Production Fork of Ethereum

Question

everyone!

I have a project, where I surely need to implement transparency of all the actions doing in the network. Let's say I want to create public asset tracking. So everybody who posts an asset in my system, can track it's state and be sure I'm not trying to cheat.

So I decided to put all events on blockchain. But I assume there are going to be plenty of them, so Ethereum mainnet is not suitable for me, as it's going to be irrationally expensive.

An idea to fork the Ethereum and run private network came to my mind.

1) Public network - I would allow everybody to use my private network (to mine, validate, post transactions, etc.)

While thinking about it I faced a problem: how is it possible to protect from 51% attack if I don't have ALOT of computation power on startup

2) Private network - only bounded servers would be allowed to perform actions on the blockchain

Please, tell me if my thoughts direction is wrong and there is some other options to implement trust and transparency in my case.

Answer 1

I recommend looking into Plasma and/or State Channels. Here's a good article about them: https://medium.com/l4-media/making-sense-of-ethereums-layer-2-scaling-solutions-state-channels-plasma-and-truebit-22cb40dcc2f4

They are meant for pretty much exactly what you are looking for. You can use the Ethereum main chain for data integrity but use a side chain (Plasma) for own transactions which don't need to be broadcasted to the entire Ethereum network.

The only downside is that both of those technologies are still quite new and real implementations are only slowly appearing.