That's excellent, I wasn't aware of stacks - thanks.  From a brief look it works in a very different way, using private auth tokens instead of public smart contracts to control access, but the result is very similar - a private data layer for dapps with full read/write/delete access controls.  Will do a deep dive.

No, they are valid points.  DApps built on public blockchains and decentralised storage networks is a beautiful concept.  However, there are problems with DSNs: they don't offer authenticated access controls, afaik (except by controlling who has the file id and decryption keys, which cannot be revoked); data can't be deleted; data can't be easily analysed; they don't help companies that store different parts of customer data in different tools (e.g. salesforce for sales data, mysql for the core product, etc).  This limits the use cases for DApps built on DSNs, it seems to me.

I guess the question is, is there value in having the access controls deployed on, say, Ethereum while the data is held on a private trusted server?  The vision would be a marketplace of 1000s of cloud-based vault services all competing on integrity, security, availability and feature set while some users run their own home servers and let their friends and family use them.  DApps for whom data integrity is not that important, like social media DApps, could allow users to choose where their data is held, while others could insist on using one of a set of trusted cloud vault services.  Companies that insist on storing their customer data locally would be able to demonstrate to a regulator they have an active smart contract proving they have their customer's permission to hold the data and conversely would have to delete the data if the customer terminated their contract.  Some cloud vault services could be gateways to DSNs.

Thanks.  Yes, one way to think of it is as a linux file system with file permissions defined in a smart contract.  Sounds pointless right?  I'm not so sure.  I think there are benefits that could be valuable to DApp developers:

From a DApp perspective the permissions are separated from the data which allows the data to be stored anywhere and the DApp to control access permissions using a state driven, auditable, authenticated smart contract that can accept money.  This opens up interesting new use cases like data monetisation and users taking control of their own data.  It also means the DApp developer doesn't need to deploy and configure their own backend server, instead they simply deploy a smart contract and use an existing cloud based vault server or allow each user to choose where their data is held.

For old-school users and businesses it could be seen as a stepping stone towards full decentralisation.  i.e. businesses can start exploring DApps without having to fundamentally change their existing infrastructure.

Smart data access is meant as an alternative to decentralised storage platforms like filecoin, sia, storj, ipfs and ipdb, and to storing data on-chain.  It can also allow companies to step lightly into the world of decentralised applications by allowing them to store off-chain data locally on existing infrastructure.

I'm looking for feedback on whether the following idea for 'smart data access' could be of any use for DApp development. It combines off-chain data storage with on-chain authenticated access controls. Smart contracts control the access rights to data stored in a 'vault' on any compatible private server, whether that's a home server, company server or cloud storage service. DApps send read/write requests directly to the server and authenticate using the user's key. The server queries the blockchain for the access rights before servicing or rejecting the requests. The life-cycle of the data in a vault is controlled by the vault's smart contract, which the DApp developer would write for the specific use case. Being a state machine the smart contract can be transacted with to, say, grant and revoke access for specific users or to transition through a pre-defined service life-cycle.

It's a simple concept but I think it has powerful applications. Would a generic off-chain storage solution like this that offered authenticated read/write/delete access be of use? I'd appreciate any feedback you have.

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Some example uses:

Blogging Dapp: a user's posts could be stored on a server of the user's choosing and the DApp could allow the user to grant and remove access for their friends.

Paywall: access to web content is granted and removed based on payment to the smart contract that controls the content's vault.

Online Service: access to different pieces of a user's data is granted to different companies in a supply chain, granting and revoking access throughout the life cycle of the service and finally deleting the data when the service is complete, perhaps after a legal retention period. The state of the service life-cycle is visible to all parties at all times and transitions are visible as blockchain transactions.

Company Storage: a company can hold all its documents and communications privately on its own servers while making the data accessible to DApps run by authenticated users.

GDPR Compliance: customer data can be held on a company's servers and access to update and delete the data is granted to the customer. Alternatively, the data could be held in the customer's own vault and access granted temporarily to the company.

https://github.com/Datona-Labs/datona-lib

Looks like your explainer video needs to be made public.

How do you plan to get the scientific community to migrate to your platform?

I second that.  I'm struggling to visualise how it would work from a user experience perspective.

You talk about billboards - how much infrastructure is needed to make this work?

Great website, by the way.

That's a really good question.  It's easy to ignore or dismiss the moderation side of things on the basis of free speech.  I think there are a few possibilities that depend on the type of social media platform.  

If you take a look at LBRY, the blockchain platform is completely decentralised and unmoderated so anyone can post any content.  The web based Odysee is a window to the LBRY platform and moderates the content it shows based on its policies.  In an ideal future, any aspiring editor should be able to deploy their own Odysee-like website with their own moderation policy and users can choose which they use.  This model might work for a decentralised version of twitter - in fact for anything based on public posts.

A decentralised Facebook probably doesn't need a platform wide moderator since users are in control of who can read their posts and communities can self moderate by arguing, unfriending, deleting posts, deleting comments etc.

Working together


We are considering using our "smart data access" concept as a private data layer for decentralised applications.  https://datona-lib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/what.html  The data layer is decentralised not in the sense of a p2p network but in the sense that anyone can deploy a data server and the user can choose which they use (or deploy their own).  If the user is technical enough they could use their own crypto and server.  For others the payment would go to whichever datona-enabled data service they use and whichever blockchain proxy service they use to publish and pay for transactions on their behalf.

Transparency through open source app and end-to-end encrypted data on decentralised storage, is what we are thinking.

The best place to contact us is on Discord: https://discord.gg/KypttX or by email: info@datonalabs.org

Nice reply Kavelj22

Well, I'm an atheist and I agree with your conclusion but I think the way you say it is a little dismissive!

