Hi tonych,
Shower thought (almost certainly a stupid one as always happens when you don't exert deep thinking, as I haven't finished reading the white paper, and have no time right now to research feasibility):
Would it be possible to optionally (because it changes somewhat the privacy/anonymity model) save assets (including blackbytes) in the public DAG as a compressed and encrypted payload (not much differently of what is saved locally today) paying due commissions?
Maybe we could now use a different seed for each asset to generate private keys for them and some hash of these to encrypt assets payload after each transaction.
Wallets would scan the DAG trying to decrypt asset payloads to get balance and history (some optimizations may apply).
Somehow old saved payloads in the DAG could be pruned as assets carry their own history.
Pro:
- Massive improvement in usability, no need to back-up local assets after each transaction (simplicity is beauty).
Cons:
- Privacy model changes (thus to use it optionally) as now assets history only remains private as long as no one discover a way to decrypt the payload which is now publicly available.
- Increased storage requisites for the DAG (but it'd be optional and has costs)
If it were possible, users would have to store huge numbers of decryption keys because every payload has to be encrypted with its own key. They would convey a subset of these keys (instead of he payloads) to the new owner when making a payment. The keys are smaller in size than the original payloads but still have to be stored privately and backed up, so the backup problem is not solved.
The best solution of the backup problem is imho multisig.