Public and Private Blockchains
Iroha can be ran in a variety of configurations. As the administrator of your own network, you can use different permission sets to decide what criteria must be met in order for some transaction to be accepted.
We provide two major sets of permissions: called a private and public permission sets. These need to be added into the genesis.json before you start an Iroha peer.
Below we outline the major differences in these two use cases.
Permissions
In a public blockchain, most accounts have the same set of permissions. In a private blockchain, most accounts are assumed not to be able to do anything outside of their own account or domain unless explicitly granted said permission.
INFO
Refer to the dedicated section on permissions for more details.
Peers
Any peer can join a public blockchain. For a private blockchain, automatic discovery of peers is turned off.
INFO
Refer to peer management for more details.
Registering accounts
Depending on how you decide to set up your genesis block (genesis.json), the process for registering an account might go one of two ways. To understand why, let's talk about permission first.
By default, Iroha allows all instructions to go through, until a permission validator that can restrict instruction execution has been registered. You can add permission validators to your genesis block by registering built-in permission tokens that we thought would be useful for private and public blockchain use-cases. However, in that case, the process of registering accounts is different.
When it comes to registering accounts, public and private blockchain have the following differences:
In a public blockchain, anyone should be able to register an account[1]. So, in theory, all that you need is a suitable client, a way to generate a private key of a suitable type (
ED25519), and that's it.In a private blockchain, you can have any process for setting up an account: it could be that the registering instruction has to be submitted by a specific account, or by a smart contract that asks for other details. It could be that in a private blockchain registering new accounts is only possible on specific dates, or limited by a non-mintable (finite) token.
In a typical private blockchain, i.e. a blockchain without any unique processes for registering accounts, you need an account to register another account.
Built-in permission validators for private blockchains cover the `typical private blockchain use-case.
INFO
As of writing, the set of public blockchain permissions is incomplete, and as such Iroha source code needs to be modified to run it in the public mode.
Refer to the section on instructions for more details about Register<Account> instructions.
In fact, once we have finished with our key-centric address scheme for accounts, you don't register an account as much as claim it. ↩︎