Discussions in crypto, when civilized, are around scalability (ie. tx fees) and security. Hidden behind these high level properties are some fundamental underlying properties that are so central they can be found in any blockchain.
This properties are:
- Data availability guarantees
- Compute or execution guarantees
Classifications
1. Part of consensus
When Bitcoin was release data availability was not a topic of discussion. That's because data can be expected to be stored for nodes that are part of consensus. If nodes omit any blockchain data then they might not being able to compute the blockchain state and risk losing their consensis rewards.
2. Storage deals
A completely different approach is Filecoin deals. To be clear that is different from Filecoin consensus which follows a conventional pBFT leader-based consensus. Filecoin deals are essentially a marketplace with storage providers, each provider has a reputation based on their history and data is usually stored in multiple operators for better resilience.
3. Slashable DAS
If there's agreement on the blockchain data you can run a node to provide an execution environment. That means that data can be safeguard with "cheaper" methods but still have the same security guarantees.
One such method is data availability sampling (DAS) where a blockchain stores data and does not care about execution. The data are guarantee to be available by random sampling or in other words by continuously requesting random pieces so nodes cannot omit any to not lose rewards.
4. Optimistic DAS
A similar method is optimistic data availability sampling. This method still employs succinct proofs to ensure node's store the data but does not enforce slashing for nodes that do not provide the proofs.
More options
1. Sharding
Data sharding is a method to split data or execution in "committees" that only process part of the blockchain. Near protocol is focusing on sharding its mainnet that is expected to split the network in 4 and hence improve its scalability by 4x.
2. Expiry
State expiry is way to store non-permanent data in a blockchain. Storing data temporarily means that the blockchain size grows in a slower pace and hence nodes will eventually be able to store more data.
Read more on:
https://www.tzionis.com/classifying-blockchain-tech
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