a catastrophic impact if a working device is used improperly. A great example of this is with large vehicles and heavy machinery, such as a train. The DMS is a physical switch that the train conductor would need to hold down for the train to be powered and able to move. If something would happen to the conductor or his attention was pulled away from his main duty of conducting the train, once they remove their finger from the button and it is released, there is an electric killswitch and the train’s engine will be immediately killed. With this same logic of how the dead man’s switch works, an Archaeologist in Sarcophagus serves as the DMS to unwrap the sarcophagus and resurrect the corpse, or decrypt the sarcophagus and expose the payload for the desired recipient to decrypt and receive it.

The architecture for the Sarcophagus system, showing the interactions that the Archaeologist has to perform their duties.

The Archaeologist is a Node

From a blockchain perspective, the archaeologist is simply the server node. What this means is that within the Sarcophagus ecosystem, the archaeologist is incentivized to create, run, and preserve the node for Sarcophagus. Just as a miner is incentivized by block rewards in a proof of work scheme (like on Bitcoin), the Sarcophagus server node is paid and incentivized by receiving ‘Digging Fees’ and ‘Bounties’ from the embalmer, or the person wishing to store information in the Sarcophagus ecosystem. The cost and fees that the archaeologist chooses to charge should be in line with market conditions as well as the upfront costs to run the server. The archaeologist will also be responsible for bonding SARCO tokens, AR tokens (Arweave, used for the file storage solution), and ETH to the server to be used as collateral when they accept a sarcophagus to be stored on their server. This is an added incentive for the archaeologist to receive the digging fees and bounties as well as to not lose their collateral while securing the sarcophagus. Just as the system incentivizes the archaeologist to perform his duties, slashing penalties can also be applied to an archaeologist who doesn’t follow the rules of the protocol. An example of something that would garner a slashing penalty is unwrapping the second layer of encryption before the resurrection window opened. Statistics about the behavior of the archaeologist will be made available during the time that the embalmer is making a sarcophagus and choosing an archeologist. Good performing and fair-priced archaeologists will be preferred to poor performing ones. Game theory and a secure system design are what make the archaeologist want to do the job as prescribed in the protocol.

How Does the Archaeologist Safeguard the Sarcophagus?

What is the role of Archaeologists?

The role of the node operator will be to ensure that they keep their system up to date, properly secure their server, and perform the duties of the archaeologist, namely wrapping and re-wrapping the sarcophagus, and resurrecting the corpse/payload. When the embalmer comes to preserve data for the desired recipient using Sarcophagus.

Mummification Phase

The first phase to building a sarcophagus also called the mummification process, is when an embalmer uploads and encrypts the corpse/payload with the desired recipient’s public key. This is the first layer of encryption that protects the payload’s integrity to be preserved. The embalmer then chooses an archaeologist, with the digging and bounties fees locked away with a portion of the Archaeologist’s bond. The archaeologist also encrypts with a second layer of encryption to further protect the corpse while it sits waiting to be resurrected.

Re-wrapping Phase

Once a sarcophagus is accepted and encrypted within the Archaeologist node, an embalmer can always check the status of their sarcophagus and extend the time that the sarcophagus is designed to be locked away. This is called re-wapping the sarcophagus and the embalmer would be required to perform a transaction with a new contract attesting to the extended period of time that the sarcophagus will be laid to rest until it is to be resurrected. At this time, the archaeologist is paid the original digging fees and a new digging fee would be needed by the embalmer for the sarcophagus.

Resurrection Phase

Once the time has elapsed on the contract created during the wrapping phase, the archaeologist can then unlock the 2nd (outer) level of encryption they provided while holding on to the sarcophagus and exposing it for the desired recipient to be able to take the payload/corpse. The recipient would then decrypt with their public key to receive the corpse left behind by the embalmer.

Building and Running a Node

In this article, we won’t get into the full details of building and running a node, but we will discuss the important aspects of it. Additional material will be linked below to help getting started building and setting up an Archaeologist node. One key important aspect to running the node is correctly setting up the parameters for the archaeologist service. This includes:

Setting up the connections to the Ethereum and Arweave networks to process transactions that the archaeologist will need to perform
Information about the wallet address that will host the required funds for posting bonds when wrapping sarcophagus as well payments for digging fees and bounties.
Lastly, setting the configurations that archaeologist wants to run their node with (max resurrection time, digging fee and bounty rates, etc…)

Proper configuration of the node is key to building an archaeologist node that will serve the functions as designed in the protocol and make them an appealing choice for an embalmer.