Yesterday, we explored the differences between a Merkle DAG and vessel’s DAG. Today’s topic revolves around how combining wyrd’s conflict-free, replicated data type (CRDT) with vessel makes a specific kind of CRDT, namely a DAG-based one.
Conflict-Free, Replicated Data Types
A quick recap on CRDTs first.
They’re data types, largely fairly simple ones, such as counters or sets. And they’re conflict-free, meaning that multiple parties can modify them concurrently, and when their respective modifications get synchronized, each party with the full set of modifications will reconstruct the same state.
This permits for both offline- or local-first operations that …
One of the recurring conversations I’m having is on whether vessel is a Merkle DAG or Merkle Tree/Trie, and every time I have to start over with explaining that it is not. And this is a deliberate choice.
In this post, I’d like to explore the differences – and this post will also kick off a mini series on how vessel and it’s sibling project wyrd together form a DAG-based conflict-free, replicated data type (CRDT) akin to a Merkle CRDT.
Merkle Trees
But first things first. What is a Merkle tree, or trie, or directed acyclic graph (DAG)?
It’s an elegant concept by which you can easily identify arbitrarily large data. It goes like this:
- Chop up the data into …
With 2023 over, and some time between now and the last update, it’s perhaps a good moment to reflect on what happened in 2023 and where the project is right now.
Achievements
Last year saw the closing of our grant from , who have been excellent partners for the past two years! I don’t think I can overstate how important this grant has been for our work.
In particular, a longer-running grant meant the focus could be more on actual research – trying things out and writing up the results – and less on implementation. Though of course, as always, we strive to do both.
In this case, it turned out that the research was necessary. While of course you start any grant work …
I was thrilled to be on stage with the for the 2023 edition of EmpoderaLIVE. Giorgio and I followed a strong segment from Joyce Dogniez of the which delved into the intersection of human rights issues and the Internet already.
2023 EmpoderaLIVE: Interpeer and Tor Projects on Privacy and Data Protection as Fundamental Human Rights
After Giorgio explained how the Tor project saves lives right now, my part was relatively simple – I mostly said that I want to make Tor project obsolete.
Below is the full transscript.
Introduction: Privacy and data protection as a fundamental human right. That’s what we’re about to hear about.
The Interpeer project tries to find a secure and …