Using blockchain technology to protect the property rights of digital works

Rage Comment : Although in theory, the capacity of distributed ledgers is unlimited, so data can be stored at will. However, the existing infrastructure cannot provide such a large computing power, and the scalability of blockchain has not been fully released. Therefore, if we just follow the traditional way and blindly increase the amount of data storage in the ledger, it will pose a great threat to its security. So a startup company in New York, Mine Labs, uses the IPFS protocol to build a new data storage solution Mediachain. IPFS, which integrates multiple technologies, can provide data encryption verification and system computing power support. So far, this is still the best solution.

Translation: Annie Xu

Nasdaq said that Mine Labs, a startup in New York, has developed a metadata protocol based on blockchain. The system, called Mediachain, uses the hypermedia transmission protocol Interplanetary File System (IPFS) to protect the property rights of digital works. Other blockchain-based authentication systems use encrypted IDs to protect centrally managed data, but they limit the amount of data stored in transactions.

In order to encrypt and store the copyright of digital works in the Bitcoin blockchain, most blockchain startups do the following:

1. Use OP_RETURN or CoinSpark to create an encrypted ID and save it to the blockchain to represent these centrally managed data;

2. Use a custom distributed ledger to bind metadata directly to each transaction.

Both methods of encrypting metadata into a blockchain have their own drawbacks.

Limited capacity

The maximum data capacity allowed by the OP_RETURN built-in code of the Bitcoin protocol is 40 bytes per transaction, which makes it difficult to store more metadata strings in the blockchain. As a result, this method is inefficient and experts believe it will lead to "blockchain bloat."

The second method has a flaw in its security. New networks that lack miners and computing power are defenseless against 51% attacks. Once the blockchain and data volume expand, the computing power required to protect data security will become even more strained.

Considerations for network computing speed

Pete Dushenski

According to blogger Pete Dushenski, low walls are easy to attack, and “urban development comes at the expense of security.” The size of the city he refers to is the blockchain, and the height of the wall is naturally a reference to computing speed. The larger the distributed ledger, the more computing power is required to maintain the existing security level.

Rather than relying on blockchain’s built-in capabilities to store metadata, Mine Labs has developed new ways to verify data without having to store large amounts of it.

Blockchain: A new way to verify data

The Mediachain protocol uses IPFS to store data to make up for the technical deficiencies of existing startups, by adding data to the blockchain and using timestamps to verify information. Then, digital information providers use a decentralized composite system to make information and images interoperable and searchable, and encrypt product copyrights.

Denis Nazarov of Mine Labs said that Mediachain is a collaborative federated media metadata protocol that provides people with the ability to identify copyrights of creative works. Copyright owners sign these metadata statements with cryptographic signatures. The blockchain timestamp of the statement in the distributed ledger is stored in IPFS. These statements can be retrieved through search.

The arrival of the IPFS protocol

IPFS is a hypermedia transmission protocol developed by open source community contributors and the IPFS community, which supports the development of fully distributed applications. The concept of IPFS is similar to the network, providing a high-throughput block storage mode and encrypted hyperlinks for specific content. The unique advantage of IPFS is that as the basis for application construction, it provides cryptographic proof or computing power support for all data sets in the system.

Arkadiy Kukarin of Mine Labs said that IPFS, known as the "new hypermedia transmission protocol," is a stack that integrates the best distributed system ideas of the past few years to provide a globally unified addressable space for everyone, including self-proving file systems, BitTorrent swarms, DHTs, and Merkle DAGs.

"The new object format, recently modeled using JSON-LD, supports fully schema-rich connected data storage in this system."

After adding the unique cryptographic hash of digital information to the encrypted data of the IPFS system, the link of the information cannot be changed. Mediachain publishes the data-related cryptographic hash on the Bitcoin blockchain, providing irreversible and tamper-proof data support for digital information verification.