Bitcoin blockchain stored into Autonomi?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/647523/worldwide-bitcoin-blockchain-size/
It’s quite big. If stored into Autonomi, would it be deduplicated? Ie if someone first uploads it (public or private), then anyone else could upload it again as private for free and without additive space needed? And if the blockchain is used on the fly autonomi only, you could run your own bitcoin node without the need for local space?
Is this correct?

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Deduplication would happen as long as the clients are storing in the same format.

I’ve done a lot of thinking about storing other blockchains on Autonomi. Bitcoin may be feasible because its block creation & data storage growth is so slow. In my own experience, Autonomi can’t yet store large amounts of data quickly - the quoting mechanism tends to fail.

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Actially a fork of a standard bitcoin node could be made which would use autonomi directly for saving the blocks?
At least all using the same app would benefit.

One thing that’s tricky is, if anyone can create them, how do you trust the reliability of the blocks?

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Just as current node does. If someone stores a modified block, your node wouldn’t even see it. But all saving the correct one would see it’s free (but not for the first one..)

That may be true for blocks, but it seems tricky for a light node to maintain a trustworthy chainstate…

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There are a few threads about this.

There are some businesses hosting blockchains up to a recent time point, to bootstap new nodes. Autonomi would be perfect for that, as the data is immutable.

Each time the blockchain is uploaded, it will share the chunks as previously, so it would be cheap to append to it too.

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A good word spreading application might be a bitcoin node fork using autonomi to store the blocks. That might draw a lot of nerds to try autonomi :wink:

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The biggest issue I can see is that blockchains also rely on the multitude having their own copy. To have just one copy everyone uses then you lose that major protection.

It’d be great where the blockchain is controlled by an entity, like a bank, or government, but for BTC then it loses the decentralisation protection of having multiple copies as security. Even if its smaller than what many would like.

Also as mentioned the blockchain can change as conformations are done. There is not one source of truth and as blocks are confirmed then the majority then hold the true blockchain and the other nodes agree and add/rewrite the correct block.

The benefit would be to add blocks to the backup copy of the blockchain on Autonomi and is delayed in blocks being added. Even this only has use to populate a node from scratch.

It is simply too slow for searching as local blockchains (database really) have the benefit of ultra fast reading of records from local disk/NAS whereas random access on Autonomi has huge lag times compared to local storage.

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I disagree with this. Technically every node builds its own block and check it just like usually. Then it stores it like an own block. The deduplication occurs on lower level after that and only if other nodes has ended up with the same block.
On the nodes point of view, everything works as before. Blockchain forks are not a problem; they are stored just like they would on local storage.

Edit: hmm.. yes, if every blockchain node would use autonomi and if autonomi would crash, then also bitcoin would crash :cold_face:

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That is not what i was saying. Security comes from having independent copies of the blockchain that are sync’ed. Differences mean something is wrong and the majority wins out. But with one copy then its not really blockchain technology with that security feature, but is just a ledger database without the security.

THEN more importantly is that it would drastically slowdown the block creation. The speed of calculating the new block comes from being able to search the blockchain data (really a local database) with high speed access provided by local storage or local NAS. But on Autonomi then the speed is slowed by the internet lag of up to 400mS for a random chunk. Instead of the hard drive.

So you lose the speed and security of the multiple independent copies.

It would be best if Autonomi was just the static blockchain portion that people can download when needing a new copy and saving collectively the other nodes from that load to supply part of all the blockchain to a new node.

Maybe Autonomi should look at using the upcoming transaction data type to implement a new style of crypto coin that leverages the Autonomi transaction speed. Maybe a form of wrapping of old outdated blockchain ledger database technology and replace it with a database system using transaction type for transfers

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Think of bittorrents.

Trying to duplicate the way bittorrents work on Autonomi is not smart. Autonomi stores the whole file forever and who needs seeds. Only need a list of files and the datamap address. No seeding, no multitude of separate computers serving up parts of files and to try to duplicate that onto autonomi means its layering one form of file serving onto another more efficient file serving system.

