Immutable and Democratic Data in permissionless Peer-to-Peer Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores decentralized data storage in permissionless peer-to-peer networks, focusing on Distributed Ledger Technologies and hybrid systems, with prototypes demonstrating their potential compared to traditional databases.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for immutable, democratic data storage in permissionless P2P systems and presents prototype implementations evaluated against conventional databases.

Findings

Prototypes demonstrate feasibility of decentralized data persistence.

Hybrid systems combining DLTs with traditional databases show promising performance.

Decentralized storage offers increased transparency and resilience.

Abstract

Conventional data storage methods like SQL and NoSQL offer a huge amount of possibilities with one major disadvantage, having to use a centralized authority. This authority may be in the form of a centralized or decentralized master server or a permissioned peer-to-peer setting. This paper looks at different technologies on how to persist data without using a central authority, mainly looking at permissionless peer-to-peer networks, primarily Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and a combination of DLTs with conventional databases. Afterwards it is shown how a system like this might be implemented in two prototypes which are then evaluated against conventional databases.