Anchor on Bitcoin

Question

Is there a possibility with Multichain to publish a single cumulative hash of current blocks into Bitcoin (or any public Blockchain) at regular intervals? Like Openchain- https://docs.openchain.org/en/latest/general/anchoring.html

If not, I would like to develop this functionality. Can you please point me in the right direction of where and how can I start implementing this? I have already set up Multichain and installed all dependencies. 

I did go through http://www.multichain.com/developers/creating-connecting/#bitcoin-node but this is something different than anchoring.

Thank you!

Answer 1

You can certainly do this, but you would use your application layer to handle the retrieval of the current block hash from MultiChain and publication in the bitcoin blockchain. You can use getblockchaininfo to retrieve the latest block hash from MultiChain, then you can use another instance of MultiChain (as a node on the bitcoin network) to publish the hash using sendwithdata(from). Alternatively, you can use Bitcoin Core to publish the hash on the bitcoin blockchain, along with one of these libraries we developed for PHP and Python:

https://github.com/coinspark/php-OP_RETURN

https://github.com/coinspark/python-OP_RETURN

Bear in mind of course that, to publish anything on the bitcoin blcokchain, you'll need to purchase bitcoin and spend it, as transaction fees. The going rate for fast confirmations is around 0.0004 BTC, or 45 cents (at today's exchange rate), per bitcoin transaction.

Comments

@MultiChain Thank you for your suggestion but isn't it possible to build it as a part of Multichain itself? Because anchoring on Application Layer will result into single point of failure for the anchoring module.

The cost of Bitcoin is not a major concern for me at this point of time. So no worries! ;)

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I'm afraid it might not be so simple. If you did the anchoring in MultiChain, which MultiChain node/s would actually write the anchor to the bitcoin blockchain? If every node does it, you'll have multiple anchors per block, and what happens if they disagree with each other? If one node does it, then it's again a single point of failure.