Hello, hello, hello.
I can hear you.
Oh hi Saatchi
Surprise. No one else is here yet. Nope.
I know yes it is 10 minutes ahead of time.
Sorry, what was that
I said, I guess it is 10 minutes ahead of time.
Yeah, and I get the impression. This is more formal than other things like this.
Oh, I see. Yeah.
The afternoon looks like it is happening right
Yes, it is.
Cool.
What time do you have to check out
I don't know.
Yeah.
Did you end up seeing it all yesterday after
After that yesterday afternoon when
We were potentially supposed to meet
Yeah. So she came back and I got a chance to say goodbye to her, basically. Oh, yeah. No, she was still at the office when I left it six. Yeah. She was sending email until six, seven.
I guess she was wrapping up
Before she takes off today.
Yes.
She's taking data. Yeah.
Coffee shop in Philadelphia. Oh.
Oh, I just took the bus last night. Yeah.
I did some reading
My in laws for dinner.
I love this restaurant.
So do you see my screen now.
I do. Okay. So I think that's
Okay.
That's great. Now, I'm not sure how to share my screen.
Share
Haha
Nice.
I've never used this platform before it's I feel a lot more lightweight. Yeah, yeah. It really is.
Hello.
I can hear you.
But I think it's still just us.
Oh, it was just a sketchy robo dial. Oh, yeah, yeah. Here is a legal enforcement from the Office of Social Security
Call us back and give me your credit card number now.
Yeah.
I'm actually surprised that I'm not getting robo dials telling me that I'll be like, arrested.
You would think that would be a logical thing to do.
Should remember to mute it when we start
So for this for this thing that we're doing in Ghana.
One of the things I'm trying to find his resources to
Run a backup casting exercise for one of the trainings, we're doing where you're, you know, people are envisioning and anticipated date and then mapping out
To get there. Uh huh. I'm looking at one website resources process can take one to two years and needs significant financial financial resources 500,000 euros, for example, cool.
That's it. That's all. Just a few minor glitches.
Will do it in an hour.
Yeah yeah
When do you leave.
Excuse me, when do you leave for Ghana slightly like 11:30pm Monday night Tuesday night Tuesday night. Oh yes so much better. Yeah.
Do you fly back today. Yeah. And the flight leaves at like
Some on a clock.
Marta.
Hello. Can someone tell me if I'm being clear and now I hear you better now. Okay, great. So this is Margaret because kit and I'm going to be emceeing the call today.
Instead of Rose, who is on an airplane. I suggest we wait a couple of more minutes so that everybody can join and I'll come back to you in about three to four minutes.
Looking at the list of participants, I think that we have enough people on the call to start, and I hope that many people will join after, after we start. So again, thank you everyone for joining and making the time to be with us.
I would like to make sure that this call go smoothly. I know that rose send out already. A quick information.
First of all, thank you. First of all, we are all we all need to obey the antitrust policy which is available at Linux foundation.org website.
It is also available on our Wiki. So if you would like to. If you'd like to make sure that you understand it. The basic ideas that we work here in an open environment. So we should also reveal secrets of our companies.
So with that,
I first of all I would like to thank very much our presenters from you and Moldova, who are pioneering the shared fleet management across agencies or through blockchain platforms and I hear that their slides are soon coming so we'll plan that
Last call we have discussed the Global Forum panels and agreed that there should be some focus on breaking silos and implementation fragmentation.
As long as well as moving to work in a more agile manner, and if you have any more ideas please reach out to Rose, who will be happy to welcome those ideas and work with you on
Now, Bobby, who I see is on the call, as well as kindly agreed to support the wiki.
So, Bobby. If you have not used figure it out.
How to work with the wiki for all our references and email listserv. So for our, our Grover references. Then he said me know and I'll work with you.
Actually, I worked it out. I'm going to try to just very quickly share my screen. OK.
Ok I'm sharing my screen now if you can see
That's not the wiki. Hold on just a moment. There we go. That's our public sector wiki. It's pretty much organized with the table of contents on the right.
And if you go down the only addition I made the recordings are listed there. But the only addition that I actually made was to put I'm sorry about those things. The presentation that I gave at the meetup on there and it basically is a very high level.
Overview of the tools and the frameworks and it's a real all you have to do is slip out put in your bio. And you can give this presentation.
To everyone. So that's right there. Again, the articles and I will keep maintaining this if anybody has any suggestions, just please let me know and I'll make sure that they get put in the wiki. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Bobby. That's extremely useful and helpful and I really appreciate you working on that. So,
Are doing both things that we would like, or people on the call would like to add to the today's agenda other than just listening to the very exciting presentation and dads. Dr. Craig jolly will be giving in a second.
Okay, well, if something comes up, please use the chat to suggest a topic for later. Or if not,
We'll just proceed with the presentation itself. So to give you a brief overview. In case you haven't read the roses email.
The presentation is on Rd abstracts in the presentation goes
Into the political technology that has potential to transform the relationships between citizens governments and other institutions.
Particularly in developing world were public systems often suffer from corruption power imbalances and for transparency.
blockchain advocates have argued for the integration of distributed ledger technologies into many public service systems.
At the same time, there are very real concerns about the ethical implications of testing new and unproven technologies in environments where vulnerable populations and weak legal protections
So Dr. Craig jolly. Now, who works for the US Agency for International Development will join us to discuss how
The agency has begun to engage with the blockchain ecosystem. The principles for Responsible Technology adoptions. And why now is the right time to build bridges between the international development and sector.
Sector national development sector and hyper ledger community. Thank you so much, Dr. Craig, for joining us and please feel free to start sharing your screen and presenting your talk.
All right. Can everybody hear me all right.
Yes.
Okay, good. And I'm sharing my screen. And we're going to go to
Full Screen success. Okay. So hi, everybody. And I'm Craig and as Mark mentioned, I am with something called the Center for Digital development at USA ID. So if you're not
Familiar with it, USA ID is the US Agency for International Development. We are the lead us agency for foreign assistance.
And the Center for Digital development or CD, as we call it. We are the people whose job is to think about technology, essentially, and I'll get a little bit more into who we are and what we do.
So here's the agenda for my presentation today I'm going to talk a bit about who we are and what we do, how we've been engaging so far with the blockchain space.
And then a little bit about the general principles and frameworks that we use when we're thinking about new technologies.
So I'm. There's a lot of words on this slide, I'm not going to read all of them to you. But the idea is that about say
Almost five years ago, actually, the US global development lab was established as the Center for Science, technology, innovation and partnerships at USAID and within that the Center for Digital development is the technology piece of it.