Love it!  Yes, moral behaviour exists to manage relationships in a community.  Note also that any belief system or ideology that draws people together can have the same effect of managing relationships in the community.  All these can have a positive effect irrespective of the truth of any underlying existential claims - it is only necessary that people believe the claim, not that the claim itself is true. 

Do you dismiss the entire history of secular moral philosophy from the last 3000 years?  The idea that any book "completely teaches morality" shows a distinct lack of appreciation of the complexity of moral discourse.

The golden rule is a very powerful general idea indeed, but it's not without its criticisms.  For example, what motivates others may differ from what motivates you - the golden rule as you state it relies on the general idea that the way you like to be treated is the way others like to be treated.  This works for the majority of people but it's not a universal rule and fails miserably for outlying personalities.

Digital signatures are a simple example (e.g. opensig.net): The user buys tokens in order to write the hash of a file to the blockchain.  In this case it is the blockchain itself that provides the service and the miners receive the rewards.

There are many decentralised applications too.  You're right though, if the developers of these apps are trying to make a profit then they could charge something on top of the transaction fee or sell tokens to the user at a premium.  I'll think about this more.

Good idea.  I'll try to come up with an example.

Ah, I see.  In my model the miners are providing the service.  I've stripped off any layer 2 service that uses tokens as their payment method as I think it complicates things unnecessarily.

Thanks guys.


Quite right.  Miners isn't the right term.  'Node' is good for technical people but doesn't mean much for non-techies - mind you, neither does 'miners'.  Struggling to think of a good term: perhaps 'network providers'?



The 'users' are meant to be those actors - they are the ones using the service provided by network.  Are you thinking of something else?

Sign me up!  Do P&O do cruises of the underworld?  I suspect 'dining at the captain's table' has a different meaning on those trips.

Not sure it would help answer the questions but it might tell us what we'd like the answers to be.



1. Does the failure of one explanation add any credibility to another unless you can demonstrate that those are necessarily the only two options?



2. "...then how do you think it happened".  Are you infallible?  Could there be an explanation you haven't thought of?  Google "argument from ignorance" or "argument from personal incredulity".
3. Common sense is useful in everyday life for sure but is it a reliable method of getting to the truth?

I've been trying to describe tokenomics of a utility token to a non-techie crypto-noob friend.  The description is targeted at a specific project but it might be helpful for others too.  I'm trying to get to the underlying concepts while deliberately keeping it as simple as I can and avoiding describing the technology.  Here's what I've got so far - if anyone has any ideas for improvement I'd love to hear them.


Description of a utility token economy:

• The economy is an open market with three actors: users, token holders and miners.
• Users buy tokens on the open market so they can use services on the network.*
• Token holders are owners of a portion of tokens within an economy.
• Token holders provide liquidity on the open market - they provide a pool from which users can buy tokens to use the network.
• Miners run the network in return for fees from all transactions that users make on the network**.  These fees are paid in tokens which the miners may sell on the open market.

As in any economy the interactions between actors and the effect on the price is hugely complex.  Some points worth noting in very high level terms:

• As the platform matures more users join the economy, raising demand for tokens.  This has the effect of pushing up the price of the token since the total number of tokens is fixed.  Token holders can benefit from this price gain.
• The supply of tokens depends on how many token holders and miners are willing to sell at the given price, given the demand and market fundamentals etc.

* actually, application providers may buy tokens in bulk then supply them to users as part of a traditional paid service.  In this case the tokens (and the token price) will likely be invisible to the users as developers build application layers on top of the platform.  Note, application providers who buy tokens in bulk while the price of tokens is low will have a competitive advantage over others.

** Note: in the early years of platform development, when there are few users and few transactions, miners are encouraged to help run the network in exchange for minted coins.  The number of minted coins available to miners reduces algorithmically over time based on the economic model coded into the underlying blockchain software.  The reduction is designed to reflect the increasing number of transactions over time as more users join the economy.

Glad to see you are questioning your beliefs - everyone should, all the time.  The questions you have asked though are very high level and specific.  If you are questioning your beliefs you should try to get to the foundation of the issue.  Study epistemology: examine questions like 'what is truth?', 'how do I determine what is true?', 'do I care whether I believe false things or true things?'.  Study logic, critical thinking, common logical fallacies and common apologetics.  Survey philosophical schools of thought from the last 3000 years.  Hard work but if you approach with an honest open mind and don't cherry pick what you read it can do you nothing but good, no matter what you end up believing.

Indoctrination is disgusting, especially when it comes to concepts like hell.  Do you fear the hells of all religions or just the one you were indoctrinated in?

Sure, religions have been the major force driving morality over the last few thousand years, and are largely to credit for enabling us to self organise into large civilisations in the first place, but they evolved on the back of an entire history of human thought that must be considered.  Secular moral philosophy has also played a large part, particularly since the enlightenment.

Religions have provided the philosophical framework for morality, metaphysics and [generally flawed] epistemology in all civilisations of history.  However, civilisations as we know them only go back 10,000 years or so (and only 3000 years for those based around the great monotheistic religions I assume you are talking about).  Previous to that, when we lived in small tribes, we would presumably have had beliefs much like those found in remote tribes today, far less structured belief systems based largely on superstition and passed on by word of mouth.  These tribes today are not 'savages' and have moral rules enforced by the tribe.  For the previous 2 million years of hominid history we can only speculate (although a look at gorilla and chimpanzee groups might help) but its pretty safe to say our belief systems would have been very different from those today, probably atheistic in nature (e.g. animism rather than theism), and yet the shape of our moral behaviour was conducive to allow us to survive in social groups.  Clearly the rule that murder is generally bad, for example, would have applied in those primitive moral systems too.