External Access To A Private Ethereum Blockchain

Question

Background Info

I have been playing around with Ethereum and I have created a DAPP on the Ethereum blockchain inside Azure Kubernetes. Everything up to this point has been a good experience but the whole idea of using this technology is to demonstrate immutability.

The blockchain at the moment is private and therefore is centralized right now because the infrastructure is hosted and maintained by Azure under my subscription. In the future, I was considering moving to an external trusted provider like Infura

Question

My question is how do I allow external clients to verify the blockchain. The DAPP has APIs to extract data from smart contracts but how do they validate I am using blockchain technology under the hood and can they access it themselves?

1. Can they access the GETH instance directly? is this usual practice or is there another way?

2. Is there a way with Quorum to give them access to query view data on the blockchain but prevent them from mining?

   • If Quorum allows direct access for peers to the blockchain what is the best and simplest approach to recommend? i.e do they need an experienced Ethereum/blockchain developer to validate the data?

Answer 1

The question is too broad and the answer depends on the concrete usecase.

In specific:

Can they access the GETH instance directly? is this usual practice or is there another way?

You can let them connect and synchronize with your private network as a network participant. In this case, they would be able to validate transactions themselves and see all public data available in your network.

Is there a way with Quorum to give them access to query view data on the blockchain but prevent them from mining?

Quorum is a Proof of Authority (PoA) network, which gives you the possibility to control who is allowed to create new blocks.

In general, you have to consider the following:

If you have blockchain encapsulated as a service and you control this service to 100% then you don't have a decentralized system. In this case, you have client/server again. Everyone using your service, has to trust you that you're not going to corrupt this service in the future.

If you simply want to prove that something (document, record, ...) is immutable, a good way to achieve this, is, to keep your data in a private database and do the stamping / access control in the blockchain. Ideally in the public blockchain, or in a private blockchain with at least >=2 independent authorities.