Analysis of blockchain immutability

Rage Comment : The immutability of blockchain can permanently store data and evade censorship, but many projects have exaggerated the effectiveness of blockchain immutability. If data cannot be tampered with, it will take up a lot of resources. Saving all transaction data is very memory-intensive, which directly leads to high costs. For those who store data permanently on Bitcoin, there are currently two options: "OP_RETURN" and 'Transaction Output' (TXO).

Translation: Nicole

Why the immutability of blockchain is an eternal topic

Cannot be tampered with!

It’s a magical buzzword that can turn a simple database into a multi-million dollar venture capital crowdfunding platform. However, most projects that promote this feature are not completely honest about what kind of immutable service they provide. It is also increasingly clear that almost all of these claims are exaggerated.

So what is immutability? Immutability is one of the characteristics of blockchain, which can permanently store data and circumvent censorship, although there is a short period of time when there is no material incentive to do so. Generally speaking, "forever", before the emergence of blockchain technology, immutability appears in a closed system and is kept by a specific custodian. After the emergence of blockchain technology, this idea continues, and such immutability is just a magical function of blockchain. However, nothing is more outrageous than this idea.

Defining immutability

In the Bitcoin world, immutability is only applicable to proof-of-work mechanisms, and few other fields outside of Bitcoin would claim that their systems have similar immutability.

However, energy consumption aside, the truth is that immutability is very rare in all blockchains, including Bitcoin. Most blockchains promote a system where the data set of all network participants is called a "folder", and these files are cryptographically signed by network participants and can be disseminated to all participants in the network. Readers of industry marketing philosophy will think that because these files are signed, they should be shared with all subsequent participants to a certain extent.

However, such mechanisms are tied into the same way that secure transactions are tied into current database and information delivery systems. Even the "SMTP" protocol for sending emails supports the transmission of various forms of information in a single encrypted request, and such batching is very common in most server-internal messaging protocols.

So, what’s different about blockchain? Well, not that much.

At first glance, Bitcoin full nodes appear to impose a need on participants to store data. However, the Bitcoin Core team has been working to reduce these storage requirements.

Pruning is a feature that Ethereum has long advocated for and is a design goal, and for all coders in the blockchain space, immutability seems to be a bug, not a feature.

Space limitations

Why? The obvious reason is that using such a feature is very expensive, mobile users do not have enough disk space to store all the transaction data in the network, and users cannot tolerate unlimited restarts just to speed up the node and download all the transactions that have occurred.

As the Internet develops, the demand for bandwidth increases. Similarly, the response time of tracking system status is also increasing.

That's a lot of money for a low-cost system.

If IoT becomes a mainstream target for blockchain, it would not be reasonable to gather all the resources needed to maintain all the world's data.

So how do you add immutability to a blockchain? Not by buying it, of course, or by going to great lengths to reach consensus with people who don’t store your data.

Possible solutions

For those who want to store data permanently on Bitcoin, there are currently two options: "OP_RETURN" and 'Transaction Output' (TXO). OP_RETURN is a relatively recent invention designed to allow programmers to more easily encode data into transactions without affecting the functionality of the blockchain.

This mechanism is very popular in raw data protocols such as Omni, Open Assets, Blockstack, and Factom. "TXO" encoding is less popular and is generally used in projects such as Counterparty and Drop Zone.

What is the difference between the two?

TXO encoding disguises data as user addresses, which are difficult to distinguish from real user addresses. The label given to data by OP_RETURN encoding is just data, and it disguises the encoded data as network user value transfer without any disguise.

So why would anyone want to encode data into an address? This is to prevent the network from discarding data.

It is very important that the blockchain keeps track of output interfaces so that it can stay in sync with the network. If a node loses the output interface of a user, that node may make a payment again after making a payment once, resulting in a double payment.

This is how nodes are generally incentivized to track data - and it usually costs money to do so.

Moreover, it is currently impossible for the network to lose data disguised as a blockchain user’s wallet. Unfortunately for blockchain designers, the economic reality of immutability is unsettling.

Cost Benefit

Immutability services are very expensive.

Bitcoin developers have always been vigilant to filter out as many "fake" users as possible. Due to the way these transaction outputs are encoded (especially unspent outputs), they usually need to be stored in expensive network node storage - random access memory (RAM).

Putting data in random access memory reduces the number of participants in the blockchain and increases the time it takes to run transactions. For any educated blockchain engineer, this is a huge cost to implement and a tragedy of the commons for all participants in the network.

What is more likely to happen is that immutability will be seen as a bug rather than a feature when running Bitcoin, with “full nodes” deleting data more often than they save it.

For non-Bitcoin systems, these issues are compounded. Many systems are designed to be immutable without providing incentives for nodes to store data, and they don’t have to worry about not having that functionality, which is often much easier to lose than Bitcoin’s OP_RETURN.

Many like SMTP (the technology behind email), nodes only store messages that are relevant to them. This "feature" of not storing irrelevant data is what allows the global email system to handle so much information and scale accordingly to the needs and size of the entire population.

For those who believe in the immutability of blockchain, the liquidation will come soon and in an orderly manner.

Permanent Preservation Declaration

Who controls the world’s data, and what incentives do blockchain vendors offer users to achieve this goal? While many are attracted to the immutability of blockchain, most claims are at best a return to basic signature mechanisms that have been around for decades, and few of these claims have solutions that distinguish their systems from current information transmission.

In theory, the concept of immutability is great, but it is a questionable proposition that some miraculous benevolent server will appear to run this service. Of course, blockchains will make servers much more convenient to operate than the current HTTP system. Users of blockchain systems should first understand some basic issues about how and why the institutions they compete with store their data. This is because we are increasingly convinced that once such systems can scale, such promises will soon be broken.

As for Bitcoin’s promise of immutability, it remains to be seen what actions will be taken to adjust TXO storage, but given recent activity in the Bitcoin developer community, benevolent servers are a more popular option.

While the world searches for blockchain applications beyond the transfer of monetary value, programmers will soon find solutions to the technology’s “decentralization”. In layman’s terms, the unlimited immutability of “blockchain” will eventually become a permanent statement that will soon catch up with the limited resources of our beloved decentralized Internet.