Backing up Ethereum on BSV blockchain: A better way to secure blockchain data long-term

15 views 8:10 am 0 Comments February 7, 2024

Could you back up the entire Ethereum blockchain on BSV?

The answer is yes, technically—and any other blockchain you like as well. Last week,
mintBlue CIO Pieter Den Dooven proved the concept by creating a process that saves a copy of Ethereum’s on-chain records in BSV transactions. His process saves only new blocks, but he said it’s also possible to store all the records from Ethereum’s history if needed.

Does that need to exist? Time will tell, although the topic of total blockchain size and the amount of data a blockchain should retain into perpetuity (and how this should be managed) comes up more often as the technology matures. In the meantime, Den Dooven’s demonstration shows how much cheaper it is for BSV to do exactly the same things Ethereum does and secured by the superior proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism.

Is Ethereum ‘deleting data’?

The discussion on “backing up” the Ethereum blockchain on BSV sprang from discussions involving attorney and former Ethereum advisor Steven Nerayoff. Nerayoff recently made several allegations of insider dealings at Ethereum and other blockchain projects and detailed his early concerns over Ethereum’s governance structure. His release of conversation recordings from 2015 has been nicknamed “ETHgate.”

Ethereum’s roadmap does refer to “The Purge,” or the clearing of older on-chain data at some point, ostensibly to save space and boost efficiency. Separate from Nerayoff’s various claims and others concerning the true motives for wanting to delete Ethereum records, Dr. Craig S. Wright was asked about the possibility of storing a backup copy of its data on the BSV blockchain.

“Easy—sync and use the hash header,” Dr. Wright replied.

Within 10 minutes, Den Dooven said he’d set up a process to do just that, using mintBlue’s system and Web3 developer platform Alchemy.

Given BSV’s unbounded scaling capacity, the notion of running any (or all) other blockchains on the BSV network has popped up. sCrypt founder Xiaohui Liu demonstrated the concept at the Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai in 2022, where he also revealed a transpiler that would convert code written in Ethereum’s Solidity language into Bitcoin Script.

A new Ethereum block is mined approximately every 10-20 seconds and, on an individual level, isn’t large by blockchain standards. That’s still a lot of data, though each block contains information such as transaction data, account balances, contract code and state, decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), non-fungible token (NFT), token data, and verification. While it’s possible to store accompanying media/document files on-chain, high usage costs and congestion issues usually mean Ethereum’s token creators store these files off-chain, using on-chain data as a pointer to these files. BSV does not have these issues (other than, for example, large video files, which will likely become more affordable in the future).

CoinGeek spoke to Den Dooven to get more details about what he’s doing and why it may be necessary to back up Ethereum and other blockchains. If you’d like to know more, read the Q&A below.

Do you know why Vitalik Buterin was supposedly deleting/hiding data from the blockchain?

The Ethereum roadmap includes a stage called “The Purge,” which is presumably focused on reducing the costs associated with network participation. This is achieved by clearing old history and data from the blockchain. A tweet claimed Vitalik is actually doing this to remove evidence in the face of serious allegations. We can only speculate on the why, but as usual, Ethereum’s new strategy for data feels like reinventing the wheel, but with square edges. Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s over there, casually flipping through its whitepaper, whispering, “Psst, check out Section 7; we’ve been rolling smoothly with round wheels since ’09!”

Ethereum introduces fixed periodic checkpoints, where the state of the network at these points is agreed upon and considered final. Bitcoin incorporates pruning through its
Merkle Tree structure. This means older transaction data can optionally be removed by choice while keeping the proofs of what happened available. The key difference lies in Ethereum’s focus on consensus-based checkpoints for network state finality and Bitcoin’s use of Merkle trees for efficient transaction verification, coupled with the option of pruning to manage blockchain size.

Are you only backing up data from this point forward, and is it possible to also save the entire record from Ethereum’s history (i.e., from 2015)?

For now, we’re only backing up data from this point forward. This is just for simplicity. We are not running an Ethereum node and are not really spending any resources on this. However, it is possible to save Ethereum’s history on BSV. The primary reason for not doing it is the setup time involved. If anyone reading this has an Ethereum node running and wants to sync it to BSV, reach out, and we’ll set it up in no time.

From a technical standpoint, how are you using mintBlue/Alchemy to do this?

Alchemy has a webhook feature that can be configured to be called when certain events on Ethereum happen. In this case, I configured it to call a URL, with the entire block as a payload, whenever a new block is mined. Zapier is then used to collect the requests and forward them to a transaction creation function in mintBlue, resulting in the entire Ethereum block getting published on BSV. It’s not a great setup because, technically, Zapier isn’t needed for this to work. The only reason to use Zapier was for simplicity’s sake. It allowed me to literally set it up in 10 minutes. This showcases the power of these platforms.

A better approach would be to deploy a backend, collecting the Alchemy webhooks and sending them to mintBlue, removing the cost associated with Zapier events. For clarity, the costs associated with publishing the entire Ethereum activity to BSV are about $50 per month. For comparison, $50 allows you to pay for only about 12 Ethereum transactions.

Have you received any expressions of interest from anyone about funding a continuation of the project?

Not really.

What is your approach to handling the massive size of Ethereum’s blockchain when backing it up on Bitcoin SV?

At mintBlue, we don’t consider the Ethereum blockchain size massive at all. Each block is about 250kb, about the size of a PDF file. An entire Ethereum block can thus fit in a single BSV transaction, resulting in about $0.0002 of transaction fees for an entire block.

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