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

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.

Comments

Re: Cryptography is for cows.

[Anonymous Coward]

One less moo and you would have made first post.

That's not what the blockchain is for

[michelcolman]

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?

Re:That's not what the blockchain is for

[SLi]

Then configure your miners to not accept these transactions.

Essentially the blockchain is exactly this: A way to record information in an unforgeable way, for a fee to the miner. Bitcoin works, and the only way it can work, is by being a system that behaves in a desired way when each player maximizes their own benefit. (To a small extent this can be affected in a centralized fashion because the community can develop the reference implementation to a desired direction, but that may or may not turn to be anathema and may or may not be a powerful enough tool.)

True, blockchain bloat causes problems, and it's a limited resource. The bitcoin solution is to sell the space to the highest bidder, because generally that maximizes the seller's benefit. In a sense, someone saying "that's not what the blockchain is for" is very similar to someone complaining that people are using lithium to make these stupid batteries, driving its price up, and "that's not what lithium is for".

Whether Bitcoin can survive all the technical challenges in the long term is not at all obvious. For all we know, it might be that the entire model is game-theoretically self-destructive if analyzed thoroughly enough. In fact, it has provided quite a few surprises where the incentives have turned out to be something different than anticipated, causing weird scenarios where e.g. in some situations it's advantageous for a miner to not immediately report a found block. So far none of these have been such that they would cause a death spiral, but that's far from a given. (Arvind Narayanan's blog posts on the topic are quite insightful; you might want to start from https://freedom-to-tinker.com/...).

What's the next project?

[circletimessquare]

Ultra?

I'm joking of course but considering the historical significance of the name Enigma as a cypher that was spectacularly hacked to divulge crucial war secrets, it might not have been the best PR to call their project that name.

Rename.

Is bitcoin sustainable?

[doug141]

Bitcoin already uses 5000 times the energy visa does to record a financial single transaction. If parasites learn to use the bitcoin network for their own computations, that will get even worse.
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