Following a tweet that was published by an anonymous developer, the top representatives of the Ripple blockchain, from Wietse Wind to CTO David Schwartz, have been working on a solution to limit a tool called IndImm.
Announcing the beta release of IndImm. IndImm, using the IndImm Messaging Protocol(IMP) on top of the #Ripple #blockchain, allows users to upload files of ANY SIZE to the ripple blockchain and exist forever to be downloaded, #Indestructible and #Immutable. #crypto #censorship pic.twitter.com/VCZsrpmNUm
— BlockChan.Ca Censor Proof, Crypto Powered Forum (@ind_imm) July 23, 2019
As can be read in the tweet, IndImm has been developed on the Ripple blockchain and allows uploading any file of any size to the XRP blockchain.
In response, Wietse Wind, founder of XRP Labs, praised the developer for having created something revolutionary for the Ripple blockchain, while also pointing out that this tool can be used to both flood the blockchain and make it unmanageable.
“I’m worried. I operate a full history node on the XRP ledger. I am very very much afraid of what will happen when your service will get some actual use. It’ll be a matter of time before illegal content will be uploaded. Especially with the hate against the XRP community from maxi’s. When someone uploads pirated content, or worse: child abuse images, no one would be able to remove that from their full history servers. That would mean it would become a legal nightmare to run full history nodes, not only for me, but for all XRPL enthusiasts and businesses. In the long term I would suggest an amendment for the XRPL to exponentially increase the minimum transaction fee when large memo’s are being sent. That would render this ‘use case’ non viable. Again: I really appreciate your efforts to develop for the XRP ledger, and please keep on doing so! But if you want to store files, consider using tech.”
Obviously, discussions on how to solve or limit this problem began immediately. One proposal involves changing the cost of the fees and taking into account the weight of the relevant memo: once a certain threshold is exceeded, it would become very expensive to use the Ripple blockchain to save the data. This would not prevent a whale from spending crazy sums to upload whatever they want.
Ripple’s CTO, David Schwartz, instead, proposed to process large transactions without prioritising them and to leave them pending for a long time before being included in the blockchain or to impose an exorbitant fee on accounts that send many large transactions which they would have to pay to use the Ripple blockchain.
“I’d prefer approaches that de-prioritize transactions based on size when recent ledger space consumption is especially elevated over approaches that raise the required minimum fees. Another possible option is to track recent ledger space consumption by account and require higher fees from accounts that have sent a lot of transactions, or a lot of large transactions, recently. Though this might just encourage determined attackers to use large numbers of accounts, I guess. One the bright side, I don’t believe there’s any serious short-term attack. I believe the threat is that an attacker can maliciously gradually increase the cost of running a server and keeping history over a long period of time.”
IndImm is still in the beta phase, however, in the future, all the code will be released to use this new type of protocol.
