At collecting requirements for distributed systems, one of the most important requirement of the application is the trust model. Firstly, general trust model must be exactly specified:
- Untrusted model: in untrusred model participants do not now each other and do not trust each other. Despite the system has to guarantee the participants can cooperate and can exchange value. In untrusted model almost the only logical choice is the public blockchain model, possibly with high security.
- Semitrusted model: in semitrusted model, the participants might know each others and might trust each others up to a certain level, but they do not fully trust each others. In such a models, a consortium blockchain solution might be a good solution.
- Fully trusted model: in a fully trusted model, the participants know each other and trust each other. In such a model, a blockchain solution is pretty much an overkill.
The exact model can be further fine-tuned, like considering a more complicated architecture, including storage, computation, resource intensive computation, user interface, external oracles, communication channels. At each part we can define how much do we trust in the certain medium, or with other words, how much do we want create the certain part to be byzantine fault tolerant.
