vs Public blockchains
Quidnug vs. Ethereum / on-chain reputation
Section titled “Quidnug vs. Ethereum / on-chain reputation”“Blockchain identity” projects on Ethereum (and Cosmos, Solana, Polkadot) solve overlapping problems to Quidnug. Here’s the honest comparison.
What public blockchains do well
Section titled “What public blockchains do well”- Global consensus. Every participant has the same view.
- Programmable smart contracts. Token incentives and complex multi-party logic.
- Censorship resistance. Hard to suppress information once committed.
- Permissionless participation. Anyone can join.
What public blockchains aren’t great at
Section titled “What public blockchains aren’t great at”- Personal trust. On-chain reputation is necessarily a single public number per identity. You can’t have “Alice trusts Bob at 0.7 from her perspective” on a public ledger without reducing it to a visible number that every observer sees.
- Privacy. Every transaction is public forever. ZK-SNARKs help but add massive complexity.
- Throughput. Ethereum L1 does ~15 tx/s. L2s help but the proof systems have their own constraints.
- Cost. Every transaction has a fee.
- Key recovery. The canonical answer is “your key IS your identity; lose it, lose everything.” Social recovery contracts exist but aren’t protocol-native.
- Domain scoping. No built-in notion of “trust in this domain is separate from trust in that domain.”
What Quidnug adds over a blockchain
Section titled “What Quidnug adds over a blockchain”| Capability | Blockchain | Quidnug |
|---|---|---|
| Per-observer relational trust | global single number | native, per-viewer |
| Privacy by default | no (public ledger) | yes (domains are isolated; cross-domain only via signed gossip) |
| Cost per transaction | gas fee | zero |
| Throughput | L1: ~15 tx/s, L2: ~1000 tx/s | per-domain ~5k tx/s (bench) |
| M-of-N recovery | smart contract | protocol-native QDP-0002 |
| Event streams | call Event log; no structured semantics | native, signed, Merkle-rooted |
| Cross-domain trust gossip | bridges (risky) | QDP-0003 (designed for it) |
What blockchains add over Quidnug
Section titled “What blockchains add over Quidnug”| Capability | Quidnug | Blockchain |
|---|---|---|
| Global consensus (every observer sees same state) | no (Proof-of-Trust is per-observer) | yes |
| Programmable on-chain logic (smart contracts) | no | yes |
| Financial incentives (tokens, staking) | no | yes |
| Liquidity / DeFi integration | via Chainlink external adapter only | native |
| Decentralized trust in the root | per-deployment | protocol-native |
The “single number” problem
Section titled “The “single number” problem”The fundamental disagreement: blockchains assume there’s a single truth every participant should agree on. Quidnug assumes trust is personal: my trust in Alice isn’t yours.
If you need global consensus (token transfers, DeFi, governance votes with worldwide binding), use a blockchain. If you need personal trust relationships that scale to billions of pairs without every pair being public, use Quidnug.
Many systems need both. A Quidnug consortium can feed relational trust scores into an on-chain smart contract via the Chainlink external adapter. The on-chain contract makes a policy decision (“release escrow if the counterparty’s relational trust from the buyer is ≥ 0.7”), and the personal trust lives off-chain where it belongs.
When to pick which
Section titled “When to pick which”Use a public blockchain when
Section titled “Use a public blockchain when”- You need money / token transfer.
- You need every participant to see the same state.
- Censorship resistance is paramount.
- You’re building something DeFi-adjacent.
Use a private blockchain (Fabric, Besu, Corda) when
Section titled “Use a private blockchain (Fabric, Besu, Corda) when”- You need global consensus within a known consortium.
- You need smart-contract logic executed by a quorum of participants.
- You’re building B2B settlement where every party sees every transaction.
Use Quidnug when
Section titled “Use Quidnug when”- Trust is personal, not universal.
- Privacy-by-domain matters.
- Recovery, audit, and per-observer scoring are core requirements.
- You don’t want global consensus overhead.
Use Quidnug + on-chain bridge when
Section titled “Use Quidnug + on-chain bridge when”- You have an on-chain smart contract that needs relational trust as an input to a decision.
- You want tokenized incentives layered on top of off-chain trust relationships.
License
Section titled “License”Apache-2.0.