And so we have several different teams that are focused on different aspects of what we think of as building an inclusive digital ecosystem.
And that ranges from everything that covers everything from supporting the adoption and the Equitable Use of digital financial tools.
To supporting citizen facing citizen or citizen facing services on the part of governments that we work with.
To making more data available in the development ecosystem to the piece that my team down at the bottom focuses on which is working on the respectable responsible and effective adoption of emerging technologies.
So this is our team. The I'm the one in the middle so opera was not able to join us today but Saatchi is also on the call. If she hasn't muted herself. She can say hi.
And then there's there's a blank, right, because there's a fourth person Paul is on our digital finance team, but he's been really instrumental in
Helping the rest of us get up to speed on blockchain and sort of keeping the blockchain ball rolling at USAID, so I want to make sure I give him credit as well.
So we are interested in blockchain for few different reasons.
If you work in development, you might recognize these perennial development problems which has been there long before blockchain was ever a twinkle in Satoshi naka motos I
And will probably continue to be with us for some time. And those are a pervasive lack of trust among people between different institutions between citizens and their governments.
And then also these issues of information asymmetry and the power asymmetry that goes along with it that as part of a hoarding of resources and the accumulation of power that people tend to hoard information and try to keep others in the dark, to the extent possible.
And so there are a few different application areas that we've heard a lot about that our colleagues at USAID seem to be very interested in
I would say the top ones are probably financial tools ID tools and supply chain. So we're an operational agency, the
A lot of the US disaster response and humanitarian response runs through USAID, so we have
People who spend a lot of time moving things around and are very interested in supply chains. Also, but of course there are a lot of other application areas as well. These are just the three in my opinion that come up the most in the conversations we have.
So one thing that we keep in mind is we tend to be cautious about the adoption of blockchain technologies we move fast and break things is not really a good idea when you're a foreign assistance agency. And so we
You know, we're, we're taking a very skeptical lens on a lot of things, but even if we decide not to fund blockchain technologies in a particular sector or in a particular country.
They're going to be there. Anyway, and they're going to be part of the environment that we work in. So it behooves us to understand the technology to understand its capabilities and limitations and the types of expectations. People are placing on it.
So there are a few reasons that I at least I'm very interested in talking to the hyper ledger community. And this is the first time that Saatchi and I have joined this working group call
And so we're excited to introduce ourselves to the rest of you and get a sense of what's going on in this community.
And one reason for that is that our approach to Technology and Development emphasizes openness and open source, in particular, and you'll be hearing more about that later in the presentation.
We
It's changed a little bit. But our mission statement at USAID used to begin with the words we partner and we see partnership as a really huge part of what we do and so
The collaborative project governance model that we see in Hyper ledger is really, really attractive to us because of this ethos of partnership and because of our desire to work with others rather than just trying to give others money to do things, which is how we get stereotypes sometimes
I we've found that most of the development and humanitarian applications that people talk with us about most people we talked to are
Interested in private, rather than public blockchain. That could be because they find public blockchain sort of scary.
And they they want to retain some degree of control and I don't really want to judge people for doing that. But so that's one thing that makes the hyper ledger technologies and particular attractive to us is the permission aspect that many of them have
And I personally have been have enjoyed learning about hyper ledger over the last couple of months that I've been reading up on it.
Because just the flexibility in the architectures and the modular nature of a lot of them.
Challenges my own understanding of what distributed ledger technologies are which the first one I ever encountered was bitcoin, so I have
This tendency to go back to that as my model of how things work. And it's been really interesting to me to explore this whole ecosystem where you have other ways of writing it consensus and other ways of doing things beyond sort of this classic block chain model.
So this is what we've been up to. So far, which is writing reports which feature prominent Red, white, blue color schemes.
The we've really been focusing on understanding and on helping our colleagues in the field to understand where distributed ledger technologies might be useful in the work that they do so.
Probably more than a year ago, now we put out this report on identity in a digital age where we were looking at identity solutions, broadly, but
In particular, focusing on emerging and new technologies in the development space. And that was my first engagement with blockchain and blockchain really looms large and conversations about identity.
And then Paul, who I mentioned earlier, wrote this primer on blockchain. That was very focused around this question of understanding whether blockchain is right for a particular development project.
So this is something that Saatchi has been working on. I think she's added a few more Circles and lines to it since I took this screenshot.
But we're trying to get a sense of who is who and who is connected to whom else in this blockchain for development space and some of this is just
Knowledge Management at our end trying to keep track of who we've talked to and what these people in these companies have to do it with each other.
But part of it is also trying to assume a proactive stance of thinking about whom we might want to be engaging with and where it would be most fruitful for us to be forming partnerships.
And because this is zoomed out so far that you can't see any labels. If you're curious hyper ledger is that black dot right there, it's connected to a lot of other things.
So, um, before introducing the principles for digital development.
I want to talk a little bit about how not to plan a blockchain project and the kind of things we consistently discourage our colleagues from doing
And I want you to imagine that you're in a place where you're it's the rainy season and you see a road that's like this and you overhear this conversation.
Mr blue says it takes for ever to drive anywhere. Mr. Read has an idea. Let's make everyone Dr hybrid sports cars. They are so sleek and efficient, it'll speed up travel a lot.
Mr. Blue is having some doubts, he says, are you sure that cars are the solution. Mr. Read says absolutely I test drove one in San Jose yesterday, and it was great.
So this, this example is kind of ridiculous. I don't think any sane person would propose that everyone drive hybrid sports cars on a road that looks like this.
But sometimes we tend to do the same thing with technology we reach for a high tech solution that has been shown to work really well in San Jose.
And we don't think about the fact that sometimes the underlying infrastructure or the
Conditions that would make that technology function well aren't necessarily present in the context that we're working in
And so we have to do some of this unglamorous work of building better roads before we can really think about how to put better, more efficient vehicles on those roads.
And so our approach to doing this is what we call the principles for digital development and these are the nine principles here.
So the backstory to these is that for almost 20 years now, you've had a lot of development projects integrating digital approaches and so the
This was several years back, people sort of observed that some of these projects succeed really well, whereas other ones fail to and these principles were an effort to distill some of the common features that have led to success in digital development projects over the last two decades.
And what's great about the principles is that they are technology agnostic, hardly anyone had heard of blockchain. When the principles were first developed
But we can use them as a starting point for approaching any new digital technology and development. And so the first one is to design with the user.
