Blockchain Ledger Transaction Rollback Mechanism
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Solution Overview
Problem
Blockchain ledgers are immutable, making it impossible to roll back transactions, which poses challenges in scenarios where database faults occur and require historical state restoration.
Innovation Solution
A method and system that allow rolling back blockchain ledger transactions by identifying a group of transactions, determining their eligibility for rollback, recommending additional transactions if necessary, and adding a rollback transaction to the ledger to undo the effects of the group of transactions.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If blockchain ledger immutability is maintained, then data integrity and security are improved, but the ability to roll back transactions is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a rollback transaction as an intermediary mechanism that mediates between the immutability requirement and the need for transaction reversal. This rollback transaction acts as a special type of transaction that can undo the effects of previous transactions by creating counterbalancing entries, thus enabling rollback capability while preserving the immutable structure of the blockchain ledger.
Solution Approach 2:
Instead of attempting to directly delete or modify previous transactions (which would violate immutability), the patent inverts the approach by adding new transactions that have the opposite effect. The rollback transaction inverts the financial and state changes of the original transactions, effectively canceling them out while maintaining the append-only nature of the blockchain.
2Stability of the object's composition
If a group of transactions is rolled back together, then consistency of historical state is improved, but complexity of determining eligibility increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent performs preliminary analysis to determine the eligibility of transactions for rollback before actually executing the rollback. The system pre-calculates which transactions can be safely rolled back together by analyzing their dependencies, inputs, and outputs, and prepares a rollback plan in advance. This preliminary action ensures that only eligible transaction groups are selected for rollback, maintaining historical state consistency while managing complexity through advance planning.
3Adaptability or versatility
If rollback transaction is added to undo group transactions, then ability to restore historical state is improved, but blockchain ledger size increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a mechanism where the effects of rolled-back transactions are discarded by creating rollback transactions that recover the original state. The rollback transactions effectively discard the changes made by the original transactions and recover the previous state by reversing the financial transfers and state modifications, enabling historical state restoration while managing ledger growth through selective reversal rather than duplication.
Data Source
AI summary
A group of transactions to be rolled back in a blockchain ledger can be identified. Whether the transactions in the group are eligible to be rolled back together can be determined. Other transactions can be recommended, and the other transactions may be added to the group to be rolled back together. A rollback transaction can be added to the blockchain ledger that rolls back effect of the transactions, where the rollback transaction has zero or more inputs and zero or more output, the rollback transaction having at least one selected from at least one input and at least one output. An unspent output of a transaction in the group is provided as an input of the rollback transaction. Input of a transaction in the group, that is not an output of another transaction in the group, is provided as an output of the rollback transaction.