MIT's Bitcoin-Inspired 'Enigma' Lets Computers Mine Encrypted Data

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @09:20PM from the mine-your-own-business dept.

Guy Zyskind, Oz Nathan, and the MIT Media Lab have developed a system to encrypt data in a way that it can still be shared and used without being decrypted. "To keep track of who owns what data—and where any given data’s pieces have been distributed—Enigma stores that metadata in the bitcoin blockchain, the unforgeable record of messages copied to thousands of computers to prevent counterfeit and fraud in the bitcoin economy." Enigma needs a fairly large base of users to operate securely, so its creators have proposed requiring a fee for anyone who wants data processed in this way. That fee would then be split among the users doing the processing. Those with encrypted datasets on the Enigma network could also sell access to datamining operations without letting the miners see the unencrypted data.

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That's not what the blockchain is for by michelcolman · 2015-06-30 22:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

The blockchain is already close to 40 GB in size, and now people want to store all sorts of other data (or metadata) in it. I can see this getting out of hand rather quickly.
Miners won't be able to store the entire chain anymore, so only a few archival nodes will still have it. Just how secure and accessible will your metadata be then?