And so one thing in the, in the abstract for this presentation I referred to blockchain as a political technology. And to me that's really key that blockchain adoption is about changing relationships and institutions and not just keeping a ledger.
And there's not a lot of evidence right now about the effects of blockchain technologies and real applications. And so it's really critical.
To be intentional about design and to try to foresee challenges before they arise and working with users is really key to doing that. So as an example.
If you're building a supply chain management tool for the health sector.
It could be useful to partner with a few local players before you start making software design choices. You need to talk to health clinic staff and drug suppliers and patients.
About what works in the current system and also about what some of their pain points are what they'd like to see improve
The second point, which is really closely related to the first one is understanding the existing system ecosystem. So we often hear this term disintermediation
If people want to get rid of the intermediaries and sometimes intermediaries are terrible, they're wasteful and corrupt and bad
But sometimes they do things that people really like they might provide human assistance in navigating a bureaucracy.
Sometimes financial intermediaries are there to help you dispute transactions. If something happens that you don't agree with and
As cool as it would be to pay for everything on bitcoin
Bitcoin doesn't offer me loyalty points like my credit card company does sometimes those are things that people really value and their benefits that come from working with intermediaries.
And so we need to understand what people do and don't like about those intermediaries before we decide that they're the devil.
The third principle is to design for scale.
So design choices that are made in blockchain technologies can affect how well the system scales. So, for example, fully public systems like Bitcoin often had limited transaction throughput and a lot of the hyper ledger technologies, improve on this substantially
And
In general, private lenders offer better scaling. But this comes at
The expense of greater centralization. So you need to decide which of these features is more important to you and where you want to put this trade off.
And so as an example, people often talk about using blockchain for elections and so I made this sort of back of the envelope calculation that the bitcoin network all of it can handle about three to seven transactions per second.
If so, looking at the 2015 elections in Nigeria, which is the largest country, there were 30 million votes cast if people were
Voting at a constant rate throughout a 12 hour period. That would mean 700 votes, a second. So if you wanted to keep up with an election of that scale, you would need to centralize some aspect of the process and you couldn't just uncritically turn to a public ledger.
For principle is to build for sustainability. So in any decentralized system you have participants that need to create and maintain shared goods. These could include code or network servers.
Or just having people on hand to keep things running as a shared good and cryptocurrency based systems will incentivize that by
Essentially printing money and giving it to people to reward participation.
In private systems, you don't have those native tokens. So you need to use other ways of motivating people like legal contracts and what I still insist on referring to is real money.
And ultimately, keeping the lights on needs to be somebody's job or else you're going to have a system that falls apart. Once the initial enthusiasm fades
The fifth principle is to be data driven. So sometimes blockchain applications can make measurable improvements like savings of time or money.
And when we can measure things we should. But the really important things in my opinion are qualitative their changes in power dynamics or institutional structure or community participation.
And so we need to remember the qualitative data or data to and often we need to approach.
blockchain technologies through more of a political economy lips, where we're thinking about who has power and how we anticipate the introduction of technology changing that distribution of power and then following up afterwards to see how it really did affect it.
So for example there. I've seen a couple of proposals for distributed ledger based systems for paying school fees.
The quantitative measures would be how many payments right time, what fraction of fees is going towards student beans, rather than overhead.
How many students are staying at school. The gap between boys and girls, that sort of thing. You also have qualitative things like
Was there a change in who was making payments, where we see
You know, fewer parents and or aunts and uncles and grandparents who live further away, making payments were parents more engaged. Did the parents expect or have teachers.
And if you look at the power distribution within the school system. Was there a change in which teachers or administrators work more influential are respected resulting from this change at health habits, where
The six principle is to use open standards open data open source and open innovation and this is what I alluded to before that blockchain applications are inherently long term and we need to avoid vendor lock in.
And in the blockchain ecosystem. There are a lot of excellent open source examples. And I think when you're when you're planning for the long term.
You know, you have to think about which which platforms and which technologies are really going to be around for a while.
That startups have a tendency to come and go open source projects have a tendency to come and go.
Until they've reached a certain level at scale where you can where they have a community built up around them and you can expect them to be there for the long haul.
And so I think the, you know, it behooves us to seek out open source platforms that have those sorts of characteristics.
Principle seven is really closely related to number six. That's to reuse improve. So when you use open source systems you build on existing things rather than building it from scratch.
Another way that we've seen that people will reuse existing systems is to explicitly tire system to a widely adopted public platform, which lets you offloads system costs onto the public network.
But of course has some complications associated with it. So my favorite example of this is that in 2016 the Republic of Georgia.
Started using a blockchain to validate their land registry and I don't know everything about this project. But my understanding.
Is that they have a custom private block chain that they're using to register lead titles. And then, in some sense, posting Hash. Hash receipts on the public blockchain.
So that that combination lets them retain control of the central government processes, but make the results of those processes transparent access
Point eight is addressing privacy and security and this can be really complicated. So on the one hand, distributed systems are more resilient, they're difficult to attack at the same time those permanent Ledger's can be a problem for privacy. If somebody screws up and posts.
A private key online or post some kind of personal information online, it's hard to take it back down again and
If someone consents to sharing their data and then changes their mind can be really hard to revoke that so
There's, I think some of this is key management issues. Some of it is more fundamental than that thinking about what what needs to be on a chain. And what we want to keep public and what we want to keep private
And cryptographic keys aren't always the answer. Because it's pushing that security maintenance burden onto people who might not be
Equipped or interested in taking it up. And then the last principle is to be collaborative and this comes from all of the other ones we will do better at all of these things. If we take a collaborative approach.
And part of the whole as those of the blockchain thing is to remove hierarchy and strengthen peer to peer interactions we can borrow from that. And so we need to build a culture of collaboration in both the online and the offline worlds.
So this is something that comes from Paul's report. This is how we think about the applicability.
Of distributed ledger based tools to international development problems. So we can divide this into two categories. One is gauging relevance. The others gauge appropriateness.
The first question we always ask people is, do you have a well defined problem. The answer is usually no
But sometimes they do. And we can move on to the next step which is asking whether they have a need to store data. If that's true, are there multiple parties that need access to your data and do these parties have less than complete trust each other.
And then if these parties like to interact with the data repository directly rather than working through a centralized
Intermediary
And then moving to the appropriate side, we need to ask about whether a distributed ledger application is achievable, given the operating environment do you have
The kinds of digital infrastructure. Do you have the kinds of human resources necessary to make this happen.
Is it viable given those startup and operating costs and is it feasible given the maturity of the technology and question that some blockchain applications are better developed than others.
