Zooko

Truly decentralized, immutable and uncensorable microblogging

Zooko is a working-example, proof-of-concept proving that you can have a decentralized, immutable, and uncensorable microblog platform (like "twitter") in a truly decentralized manner without needing any 3rd party APIs and simply relying on cryptography.

What is Zooko?

Zooko uses the Handshake blockchain which allows you to fully own and control a name. While many use cases exist for Handshake, including federalist, DNS, and decentralized identity, Handshake is a versatile blockchain that also allows you to build any number of applications on top of it, without the need of smart contracts.

Zooko was named after Zooko Wilcox O'Hearn, one of the few remaining, original, Cypherpunks.

We're still writing code.

How it Works

Handshake is an incredibly secure blockchain. While many other chains are easy to abuse, Handshake is not one of them. That being said, there was one outlet that we could take advantage of, and that is the UPDATE covenant which allows for a DNS resource record with several types, GLUE, NS, among others, and most importantly, TXT.

This is what we take advantage of.

UPDATE Limitations

You can only call 1 UPDATE per block. This means that with our implementation, you can only Zooko once per block. Additionally, TXT has a limit. We are prepending our TXT with "zooko:" so the limit is 249 characters (255 less 6). That's 9 more than the leading microblog!

Writing a new post

Zooko will copy your DNS resource records over everytime you post, while replacing the last Zooko. Since TXT records are ignored when a NS record is present, this will not affect anything as we are using on-chain TXT records as opposed to authoritative server served TXT records which are preferred when an NS is present.

Proof of Concept

This is a quick, and simple, proof of concept. If someone was to build this into a full blown microblogging platform, a lot more "protocol" would likely need to be developed to integrate different kinds of interactions as well as 'compound interactions' using multiple strings in TXT records, which could allow for more than 1 action per block only limited by resource record max size limit. One could also hook this into the websocket to watch both the mempool and, as well, for new blocks. Finally, of course, someone could utilize web technologies and build a beautiful interface for this.

How to Install

1. Clone

git clone https://github.com/publiusfederalist/zooko

2. Get prepared

cd zooko
npm install hs-client hsd prepend readline stream

3. Setup wallet and node keys in the keys folder. If you use Bob, it is in the Setup. If you use hsd, you probably know how to do this already.

4. Now, just try it!

Commands

zpull

Updates the latest posts.

./zpull

zread

Reads the posts.

./zread
./zread <name>
./zread <block>

zpost

Posts a new microblog.

./zpost <wallet-id> <name> "<message>"

This will prompt you for your password (the password will not echo back to the terminal).

License and Copyright

(C) 2022 Publius Federalist

All Rights Reserved.

MIT LICENSED