hey folks,
under which circumstances would I want to have more than one maintainer for a key? does anyone have an example use case?
regards,
e/
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Hi @entzik,
In a network where you don’t necessarily fully trust everyone, having multiple maintainers means that they would all need to be dishonest (and colluding) to fool the network.
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In particular, the maintainers are responsible for the uniqueness of the key.
An example could be a patient card for medical care. The key of the contract representing the card would be a unique id for the patient, the uniqueness guaranteed, and checked by all involved medical institutions. The entries in the patient card would change over time, so a contract key makes it handy to look up the card by the patient identifier. Only if all involved institutions would be dishonest or faulty, the creation of two cards for the same patient would be possible.
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thanks @drsk - so you’re saying all institutions should be key maintainers ? does not sound very practical…
ok I see, thanks !
You can also just use contract ID’s, but then you need to keep track of changing contract ID’s when your contracts get updated.
Definitely not all medical institution in the country would need to be maintainers of the key. That indeed wouldn’t be practical.
Let’s say if the patient is represented by a party, I would assume that the maintainers of that medical card would be the patient, the healthcare facility, and maybe a medical records registry.
In the end, you’d just have to find a set of parties that are signatories of the contract, and between which collusion is very unlikely.