And then is it desirable. This is the part where you have to go out and talk to people and see
Whether whether this is a change that would be welcomed or whether you're forcing something that maybe would be resisted. And then if you get that far, then you can start thinking about what particular technologies would be best suited to the problem at hand.
And so, that is that is what I've got as far as content here I'm open for for questions or discussion. I think the, the one thing I want to flag is that we've been in this kind of research and developing written products stage and our team is really interested in
taking the next step and figuring out how to
operationalize some of what we've learned and how to really get into more of the details of helping our colleagues to use distributor distributed ledger technologies and to use them well. And so we'd welcome any advice or input that this group has on those topics. Thank you.
So much. This was really, really interesting and I learned a lot.
I like the the grid that you have the crew presented on the flow that you have presented
Do. Are there questions or
Are there people that can do. Are there people that would like to ask questions.
So while everyone's thinking I was wondering what you think, taking into account that you're looking at kind of sustainability of the development. I'm just coming back from the world investment forum where we had a session, which I participated in on blockchain and sustainability.
There were several very interesting questions that came up. One of them was, how do we
Excite and introduce people to these concepts. How do we make sure that people are interested in creating sustainable solutions solutions that last for a long time and bring good to the environment and society, and not only for themselves.
So I think
So if I'm understanding you right there's there's couple aspects to that question, right. One of them is
Taking the people who are who are already clarity sort of self identify as do gooders, the people who are interested in
Positive social and environmental impacts and getting them up to speed on the technology. And that's sort of the space that we've been in so far because that's our role as people who are working in a
In a development agency. I think the that might be the easy half but the you know the other half of it is taking people who
Have resources and have technology and getting them excited about the types of things that we work on getting them to see how what they do can have a real impact there. I don't. My feeling at this point is that there isn't a shortage of
Sort of crypto do gooders out there. I think what's what's necessary is really to
To inject a dose of reality and to some things and to
To help people see which of the proposed applications are real feasible in the short to medium term, and which ones we may want to wait until they're a little bit more fully baked. Does that, does that get to your question. Or was there an aspect of it that was missing.
No, it does. It does. Enter a lot of those questions. I'm also thinking about the young population. You know, I think.
40 or know 60% of today's society is under 30 about 15% is under
This society is not really focused on what will happen in 2030 years time, and we are talking about blockchain which is something that is supposed to exist for a long period of time. So how do we kind of work with the young population.
Yeah. So honestly, I tend to take the opposite view on that that young people are often born engaged in the future because they have one
But see, that's not an official agency statement that's fine.
But I think the
You know, if you, if you look in a, in a lot of developing countries, the most educated segment of the population is people in their 20s, 30s.
Because you've had these rapid improvements of the educational system that you know it's these
Younger people are the ones who are the digital natives. They are the ones who are, you know, who are really going to be the ones who are the first to see the potential of new technologies.
And who are going to be most bought into the idea of using those technologies to affect some of the issues that they're facing in their own countries, and so I'm honestly
Optimistic about the youth angle of of all of this, I, I think the bigger challenge is taking the the gray haired folks who are often are running governments and that sort of thing. And getting them to understand what a lot of the younger people are already grasping pretty quickly.
Hey Craig, it's it's Mark fifth Carrie.
Hi, Mark. So I'm just kind of my perspective is one of the biggest challenges in this space is the governance and you know getting that you know kind of business network together.
Yeah, we've talked about that a little bit. And, you know, any, any of your view of how you know
USA ID can can help in that process because you got two problems. One is, you know, just some pretty complex.
You know, kind of situations between business network members, but you also have, obviously, the people who are those middlemen who are not anxious to get disintermediation and maybe you know your perspective on that would be great.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, part of it comes back to
What I said before that middleman and intermediaries are not necessarily the enemy.
And we're never going to get rid of all intermediaries that often what we're really doing when we introduce a blockchain technology is we're swapping out one set of intermediaries for others. So, you know, an example is when people have been looking at using crypto currencies for remittances
Yes, you get rid of this network of correspondence banks and all of these other things. But the in exchange for that.
You are empowering these people who are in a position of being able to exchange between cryptocurrencies see currencies and so you're
You're losing one set of intermediaries and irrigating a whole different set and that is going to involve shifts in who has power. It's going to involve shifts and who's getting business. And so I think see
You know, one clear advantage. There are a couple of advantages that an organization like USAID has that context. One of them.
Is that we have people who are tuned into what we refer to as thinking working politically that they will
You know they're they're trained in how to do that. Political Economy analysis and have the tools and the mandate to
Understand, who's going to be winning and who's going to be losing and those situations really try to understand those things in ways that software developers aren't always as well equipped to do, necessarily. I think the other piece of that is that we
We often refer to our convening power our ability to get a lot of people into a room to discuss things and the My feeling is that governance issues.
Are a lot more likely to be settled. Well, when we can get a lot of the relevant stakeholders in the room together.
And have an open discussion about things that went. We have one party trying to decide the perfect governance model and then unveil it and wait for everyone else's approval that almost never works.
There's no guarantee that the collaborative approach is going to work either, but it's something that we, you know, that we have some facility and doing it and that we're often able to do
Great, thanks.
Hi. I think that I dropped out.
So,
Can you hear me.
I can hear you now.
Okay, great. So I think I dropped out. So one more thing that I wanted to ask you another question. Sir, please, please feel free to ask questions and don't be shy. We have an incredible person on the line, who can answer a lot of your questions, so please
Please, please feel free to to ask questions and see, see what, how can Dr. Julie help you
One thing that I was wondering just what's your opinion about introducing ethical programs or for requirement for the
Students at some of the better universities or more famous universities in the US to take ethics class. And in, in, in addition to
In addition to computer science classes.
I have always been in favor of that. I mean, I think the I remember years ago when I was a a physics undergraduate reading something that made the point that
Science and Technology undergraduates tend to have the most narrow curriculum of students in any field with the possible exception of Orthodox theology
So I think, you know, anything that broadens students horizons and gets them to think about the things that they're doing in a new way and in a broader scope is probably a really good idea. And when it comes to computer science, in particular, you know, I think.
I think design is a really
A really interesting lens through which to approach ethics that if we can take, you know, I mean everyone's excited about human centered design now. And I think that we are really good framework for
Making this connection between people who think about technology and who think about user experience and on the
People who think about and who think about the implications of introducing a particular technology in a particular so I think it's a great idea. And I think there's some really good frameworks and ideas that are already out there for some of the best ways to do this.
