Quick Take on Measurable Proof and the Importance.
This is a Quick Take on measured proof of what it is and why it matters. This Quick Take is a segment of Dragonchain’s weekly Super Happy Dragon Lucky live stream on YouTube with our Founder & Architect Joe Roets.
Examples of Proof
What is Proof?
Everybody generally understands the meaning of proof. It's the evidence or an argument establishing or helping to establish a fact or the truth of a statement.
Most people are familiar with presenting proof from court cases or television shows.
The blockchain community realized pretty early the concept of using the hash power of Bitcoin. When we were at Disney, one of the concepts that we brought to the enterprise was the huge value of using blockchain itself is the fact that you can apply more than just the proof itself.
When we talk about the proof capabilities of blockchain we are proving an event has occurred, that the data has not been changed, and that the information was derived from source data. These are very commonly known functions of proof in blockchain.
For Dragonchain it goes deeper than just proving that the data didn't change. Proof of Time proves that the data was in a certain state and has not been changed, but also that the event happened between two points in time.
Why does it matter?
The interesting thing about Proof of Time is that with Dragonchain sensitive data can be kept private, yet it can be proven at any time after the fact. By decentralizing the proof itself instead of the sensitive data or potentially sensitive data businesses can be GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA compliant. With this measurable proof, you have much better privacy capability than you would ever have with a public blockchain encryption strategy.
In the early days, people questioned how to store big data and how to store sensitive data. At the time most blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, were public. With a public chain, a huge issue is that the data is out there, it's on chain, and it's decentralized all over the world. It doesn't matter if it's encrypted to the best tech that we have today, because within five, 10, or 20 years, that encryption will very likely be broken. When that happens the data is out there and exposed. Everybody has access to it and they can look at everything, even in the past. They can pull out all your customer data and or anything that would be important to you, putting the business at risk as it might even be illegal to someone. The liability and legal implications are not yet known in that kind of situation.
With Dragonchain’s hybrid blockchain network, the data can be decentralized, centralized, or any combination of the two, but you control the data. It is not on chain. If there is a situation where you do need to store the data on chain there are systems that have that function.
The hybrid architecture brings with it a decent amount of quantum resistance as the data isn't on chain and because there is an abundance of decentralization in both trust systems and the various proofs.
What gives you is timestamping. Take for instance a human-readable, traditional, real-world, go to your lawyer contract or maybe even a licensing contract you now know that timestamped version of the contract. You can see version one, version two, all the red lines, and version three, etc. You can see that it was signed by both parties on chain. The legal implications of this are not yet known but you could use this as evidence in court and have the best of both worlds.
Evidence in a court case, for example, an email, could be faked. You could bring in an expert to testify to its authenticity which is what typically happens today but is the expert trustworthy? Is that expert compromised? Did you pay the expert? These things do happen and experts say what the client wants them to say. Then the judge or the jury decides based upon subjective factors what the truth is. Today, without using blockchain, there is no way to measure it; there is no way to prove the email was in a particular state at a particular time.
Dragonchain designed the notary verification function to incorporate either an independent or relatively independent external entity who is a real person or organization that can sign a hash. They don't have to see any of the data. All they have to do is sign the hash in a chain and you can know and have proof of what the state of that data was at that time. The first person to write a hybrid blockchain connection to Bitcoin, in 2016 while at Disney, is still with Dragonchain, today, and is leading the core team. That connection is called Interchain and Dragonchain holds a patent on the process.
Timestamping is important because you can actually prove that something happened or that the data was in a certain state between two points in time without exposing the sensitive data. The hash power applied is because you have staking power that you can tie a number to it.
What do we mean by “Measurable Proof”?
When we say measurable proof, we're talking about an extrapolated value of energy applied. With Dragonchain’s fifth level of context verification, we can give a relatively conservative estimate of the amount of energy applied to a transaction. We use some pretty well-established formulas on the yield, the power of certain Bitcoin and Ethereum miners. We take the estimated tracked hash power over a set time to tell you how much energy was applied every day, every month, and every year.
Eight million dollars a day of hash power is applied for every single transaction that goes on Dragonchain. Every month an additional $250 million is added and it's about three billion dollars by the end of the year of applied energy. Again, that is for every individual transaction, no matter the cost for the business. We make this extremely scalable as we have demonstrated with 250 million transactions over 24 hours on a single business system.
We make it very expensive for someone to manipulate data without you having a signal that they have attempted or have altered the data. Let’s say I have a tweet that shows someone said something that they have since deleted. If it is a screenshot you have no idea if it is accurate. If the tweet was on chain the proof would be there. With measured proof, we know that someone would have to pay millions of dollars to fake the tweet. The question then becomes would they do that for a tweet? Likely not. If, however, you have plans for a part of a weapons system on a carrier, then yes, a nation-state would likely spend millions of dollars to fake that data.
In addition to the simple dollar figure applied to security, you also can look at chain forks. If you have, as an example, multiple forks after the transaction post time and the forks have reorganized to a point before your transaction, you would know that you have a reason to be concerned and that you might want to check your data and go back to re-verify. Multiple simultaneous forks have never occurred in history and the rarity of such an event happening would likely be well known.
Learn more about Proof Systems or contact us directly.
