
Show HN: A new blockchain that can do email on-chain - trevelyan
Dear HN,<p>As a long-standing member of this community (2007!), I&#x27;m really pleased to announce the launch of the Saito project here.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;saito.tech" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;saito.tech</a><p>Since you probably haven&#x27;t heard of us, Saito is a terabyte-level blockchain designed to support email, social networks, payment channels, distributed forums, and other big-data applications directly on-chain.  We achieve scale for this by solving the fundamental economic problems with the proof-of-work and proof-of-stake consensus mechanisms. If you look into the network design, we think we&#x27;ll blow your mind!<p>Anyway, we&#x27;ve been reading the discussions here for the past several months about whether blockchains are useful and... well... hopefully Saito is going to end that debate! So if you&#x27;re interested in blockchain technology or just open-minded, I really hope you&#x27;ll check us out and let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions or questions. Right now we have an online demo, downloadable code on Github, and some resources explaining how Saito works and how to get started building apps with it.<p>Also, I should probably also mention that we&#x27;re hiring, with the caveat that we&#x27;re in Asia so anyone interested in joining the team should either be in this part of the world already or happy to work remotely.
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WhiteOwlLion
I think all .gov needs to use blockchain email so they can't erase e-mail
metadata. Not sure if we should be able to read the contents, but by court
order it could be revealed (political scandal). Otherwise, just the metadata
of time, from, to, etc is on the blockchain. No way to erased e-mails you
sent.

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notheguyouthink
I've been saying that about everything related to government. Their phone
calls, their sms, their email, office visits, etc.

The thing about government is that no one, not even government can be trusted.
Government however, has power. For obvious reasons, no one can govern the
government, so all we're left with is improving visibility, heavily.

Absolute power corrupts, and without oversight, they basically have absolute
power right now.

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billconan
does your chain carry all historical data forever? because that will be
costly. Do I, as a node, keep copies of emails that weren't sent to me or
forum posts that I'm not interested?

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billconan
interesting! you said in the whitepaper that you can delete history. I need to
read further.

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trevelyan
Hi Bill,

Yes -- Saito is the first "transient blockchain" and everything will
technically fall off the network eventually unless someone acts to preserve
it.

It _is_ possible to maintain data on-chain, although in most cases the users
sending transactions and the users receiving transactions will not want to pay
for that and will prefer bear the burden of archiving them. There is no reason
for the entire network to backup my email inbox, for instance. So "permanent
storage" will only really be needed for tokens that represent monetary value.

We do have two ways to maintain data on-chain in perpetuity though:

1\. applications can manually rebroadcast transactions whenever they near the
end of the chain. This is dirt-cheap and helps preserve the security of the
network for complicated reasons that you can read up about in our explanation
of how Proof-of-Transactions / Proof-of-Relay works.

2\. nodes creating new blocks are forced to rebroadcast transactions that meet
consensus/code-level criteria qualifying for rebroadcasting (i.e. their
"rebroadcast" flag is set and they have enough money to pay for it. We intend
this as a fallback rather than the main mechanism -- it will be more
expensive.

Generally though, shifting to a transient chain is important as it is one of
the steps needed to "fix" the economics of existing consensus mechanisms. It
allows us to price the cost of storing a transaction forever by dividing
infinity up into manageable chunks during each of which storage costs are
accurate and market-driven and fees are handed over to the nodes that are
actually doing the work in that point at time.

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arisAlexis
congrats. I wanted to do this for a long time but I lacked the skills. This is
definitely needed

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jonnismash
Hey u/trevelyan, any particular reason why the site isn't secured over https?

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craftyguy
Oh the irony in releasing a service that depends on cryptography..

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trevelyan
hey craftyguy -- thanks for the reply and for taking a look at Saito. You can
access the server over https if you'd like at
[http://demo.saito.tech](http://demo.saito.tech) (this runs through a reverse
proxy that layers on SSH) although this may break some links in our live demo.

The reason the demo defaults to plain http is that the server that feeds out
the applications is part of the full-node software and it does not support
HTTPS yet. We are intent on fixing this, but it didn't seem like a critical
thing to worry about for this dev release, which is focused on getting people
a working version that can be run on localhost and give people the tools to
build genuinely distributed applications. We hope to get this fixed in the
next two months before launching our public testnet and DNS system. Right our
biggest dev focus is overhauling the network code for multiclient connections.

With that said, in the long-run it won't matter if users http or https to
connect to the blockchain. Saito is not vulnerable to MITM attacks and users
can use Diffie-Hellman key exchange mechanisms to swap keys directly over the
blockchain. We can think of it as an improved version of TCP/IP that is
actually secure but that will cost a few fractions of a cent for every message
we need to send to unknown and anonymous peers.

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jonnismash
Wow that sounds pretty damn great, I look forward to seeing the dev happen as
time rolls. I will always call out non-SSL specifically when discussing all
crypto-things but clearly you and the team have thought this out as per your
detailed reply. Good luck on the project, I am for sure going to give the demo
a test run.

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hapnin
This looks promising and worth keeping an eye on. Good luck with the project!

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schrectacular
Seems great, definitely keep us updated!

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Cindycoin
Cool.This is something new.

