My fellow retards,
Part uno of attesturbation followed well-endowed phren peebo as he holidayed his family in eastern Europe and managed to procure goat meat from your favorite deacon of abysmal hope, whose paranoia was assuaged by a simple, shareable attestation file. We looked at how a signature stored off-card could be used as an additional guarantee layer for the receiver of a phonon in a fully offline context. While phon/ongod believes this is valuable, it is *not* the only way forward…
The type of attesturbation investigated in part uno involves a third party. It essentially ties reputation from the third party to the veracity of the metadata claimed in a given phonon packet. In other words, we can trust a known party rather than having to investigate the details of a packetized piece of money sitting in the phononscape.
Some of you immediately cry. “Wah Wah Wah, we don’t want trusted third parties. Satoshi said they are bad.” You are right, dear friend. But the important distinction is that there are no trusted third parties needed in phonon. This is just an added layer above, an opt in system that provides some additional value. By no means does phonon rely upon it. That being said, this goat rider heard you loud and clear and began ideating on a fully math-based way to trust the veracity of a phonon.
Taking a step back, when one creates a phonon they deposit monies into a public address that is associated with a private key generated in a secure enclave. They have no access to that private key. We discussed that one could deposit fake ether on a forked version of Ethereum and if you had no internet access to investigate if that deposit ACTUALLY exists on real Ethereum then you couldn’t be sure if you should accept the phonon or not. Well, there are likely one or more solutions to use a mathematical proof to trust the metadata claim actually exists on the real chain and not a forked version.
To understand how we can simplify the data needed for a math proof, some background reading on Merkle Trees is helpful. Once you have a basic understanding there, then Simple Payment Verification (SPV) is probably a next good bit of reading. If you get through both of those ideas you’ll probably see where this is going.
A SPV proof is the simplest way to prove that a given transaction is included in a block. Rather than needing ALL the data of ALL transactions in a block, you just need the deposit transaction and a few hashes as you make your way up to the Merkle Root of the entire block. With a SPV proof, you can be certain that the deposited monies are a real transaction. You also know based on the code of the Phonon applet that there exists a private key in that secure enclave related to the public address of the phonon deposit. At this point you are sure; the transaction exists in this block and the phonon applet has the private key associated with the location of the deposited monies (public address).
Now what is needed in the proof is somehow to show the level of work that went into creating the block. If phon/ongod wanted to scam a naïve receiver, all it would take is a deposit on fake Ethereum and to give you just the SPV proof of the block, but that is not enough for wise receiver.
Imagine the attestation includes some more data which shows the level of work needed to generate this block…for the case of bitcoin, use the SHA256 hash function. Actually: SHA256(SHA256(Block_Header)). The digest of this hash will have a certain number of leading zeros which shows the difficulty that went into creating this block. A phonon client can easily verify if the number of leading zeros is in the ballpark of what is currently accepted as the current difficulty for bitcoin and Ethereum. A fake deposit might have one or two leading zeros while the real bitcoin or Ethereum will have many leading zeros, as this is the methodology used when miners fight each other for “solving” some complex problem. All the miners are really doing is trying out a bunch of hashes and incrementing a nonce (random number) to result in a digest that has x leading zeros where x is equal to or greater than the currently accepted difficulty level.
So in the case of our phonon deposit proof, it’s pretty simple from a math-based perspective. A sender would need to store some additional data in their client. This does not need to be on the card taking up secure space where the phonons (private keys) themselves are stored. This data will include a SPV proof that the deposit was part of the block, then the details that go into the block header (prev hash, nonce). There are some extraneous details too, such as version number and time for bitcoin, but that’s not important here.
So…attesturbation part uno is a neat way to allow third parties to check on chain data and give a simple signature to state that the phonon deposit is legitimate. Now there is a math based way too, that does not require third party trust assumptions.
For the hole pokers out there, we can already see you saying, “but mr. goat rider, what happens if the phonon is worth $10m dollars, and the cost to create a fake block at the current level of difficulty only costs $50k, your solution doesn’t work.” Alas, mr. midwit, math and game theory provide the solution for all.
If you wanted to give the receiver even MORE guarantees, you can provide the same SPV proof and block header data for the NEXT block that follows the one where you made the deposit. This will increase the size of the proof, but it will double the cost to forge. The receivers phonon client can even provide some info to the receiver such as “the proof provided by sender would have cost $XX,XXX to forge. If this amount is greater than the value of the phonon, the receiver should accept the phonon as genuine. When an owner creates a proof to showcase authenticity, the proof should always have a greater cost to forge than the value of the phonon being sent. Simple. Fuck those “trusted” third parties.
Tell them how you really feel on the Phonon DAO discord.
Tips to phonongod.eth will be invested in bounties that advance the Phonon project.
Hatemail to phonongod@protonmail.com will be scathingly considered.
Targets for the marketcap of PHONON DAO remain:
$1b by Q2 2022, $12b by EOY.
On the high end, $300b marketcap in 3 years.