Holochains

= "Holographic Storage for Distributed Applications".

URL: http://ceptr.org/projects/holochain

Whitepaper: http://ceptr.org/whitepapers/holochain

Description

Arthur Brock et al.:

"Holochain delivers on the dreams of making decentralized computing easy and real. It provides the underlying cryptographic fabric to maintain data integrity across unlimited peers without requiring consensus.

Integrity without consensus means:

● immediate and efficient processing, ● no proof-of-work, ● no proof-of-stake, ● no energy wasted on mining, ● no bottlenecks nor global delays.

In fact, Holochain is so efficient that you can run over 50 full nodes on a cell phone or a $35 Raspberry Pi computer. Holochain even enables scalable crypto-accounting to build new generations of asset-backed and value-stable cryptocurrencies.

Programmers can leverage our RAD tools (Rapid Application Development) to quickly build fully P2P web applications designed to operate on the scale of Twitter or Facebook with no centralized data centers or infrastructure. Each user just brings their own device to share a small amount of computing and storage.

Holochain meets the demands of people who want to:

● own their own data, ● control their identity, ● have automatic backups, ● customize their user experience, ● choose how to connect their applications, ● decide with whom to share their private information, ● and transact without dependence on banks or governments."

(https://files.holo.host/2017/12/Holo-Green-Paper.pdf)

Discussion

"Holographic storage for distributed applications. A holochain is a validating distributed hash table (DHT) where every node enforces validation rules on data against the signed chains where the data originated.

In other words, a holochain functions very much like a blockchain without bottlenecks when it comes to enforcing validation rules, but is designed to be fully distributed through sharding so each node only needs to hold a portion of the data instead of a full copy of a global ledger. This makes it feasible to run blockchain-like applications on devices as lightweight as mobile phones

Historically, data integrity has been ensured by restricting access to data. If we wanted to prevent anybody from tampering with data, we locked it behind firewalls, or set strict permissions on databases and file systems. Because with centrally stored data, having the ability to write to data typically means you can change whatever you want.

If we want to build peer-to-peer systems where we collectively hold data among many parties, we need better strategies for shared data integrity. Many are excited about building these kinds of applications on the blockchain, because they provide a strategy to maintain integrity of data that can be held by many peers without a single central authority.

However, other limitations have become apparent, such as high computational overhead for achieving consensus, and the Pareto Effects of Proof of Work and Proof of Stake which steer the system toward being more centralized than many would want.

Breakthroughs in shared data integrity enable new social, political, and organizational patterns with less tendencies toward corruption that emerge from power imbalances involved with selective parties controlling data, information, and protocols.

We believe Holochains are one of these breakthroughs, because they take a different approach to ensuring the integrity of shared data. Instead of being built on top of cryptographic tokens they are organized around cryptographic validation of people (peers) validated against an immutable cryptographic record of those peers actions.

This change allows us to manage data integrity without the massive overhead of computing consensus on a global ledger. Our monotonic, validating, graph DHT (distributed hash table) achieves eventual consistency while only allowing valid data to propagate and holding everyone accountable for their actions.

The lower overhead of this approach makes it feasible to run full nodes on devices like cell phones or tablets which don’t have massive computing power.

Holochain is designed as a data integrity engine for distributed applications. Unlike a distributed database, there are no methods for users to directly interact with the data because this would bypass application specific validation rules. All interactions happen only through the application code which enforce whatever business rules, application logic, or restrictions they need to, since different applications have different demands for strictness." (http://ceptr.org/projects/holochain)

More Information

• Pre-release Draft of whitepaper by Arthur Brock [1] and Eric Harris-Braun [2]:

"We describe a holographic data storage architecture which combines the data integrity assurance of Hash-Chains with the efficiency of Distributed Hash Tables while eliminating consensus bottlenecks typical of Blockchain and typical approaches to distributed computing."

• Holo