Integrate with VerSum?

[ELBQ]

Background for Non-Technical Users

VerSum makes up for the lack of SPV support in Counterparty. VerSum neutralizes arguments against Counterparty that live or die on Counterparty's lack of SPV support. With VerSum integration, serious criticisms thrown at Counterparty like this:

The advantage of a metacoin protocol is that it can allow for more advanced transaction types, including custom currencies, decentralized exchange, derivatives, etc, that are impossible on top of Bitcoin itself. However, metacoins on top of Bitcoin have one major flaw: simplified payment verification, already difficult with colored coins, is outright impossible on a metacoin. The reason is that while one can use SPV to determine that there is a transaction sending 30 metacoins to address X, that by itself does not mean that address X has 30 metacoins; what if the sender of the transaction did not have 30 metacoins to start with and so the transaction is invalid? Finding out any part of the current state essentially requires scanning through all transactions going back to the metacoin’s original launch to figure out which transactions are valid and which ones are not. This makes it impossible to have a truly secure client without downloading the entire 12 GB Bitcoin blockchain.

become null and void. Counterparty needs VerSum especially so now that smart contracts are playing a larger role in its ecosystem. Please give the whitepaper a read if you haven't already.

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VerSum ensures the accuracy and completeness of federated return data, regardless of datatype, with minimal client overhead.

VerSum is a refereed delegation of computation, or RDoC, system. A VerSum client outsources a computation to a pool of independent servers, and can determine the correct result as long as it can reach one honest server. To handle large inputs, outputs, and intermediate state, VerSum stores all data in authenticated data structures.

VerSum guarantees that data returned to lightweight clients from remote servers is authentic and complete if just one server of many federated servers is honest. It was designed in part to obsolete the need for SPV in Namecoin, and the authors claim limited success in testing.

I can't stress the importance of VerSum integration enough. If you want secure lightweight Counterparty clients complete with smart contract support, you really need VerSum. VerSum is absolutely instrumental to the healthy growth of Counterparty.

I will pledge 125 XCP towards this goal, because I believe VerSum benefits every Counterparty user.

[ghost]

It's recommended that you post the bounty to Bountysource, so that people can verify its legitimacy. This will also get your post more exposure.

https://www.bountysource.com/issues/6083247-crowdfunding-improving-counterparty-security-and-scalability-with-versum?utm_campaign=plugin&utm_content=tracker%2F494307&utm_medium=issues&utm_source=github

[ELBQ]

This RDoC system was developed by tenured professors at MIT. VerSum is the only viable means I'm aware of for scaling Bitcoin smart contracts in Counterparty. It's groundbreaking technology, and as such would be a very serious undertaking, requiring stakeholder buy-in at all levels.

Lighthouse crowdfunding would be preferable to BountySource but still lacks formal organization and buy-in from top developers.

In absence of Lighthouse and Counterparty core dev interest, I recommend voicing your opinion and your pledge ITT.

Saying that you pledge 125 XCP towards VerSum integration, and then talking to more people about this is what we should be doing, and so it is what I am doing. VerSum integration is simply incomparable to a translation of Counterwallet, or "adding Trezor support" for $15.

[ghost]

It's complex, that's why it's early to say whether someone may be interested. Give it some time.

[adamkrellenstein]

This is a really interesting proposal. What exactly would integration with Counterparty look like?

[ELBQ]

VerSum is available here for reference: https://github.com/jellevandenhooff/versum.

As to how their approach compares to Ethereum's, and how to implement VerSum for Bitcoin smart contracts, I can't say. Namecoin thin client remote key-value lookups are straightforward to secure, as that was a design goal:

For example, consider a client outsourcing the storage of a binary search tree to a server. To perform a lookup in the tree, the client asks the server to perform a lookup, and to transmit all the nodes that the lookup function accessed to the client. The client then checks that the server sent the correct nodes by computing the hashes, and performs the lookup itself to determine the result. If either the hashes are incorrect, or the server has not sent some required nodes, the computation fails. Otherwise, the client is guaranteed a correct result, as it has performed the computation itself on the correct input.

The idea behind the algorithm is that the function that will perform the next step (the innermost incomplete, meaning not yet returned, function call) can efficiently be run on the client up to the point where it performs the next step, because any nested function calls made by the innermost incomplete function have their results already available in the computation history.

Minutes spent consulting with the co-authors of VerSum could pay dividends. The authors of the paper are clearly cognizant of the cryptocurrency space, and may appreciate interest from platforms like Counterparty.

[ghost]

If this works as described, consider me very interested. I think it's definitely worth looking into.

[adamkrellenstein]

Closing because 'integration' isn't well defined.