You're very, very quiet.
Much
Okay, so I very much agree with what you said. I think that you're right on spot. So where's this research going where you've created the report, you've been introduced, all of those concepts. What are the next steps. How can hyper ledger support you and help you
So, um, that that is of course the most important question and
You know, like I I showed at the beginning with the photos. We are a very, very small team. So we have to be selective and strategic about what it is that we're doing.
And the thing that is most important to us is supporting effective responsible technology adoption on the part of our colleagues and so
Whatever will get us there is really the thing that's going to be the highest priority for us. And so thinking things through on our own in our own internal discussions.
I don't think we need to be talking about blockchain writ large anymore. There's been a lot of that done.
I think the really important thing at this stage is to drill down on specific applications so that we're talking about.
You know what would a distributed ledger solution for insurance look like what would a distributed ledger solution for land tenure look like some of these specific use cases where we can take a hard look at the kind of work that our agency is already doing in that space.
And also take a look at some of the proposed blockchain solutions in that space and see to what extent, there's a viable connection there and whether it would make sense to
Integrate new technologies into future programs that have goals that are similar to our past programs.
And so where I think the hyper ledger community can really help us out a lot is identifying some of these viable well supported proposals for how to do things, or even if we're going to be
If I'm going to ask for the moon here pilots that actually have some data evidence associated with
That the
You know, separating out. What is an idea. Someone has sketched out on a whiteboard from what is something that has been implemented or could be implemented very soon is something that's often really hard to do when you're not in such a technology heavy space.
Hmm. So do you think that having someone from our community.
Work with you on some of those applications would be a useful thing. But as I'm kind of workshops for your agency.
Would be, I think we would need to first do the work.
Of figuring out
which applications are really priorities for us and
Which ones are going to have the most traction among our colleagues.
And by traction. What I really mean is you know people are interested in actually implementing and actually running projects around these things. And right now we only have a really dim sense of
What those priority areas are because we've been
encountering a lot of curiosity, but we have not been asking that hard question of how eager, are you to actually spend money on this. And so once we've
Once we've gotten to the stage where we know what those priority applications are that would probably be the right time to start working a lot more closely with people from this community to understand what some of the existing approaches out there are
Okay, that makes sense. So are there any other questions from the community. I don't want to hijack such a great speaker.
Oh, I have a question. If it's her right
Go for it.
Hi, Craig. My name is Nestor.
I had a question about the specify the specific applications being used by the
Republic of Georgia and
I guess that would be land tenure application. And I know that they're using bit fury, as the service provider.
And and when you when you were going through that I might have dropped out a little bit. But were you in praise of that effort or critical of it wary of its longevity.
None of the above.
I was just, I was really just citing it as an example of how you know how it's possible to tie together a private and a public system.
So I
You know, I honestly have not what I know about this is kind of limited to press releases that have come out from the Republic of Georgia and from bit fury and from GI said so I
And of course, press releases are telling you how great things aren't so I'm not intimately familiar with what a lot of the limitations of that system are likely to be so I don't want to
Put myself in the position of either endorsing it or criticizing
Okay, fair enough there. There's a where I live in Estonia, there's a similar system that's been used and was started to be used before there was even the the nomenclature of
Like distributed Ledger's
Necessarily
What's the X X road system.
And I think
You're probably familiar with that.
Looting here, I can tell you that it's extremely effective system. But yeah, I'm not trying to get your endorsement or anything, but it just immediately made me think of how Atlanta and your works here how access of medical files works here and how that is
Something that has been very useful. There was actually some
Corruption here where there was replication illegal replication of identity documents and as soon as it was exposed
They just went right into the ledger and said, Well, these are exactly the people that did it because they their IDs were used to access the system and make the make the copies
Wow.
Which is interesting because there was just no it was, it was like zero to 60 and like this was the problem. And these are the people that did it because that's the only way to access the system.
There is not that one database. So that was pretty cool. The other question I had was about when you commented, or you mentioned that for voting for example.
You would need something like 700 transactions per second. And because of that, the bitcoin network wouldn't be effective, without a centralized
Does the centralized element.
Are you saying that like hashing to another faster network is that centralized
Or there's
That's, that's, yeah. Go ahead.
Yeah, there's a few ways you could do that. Um, I think the end I'm not again if we if voting ends up being a priority application area, then it's something that will that will get into a lot more detail on going forward, but
I mean, there are a few different ways one can centralize right. One would be to centralize at the
At
The polling site level so that instead of recording every single vote with a new onchan transaction.
Your instead having, you know, each poll excite update votes that were cast in the last hour, all in a single transaction that would
You know, hugely decrease the number of individual rights to the ledger that you would have to make and probably put it well within the range of what a bit Bitcoin type network could handle
But that would be, you know, a level that would be one step removed from every single vote be hashed individually or be recorded individually on the blockchain.
And so yeah, if you're, you know, instead you're working with a private network that has a faster throughput.
That would typically involve some degree of centralization, because in any private network you're counting on someone to be the gatekeeper as far as who is on the whitelist and as allowed to write network.
Okay, got it. Yeah, I guess the ambition of some of those faster networks that are not Bitcoin is to be public. And then eventually that you wouldn't have that problem, then you could hash over if you wanted to, to Bitcoin
That would be
The best of both worlds. Right.
Sorry what we say.
No I that I understand what you meant. Now that you do have to centralize in the sense that there are those other networks that you'd be using that that have faster transaction speeds.
Well, they're, they're much more private maybe there's only like 100 nodes as opposed to, you know, thousands and thousands
Yeah, so it's a matter of degrees and and actually we do it. We have my company a track and trace solution. And we're, we're trying to make the best of both worlds. But the challenge at this point is to get
That faster transaction network, you know, hundreds of times faster than Bitcoin to be a public network.
Until we get there, then
Still a challenge.
Cool.
Thanks for the humoring my questions, Greg.
Yeah, thanks for the questions.
Okay. Well, great. Did I hear correctly dead to there was another person to try to speak earlier.
Yeah, hi, Mater. This is Leonard Craig, good morning to yes i was earlier. Yes. Craig I man. I'm an independent consultant. I'm very
Excited by USAID looking at trying to understand from a proof of value perspective, no longer from a proof of concept because
blockchain has proved itself to be suitable for certain use cases, as you've initially said where there is
an SSD for trust, as well as decentralization and minimizing the number of intermediaries in, you might say, trying to work together to to provide a solution of some sort.
So you today you have many social impact organizations that are looking at issues problems on the ground where they happen in terms of earthquakes.
