SafeNetwork DBC Technical Series

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Hey @oetyng - thanks, that was fabulous. I feel spoiled. Your explanation was very clear, I read over a few times and could follow along on a high level, after reading over a few things here and there. Cryptography is a fun subject. I’ll throw out a few questions, and the same rules apply - ignore anything worth ignoring, and ignore all if you’re busy, I’ve enough to keep me going here for a year or two already :smiley:

  1. So the whole Network isn’t the Mint - it just has the capability to create ad hoc Mints as the need arises in an efficient and probably ridiculously scalable way?

  2. These lovely little “constellations” then - they’re trustable because they’re built with time-tested cryptographic primitives? I believe it’s true that the trustability of the mint is where the DBCs value comes from, so I’m asking explicitly.

  3. I’m presuming XOR closeness plays a role here - I’m imagining a client asks the network “hey, can I get this DBC reissued?” does some hashing itself, maybe a sneaky little Pedersen commitment at this stage (?), and then that hash is used by the Network to find peers that are “close” in XOR-land? If that’s how it works roughly, is the job of selecting nodes close to the address of the DBC done seperately to the job of, say, storing a chunk?

  4. The DBC is then just a special data type, with an input and an output field, or some such? I think I saw this somewhere, but just to check.

  5. This is perhaps the largest question: where do VRFs, bulletproofs, BLS signatures, Pedersen commitments, etc all fit in? Which key derivation function is used, is that the VRF? Is it possible to describe (from about ten miles up) where each one of these plays its role?

My last question is the one I’m most interested in, I’ve spent the better part of the last 24 hours trying to read up on these and guess where they might fit in to it all. It’s a bit of an onslaught of vocabulary for the moment, but it’s fun riding the waves.

Thanks again for the great explanation, I’ll keep plugging away in any case.

EDIT: rediscovering this now Update 22nd July, 2021 - #17 by danda and answering a lot of my own questions. I was stuck in wikipedia and note-taking yesterday, and hadn’t arced back to reading the forum again and comparing notes etc.

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