The status chain

Pyledger does not use a blockchain or any similar protocol because it would be very inefficient for a tool that is not distributed. The internal storage for every contract is not divided in blocks, since each state is stored as a register in a SQL database.

One of the important features of the blockchain is that it is impossible for anyone, even the owner of the data, to tamper with its contents. Pyledger also has this feature, but in a slightly different fashion. All the statuses stored in the ledger for every contract are hashed with the the previous state’s hash and the date and time of insertion. It is therefore impossible to modify a register of the database without leaving an obvious footprint on the sequence of hashes. This is a kind of status chain instead of a block chain.

All the hashes are secure, since pyledger uses SHA-256, the same as in Bitcoin. This means that one can verify that anyone hasn’t been tampering with the backend database that stores the statuses. We can use the verify command of the client to check that the greeter smart contract works as expected. We will start an example session to understand some of the features of this status chain with one of the previous examples:

(env) $> pyledger-shell
PyLedger simple client
(http://localhost:8888)> call Hello say_hello Guillem
Hello Guillem for time #1
(http://localhost:8888)> call Hello say_hello Guillem
Hello Guillem for time #2
(http://localhost:8888)> call Hello say_hello Guillem
Hello Guillem for time #3
(http://localhost:8888)> status Hello
{'counter': 3}
(http://localhost:8888)> verify Hello
'Contract OK'

The status command checks and prints the last status of the contract attributes, while the verify command verifies at the server side that all the statuses of the attributes are consistent. If any of the statuses is inconsistent with the chain, that inconsistency and its timestamp will be printed.

Of course, you may not trust the server-side operations on the status chain, which is quite smart. For that reason you can dump all the statuses of the contract with their corresponding signatures and timestamps with the following command:

(http://localhost:8888)> status Hello dump ./hello-ledger.json
Contract data dump at ./hello-ledger.json
(http://localhost:8888)> exit

The dumped file looks like this:

[{'attributes': 'gAN9cQBYBwAAAGNvdW50ZXJxAUsAcy4=',
  'hash': 'Z2VuZXNpcw==',
  'when': '2017-03-15T18:24:27.523828'},
 {'attributes': 'gAN9cQBYBwAAAGNvdW50ZXJxAUsBcy4=',
  'hash': 'eRs+YxhvKIyUdl++TQZ5sCcMDE0aoaNKn1swFQ44bMM=',
  'when': '2017-03-15T18:24:38.846864'},
 {'attributes': 'gAN9cQBYBwAAAGNvdW50ZXJxAUsCcy4=',
  'hash': 'ZGELWR6y7n+hneBbR+8x9PwaRpBi3Bi0CI/T+9J7ccY=',
  'when': '2017-03-15T18:24:39.580593'},
 {'attributes': 'gAN9cQBYBwAAAGNvdW50ZXJxAUsDcy4=',
  'hash': '7B+OH/4xxJz6J6NOixl32F1vXrWZFNQKMR7pe/HO7gY=',
  'when': '2017-03-15T18:24:39.925244'}]

Every state has three properties. The first one is the hash, which is a base64-encoded SHA-526 hash; the second one is the timestamp of the addition to the database in the ISO 8601 format, while the third are all the attributes of the contract, also properly serialized.

Note

If you want to deserialize the attributes to look inside that funny string, they are pickled and then base64 encoded

If you want to verify the dumped statuses of the contract you can use the utility pyledger-verify:

$> pyledger-verify --data hello-ledger.json
...
DONE

where every dot is one successfully verified step.

If you tamper with this file, or the database that stores the information, even changing a single bit, the status chain will inform you of the inconsistency giving its timestamp.

 [{'attributes': 'gAN9cQBYBwAAAGNvdW50ZXJxAUsAcy4=',
   'hash': 'Z2VuZXNpcw==',
   'when': '2017-03-15T18:24:27.523828'},
  {'attributes': 'gAN9cQBYBwAABGNvdW50ZXJxAUsBcy4=',
   'hash': 'eRs+YxhvKIyUdl++TQZ5sCcMDE0aoaNKn1swFQ44bMM=',
   'when': '2017-03-15T18:24:38.846864'},
  {'attributes': 'gAN9cQBYBwAAAGNvdW50ZXJxAUsCcy4=',
   'hash': 'ZGELWR6y7n+hneBbR+8x9PwaRpBi3Bi0CI/T+9J7ccY=',
   'when': '2017-03-15T18:24:39.580593'},
  {'attributes': 'gAN9cQBYBwAAAGNvdW50ZXJxAUsDcy4=',
   'hash': '7B+OH/4xxJz6J6NOixl32F1vXrWZFNQKMR7pe/HO7gY=',
   'when': '2017-03-15T18:24:39.925244'}]

This is the output of the pyledger-verify tool with the manipulated file:

$> pyledger-verify --data hello-ledger.json
 Inconsistency 2017-03-15T18:24:38.846864..
DONE