Tsunamis and I guess USA this father fat.
Now sure, I have said that because inclusive of the United Nations, they are all looking at blockchain solutions to resolve and assist in all of these areas. Okay, with
No exceptions with no exceptions. Of course, it must be applicable to the use case and and to find the best solution on the ground, but based on everything. We said initially for trust premise ability security, privacy and all these things, a well constructed blockchain on the ground. My
My still work for many of them now. Yeah, sustainability and the performance will continue to be an issue. But that having been said, what I'm trying to understand is the US aid perspective in that
Will you become invested in the technology so that within USAID you fully understand it smells so that you can either be a champion and sorry. Can you hear me.
I'm not sure if my
Fine.
Okay, wonderful. You will continue to be a challenge.
A CHAMPION because you have that vested knowledge in terms of and all the, the impact social impact groups out there today that yes, it's the technology that's not going away.
And literally, it has value to what you do, if not for all situations, but at least it will be suitable for some and that's the mantra going forward for all organizations today. It's suitable for some opportunities.
But it may not be all for all, as you said some situations need to have a decentralized view.
Of their data manage that data for several reasons. In the centralized database so that having been said, Will you now as your next step collaborators. Some of the other departments within USAID so you become invested in the technology because you seem to be how
You seem to be the
The person who can who can actually that and and approve and take the blockchain ecosystem further within
Sort of USAID and in other a might say organizations within the US and make yourself a flagship someone to go to systems for knowledge exchange, as well as solutions that actually do work.
In the live environment. So I'm just
Trying to understand your next steps.
And what kind of also
There's a lot to unpack there.
That was
That was very flattering. But I would be quick to point out that I'm neither the only person position to fill that role during my position to fill that role.
We, you know, we have we have a team of people and people, different, different competencies and different kinds of connections to this.
I think
So,
One thing that I always feel like I need to remind people, including myself, have is that fundamentally as an agency, we are not in the technology promotion business we're in the
So any use of technology needs to be subordinated to our larger goals of alleviating poverty.
And so the
And so my team is certainly positioned to be in this role that you've described as being kind of an intermediary between the people who are experts in
Health or water and sanitation or biodiversity, or whatever it is that is there technical focus area.
Helping to be the translators that help those people talk to those in the tech community.
Who might not know nearly as much about those application areas. That's definitely a role that we're well positioned to fill
At the same time, though, our primary responsibility is to be advocates for development, rather than to be advocates for technology. I did that address some of your question, at least.
I think it does, because that advocacy that you provide is of extreme importance because in my work I find many companies, asking the same questions. We know blockchain exist. We know it seems to be good for certain things, but
We're not invested in it. So we really can't wholeheartedly say yeah will spin up
A project and call it a proof of concept because it needs the
Oversight and support of executive management and, you know, the people who hold the purse strings and say it does is it strategic for us to move that way today or hold off.
Right, it's fully proven out in the field. So you do need advocacy to say, Now is the time to get started as
Opposed to nature, because they all solutions out in the field that work even if they may not be as scalable, as we would like them to be from the get go.
So I have a lot of companies out there in that boat at that stage should be moving ahead. Should we wait longer but itching to find someone with the light level of advocacy to help them make that decision to move forward.
I just want to China where everybody. Isn't this point.
Yeah, so I just wanted to know how USAID. Now we'll play the game in terms of what are your next steps in that
ecosystem of things.
Now that you understand the technology well enough and you can promote it in delight areas.
I think the short answer is that we're still figuring all that out.
It's a good place to be because, again, it's all collaborative. So with hyper ledger and I think that's why you are not part of hyper ledger.
You bring to us a set of new use cases and pain points and opportunities where we can try and address them together and assist you in Lord mapping your
Your business value within within USAID to sort of see as an organization.
I think that's where you are.
And as Martin said it could be a win win situation for both USAID and I pleasure moving forward.
Thank you.
Okay, well, we are already two minutes overtime, but that makes me very happy. I'm sure that because it means that we had a good discussion. And thank you again so much everyone for participating. I will make sure that rose gets
Gets the recording the recording will also be published on our Wiki, and we will be happy to see you in two weeks time and watch out for roses emails about the agenda and plan for the next two weeks.
Hi, Marta. I just want to point I'm Sachi here, I just want to point
Out that I see a question, Alejandro on the chat.
That I don't know.
I know we're over time, but I just want to point out that there's a question there that maybe
Craig wants to think about, oh,
Absolutely. Sorry for that. So for dos. If you you are able to to stay for a tiny bit longer
You can create you can maybe answer that question, so that it's on the record and we can continue
Continue the lesson.
Yeah. Well, you said that you're a please email me and I would like to hear your answer. Oh, sorry. Right.
I'm sorry, I didn't see the question for me.
Yeah.
Okay, wonderful. So if anyone has any more questions, please email CJ LL e y@usaid.gov and we'll see you next time.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks, everyone. Have a great day good weekend.
Bye bye.
Bye.
Alright, this is Mike who's here for the privacy and confidentiality.
clipboards and to
Quiet. I saw you.
Look like you're destroying it.
Okay. Um, I know heart will not be here today.
So we could just say whatever we want about him.
Please make a particularly nasty.
I think hard needs to go the dunk tank this time.
I'm kind of tired and they're not there.
At least by myself.
All right, where are we
Okay, so just before we get started, reminder to everyone that you know there are a couple of important things. One is
Behave yourself with regards to
Any trust.
There will be no non know anti competitive behavior accepted. And the second thing is is that we do have a coder contact, which basically boils down to.
Be nice and treat each other with respect. So, okay, I've done my
Managerial duty. Right.
All right.
So,
Great money make
More. Is that wrong. Yes.
I'm here. Okay.
Good.
Okay, so we have a pretty substantial number of people on there. Some of
Which I know and some I don't
Let me just post in the chat window.
Here and then rocket chat.
The meeting notes.
Down please add yourself to the attendee list.
And
Someplace I rocket chat up
And of course the paper self, which is really a focus of today.
Alright, so
First off, just kind of going back through
What of the discussion that we had in Montreal.
Do we really need to make sure that we get captured in the paper. It was kind of nice to have a bunch of different perspectives in the room.
I was having kind of a hard time mapping that back to
Something we could generalize out of it. So did other share anything and and thanks to ROM. We have notes from the discussion.
But did any others or anything that we needed to pull out
There, make sure that we capture on the paper.
Okay, who else was in Montreal.
I know he's a couple of us.
Morning.
