Plasma's Data Choice: When "No Guarantee of Availability" Becomes a Strategy
In the race where everyone is rushing to promise "absolute data availability" in the DA war, I, as the designer of Plasma, chose a counter-consensus path: to candidly admit that I cannot, and do not need to, guarantee the permanent availability of off-chain data.
This may sound like abandoning security, but in fact, it shifts the core of the security model from "ensuring data is always accessible" to "ensuring users can always escape." My logic is: rather than incurring huge costs to put all data on-chain (as Rollups do), it is better to ensure that when operators act maliciously or hide data, users can initiate an "exit" transaction at any time with the locally stored transaction proof, safely withdrawing their assets from the main chain.
Therefore, Plasma's "alternative path" in the DA war essentially transforms and downgrades the data availability issue into a user experience issue (requiring users to manage their own proofs). It constructs a minimized trust model of "data may be lost, but assets are always secure" using sophisticated cryptography and economic incentives (fraud penalties). This not only significantly reduces operational costs but also provides an extremely efficient dedicated solution for specific high-frequency, low-risk payment scenarios.