To have separate bittorrent computers grabbing the file sections from Autonomi and torrenting them to requesters is duplicating work since Autonomi can deliver the whole file itself without proxying through other computers that read autonomi data then sends it to another computer.

Maybe have a proxy computer, like VPN to mask ip addresses but to act as a torrent machine is duplication of effort

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Thanks to autonomi deduplication, would people not be able to store the entire blockchain chain (that they revalidated themselves using their own node) for free, mostly, since someone else would already have uploaded even the more recent honestly validated blocks? (Obviously someone would need to figure out how to store an ever growing chain (or tree) of files.)

Even if you store it on the network, regardless of other issues, you still have to download it to use it and index it. Not such a huge advantage I think.

Let’s see, we build up a block or receive it from the network and check it is valid. Then we store it on the Autonomi network.

There is a security risk only if the copy I see

  1. can be modified, intentionally or accidentally
  2. can be deleted, intentionally or accidentally.

Case 1) if someone modifies it, it will be saved to some other place on the autonomi network, you don’t even see it. You still see the one you authorized and checked and saved.
Case 2) It cannot be deleted, it is immutable. The only way to delete it is to crash the Autonomi network. And that’s the only risk what is left.

Logically the copies are independent. That’s the idea of deduplication. Logically independent, but physically copies of the same data is stored just ‘once’ (which is not only once in this case).

About the speed issues; the blockchain needs to be read only once, after that the state is kept up with new block info stored on chainstate. The chainstate should be local, not on the autonomi. (see @bytes link). There is no need for random reads from the blockchain afterwards.

And was it on the autonomi or some other place, in both cases you must download once over the network. Not sure if you need to ‘save’ it back to autonomi to get your ‘private’ copy thought.

Well, you might get a physical copy of the blockchain from your friend, then you would not need to download..

Its part of security of blockchain. Not security in general.

Once its a single source of truth then its loses the security of every miner having their own copy that must matches all the other copies.

Who cares if there is a copy that when block write worked that some agree with, but unknown who did. But there is no proof that a year down the track the copy on Autonomi is actually right. THe security is that the majority have independent copies that match.

Its the fact there are independent copies.

What you are morphing it into is a hybrid system that relies on people trusting that a year ago it was written right.

No, the verification process relies on checking history of the address, and it actually has the coin to transact with. There is no “balance” field anywhere., and even if there was the many transactions in a block still need to read random blocks to get balance. But in fact it is scanning the block chain to check each address has the balance in order to back up the transaction info.

The speed is also a major issue to only have Autonomi storing the blockchain. Chain state is the whole chain. Addresses cannot be stored in some file on each computer because the state is the whole blockchain. Address often have their last transaction years ago, or months ago.

Blockchain relies on independent copies being kept, and the blockchain being local for speed.

Anyhow if one copy would be OK then blockchains would be stored on a AWS server and nodes keep checksums to verify its in good condition. And rely on AWS backup systems to ensure its never lost.

Well, currently a node trust that a block it wrote a year ago was written right. If you cannot trust the same in Autonomi, then Autonomi is worthless.

But I do agree that it (Autonomi crash) would be single point of failure which would cause catasthropic consequenses. Nevertheless, as long as not too many of the nodes are relying on Autonomi, it might be very usefull.

Yes, but a node upkeeps the latest state of the outputs so it does not need to read whole blockchain all the time. That chainstate is better kept local, not on Autonomi.

As good as Autonomi is, for blockchain security model it is not good since its only one copy that is written by hundreds and not guaranteed against being written wrong, no matter how good dedup is. The blockchain security model is broken if you have Autonomi as the copy of the blockchain.

Will not be adopted no matter how you try to sell it to them

But as soon as you get 100 or 1000 addresses to validate (normal) in the block that is not in the state then block validation grinds to a crawl