Today. Anybody ever filed a bug on the
Cyber private data collection.
Alright, so
Again, if there's nothing that's particular coming out of that. Let's, let's go back.
And just kind of review where we're at on the paper.
So at this point I'm feeling like the introduction and goals is good enough for the moment, we need to talk a little bit about, I think we've we've had this discussion about how to capture sort of risk reward.
Risk performance trade offs and that came up again with the discussions around kind of economic models.
In Montreal. I think we need to capture a couple paragraphs on that.
I think the definitions are in good shape. We have, again, one of the kind of
threads of discussion was that privacy and confidentiality is not just technical, it has to fit into a broader context of
Kind of legal and I think we've captured that at the high level. I do think we need to make sure that it's mapped down into this paper is not about tech or is not about legal but it's about specific mechanisms for
Confidentiality for the paranoid.
There was a little bit of discussion about this. Where do we stand on
Kind of beefing up this particular section.
So we currently have the for proposals.
For kind of quick and dirty. Here's how bad the privacy can get. And again, what we're trying to get out of this section was
It's not just the obvious ways in which information can be leaked, but there are a number of columns side channels.
Through which information can be leaked that could be useful here.
I still have it on my to do
I've been slacking
I'll try to get it done by the next day.
Okay.
Has anyone seen a few weeks.
I haven't seen him in any of our meetings, the last
Couple of meetings.
We need to reach out to him and just find out where he's out on things, but
Alright, so we can take a shot at writing that one. That's it.
Again source sort of feel comfortable with the summary that we've got. I think the four that we've talked about. We've talked about fancier ones.
With the identity information that Dave crispy was was talking about. But I think we did agree to pull that out.
So uncomfortable with those for anybody think that we need more or less.
I think forest fine.
Yeah, I think this looks like a good number.
All right. And again, we're looking for no more than three ish sentences on Stan, so don't spend a whole lot of time on it.
So the abstract usage. Again, I'm feeling fairly comfortable about that except for the fact that per one of the comments that we need to make sure that we not these into
Kind of a more specific representation, if we're if we're going to do the kind of formal way of describing this, then we should describe it formally down on the bulleted list of problems that we have
On it. All right. Which leads us to the one which I think is still the biggest issue.
First actually sections, which is the ideal model. And every time we seem to have this discussion.
Things break down and the discussion. Number one, there is a
An implication for for those in the kind of cryptographic proof and security proofs.
Realm ideal system has a very is a loaded term. It's a very specific term. It doesn't mean ideal in the sense of it works exactly like we want. It's really intended to be a reference to a simplified model that works.
simplified model that serves as a construction, against which we can
Pair
The, the realistic system.
For anybody outside of that crypto security proof domain which basically is, you know, most of the world ideal system has a very different meaning, which is, you know, some sense of it's it's perfect. And this is exactly how it works. How do we describe this so
First question, and I wish hardware here to help out with us.
Is it critical that we describe this construct for analysis purposes. Second question, how do we describe that construct in a way that
Does not touch everyone's button for
That that makes it clear that this is a theoretical constructs, not a practical, pragmatic system that we're describing
That is, it can break
It can break the speed of light, if we need to.
So question number one is that we really do we do we think we missed. From here, can I work on the game later.
Or
Do we need
So I guess the question is tied to are we going to use the
This as a model in the paper to compare
You know, this is a reference system to which we kind of compare other systems, right, and use the game.
And if so, then we need at least some description as a background to
Do that. I mean, to me it seems like if you're going to use the game and use that as a as a
As a model in which we're going to compare the actual real systems, then there needs to be at least some basic description. And the question is how to make that description palatable to those who are not familiar with the
Security reference theoretical reference aspects to it right
So I would say if you're going down the path of including the game and using that as a reference to compare other systems, then we need this gotten it is to kind of leave out all of that completely which is which, which should be, as you know, change from the past, we have been going
And just use a more general comparison of the platforms. So, you know, that's the fork.
Yeah, I would agree with the ROM here. I think that this approach that we come up with some kind of a model.
Against which we compare all the others, it's kind of been a long term work better than if we were to try to compare the platforms to each other and ideal model.
Whether it's with it as a game or more abstract thing is a
Good way of doing it because I can't think of another way
going that route.
The quality. The, the academic community uses the Bitcoin paper to come up with a simplified model.
That they reference for lots of
Different consensus.
Algorithms in and papers and we don't
Forgive me, I may, I may not be fully informed, we don't really have a reference paper that we can reference and say this is the ideal model. And so what we're trying to do is to
Reference
The hyper ledger projects to an ideal model that we don't really have a reference to
But I think we're exactly trying to create this, they don't modeling this
Right, I think.
I think one paper.
Yeah, I think the point is is that we should be able to write it down and describe it.
That at least as a starting point.
Does that need some mentioned a couple of times, writing an academic paper because you didn't come across an academic paper. Do we need to put in place all the for hearts academic paper.
So I think the academic paper is a combination of the ideal model and the game playing down below that piece of that. But we need to have at least some notion of, of what we want from this. So, for example,
One of the times that we've attempted to make some progress on the section.
The ideal model generally specified and I'm using ideal model in the cryptographic security proof sense
But one of the ways of describing a deal model is to start with a trusted third party.
Describe certain characteristics of the communication to and from that trusted third party.
A model that would be useful for
Most blockchains would be kind of a bulletin board communication model.
And we started down that path.
VIP and has pointed out.
Correctly that a bulletin board model still has this implication that all communication is public when frequently communication between organizations is going for private channels.
And so maybe the ideal model is not a bulletin board, you know, the idea of a Bolton board is used to post everything and everybody can see it kind of thing, but is something where we have pairwise communication channels secure pairwise communication channels.
So,
And I'm bringing up that discussion, not to reopen that debate, although I think we need to have that debate, but just to say it's been very difficult for us to sort of Bap from
To come up with a description of this reference system, whatever it is that we want to call it at a level at which it is both useful for the analysis on the paper.
And readable by human beings. I mean, you can go back and you can, you know, we can pull that bitcoin paper out and there are, you know,
Many of us on this call. I would guess are able to interpret it and understand it.
But most of the people who are deploying blockchains read the abstract and they're done.
So how, how do we take, how do we create something. How do we craft something that's both specific enough to be useful and not so
Detailed and fit in the kind of academic literature to be unreadable.
That any of that makes sense. I'm rambling. It's early on a Friday.
It didn't make sense. And I would propose that we have to lock ourselves away in a room with a pizza and crank it out the ideal model.
You buying a pizza.
Could probably afford the pizza. Yeah.
Okay.
And this is this is Adrian I'm fairly new to this, this group, but I just wanted to also mention that
There what what I'm sort of gathering here is that it's a little bit unclear who the intended audiences.
And so they're, they're kind of mixed signals as to, you know what, what is really trying to be put across in the paper.
So having a little bit more clarity on exactly who you guys are targeting I think would go a long way. And really helping kind of narrow down and crafts, the language that you want.
It's a good point and what you were saying earlier, maybe
Maybe it's okay for this paper that gets more much more technical than the others.
So far, produced. I mean, I think we kind of discussed that earlier on, that this paper by its nature will get
Quite a bit more detailed and technical than a academic, but definitely more technical
I think, you know, definitely the audience's it's okay to say that the audience is going to be technical.
Think I agree with making the sense that they might be technical, but not, they may not be
As aware of the security crypto theoretical literature as opposed to more
You know, technical practitioners
Who are more familiar with blockchain technology as opposed to the crypto security theoretical analysis.
It's perfectly okay if we target this at a technical audience, but it's going to be a general technical audience.
what others think about Tom. Go ahead, longer term.
Yeah. No, I was just gonna say lately. I mean, you probably adjusted to ready because I've missed. Many of your meetings, but literally
It's always best I fail.
To be more descriptive because as you say it's not a white paper, but it's to provide communication. It's a communication document.
Where people definitely have to understand that at that level that promotes communication and understanding therefore comprehension. So it should be descriptive, but then can also have friends the technical
Sort of the data and other documentation out there that is substantial and will support the descriptive.
You might say narrative that we provide. And our documentation. It's not telling the story, but it's describing what it is and why it's important.
At this stage of the journey and in terms of blockchain and cryptography and privacy and security and all these good things that are related to cryptography and blockchain. So yeah, I haven't seen the document because
I've been busy in other areas. So my fault. But yeah, we need to make sure that what you're putting it into the scripted, so that a lay person.
As well as a technical person can both on the stand and can also reference any further technical documentation. If they really need to get down to the, you know, to
Down to the gritty stuff.
So that having been said, mech.
I think we need to decide exactly how we
You know how we position the document is that where we currently at in terms of deciding
On how we write it in terms of that level of
Positioning
Yes.
Okay, that was a wrong answer.
Sorry, I was just
I was trying to write down. So if you go to the introduction and goals section I just added an initial sentence or a couple of sentences to just capture the expectations for the audience. Can you take a look at that and see if that looks like looks right.
So basically reads the target audience for this paper is a general technical audience SPECIFICALLY ARE EXPECTED we read by people familiar with the implementation details of blockchain technology, but our readers may not be familiar with cryptographic proof.
Sounds good.
Is that a reasonable expectation
It's and and I say that because it's very different than what we tried to do with some of the other papers that we've been writing out of the architecture working group where where the audience is.
Both those who are interested in using and applying the technology and those who are familiar with the constructs and interested in building it. So this is really sort of suggesting that although it might be useful for others. It's really focused on the technologists.
I think that sounds perfect
Okay and ROM. You're the boss. So is this is this meet your expectations.
I am the boss. Okay.
Last
Year. The architecture working group, you know, not all god yeah whatever you say we all
Said,
No, I think, I think it's perfectly okay you know even though we try to target our
Are you know eventually paper into to be somewhat more friendly to a wider audience.
You know, if you talk to God and he'll say, hey, these are all technical papers. We haven't even with Identity Services paper right so
I think you know let's let's get to the answers and get to a comparison and and you know if we need to use garden to make it a little bit more friendlier
Version later, you know, that's perfectly okay so I think from
From an architectural group work product perspective, it's perfectly okay to have a this targeted at the technical audience. All right.
Okay, so in that context them.
So, Adrian. Are you are you are you a little more comfortable with that definition.
Yeah. Yes. I think that that helps bring a little bit of clarity.
So I'll need to read through it a little bit more as well to wrap my head around it, but I will hopefully be able to contribute a little more moving forward.
Okay. So in that context, then let me just ask this.
I think we have to strike the word ideal here although our fair companion from Fujitsu is likely to be very unhappy about it. I
Think the word that was brought up before was reference
Yeah, maybe we can just inverted we've been calling it the ideal model and using
You know the reference third party as as a way of adding cortex to others. Maybe we can invert it and say in the academic community. This would be referred to as an idea of model and call it the third party model.
Okay, I'm just gonna make that change.
And hopefully hot okay with that.
Just to chip in for for hard for a moment. Perhaps the reason the the ideal.
The ideal model. The ideal references missing is that the academic community is focused on
Large is focused on
On the bitcoin, which is which is a public model and we're
We're, we're we're dealing with private
And so all the other their reference is a public reference and we're actually looking perhaps more for a private reference
And they're so
They're so busy coming up with new consensus schemes that
I actually asked a couple of somebody PhDs on teamwork.
And they said yeah that's that's
They've got they've got a simplified model they need to do that work. So perhaps that's why
Up top brings up this this paper.
And
Perhaps we should
He mentioned he was going to get to it in the full press. We should just giving them the altar boy.
Well, and again, I think I'm, I'm happy.
To let heart do the formal version of this.
Mm hmm. I think we have to at least have sort of a reference of
We have to have an up leveling of what he's going to be running formally, that is, I'm not looking for this paper should not be about formal cryptographic proof.
But, but it can serve as a primer for reading some of those papers, for example, and it also should, and I think this is stuff we capture in the introduction, already
It also should equip our readers with a set of tools that they can use to do the evaluation of their own systems, at least at a high level.
That I totally agree with Mike Right well said yes.
Yo,
So again, I think it's, I think we're looking at this paper, not as we have to look at this paper sort of educational at some level, but
Ok so i i made a couple of changes at the beginning of the section.
So I changed the title to reference system model.
Shoot, I should probably anyway. The second content full paragraph in this context, we'd like to define a reference system model called an ideal system and formalism cryptographic proof. Let me move that up.
Nevermind.
Okay, in this context, we'd like to define a reference system model called ideal system one formalizing cryptographic proof.
Is a construct for years for analyzing and not intended to be a practical system, the reference system model is how we would build this if we had a perfectly trusted third party. We designed the system with the abstract ideal in mind because it provides best case analysis.
How does that sound.
Sounds good.
Used to be.
Those paragraphs kind of work. Alright, so then going down.
So the text that we have currently focuses on this notion of the trusted third party so
Moving into the model itself and what the characteristics are of this reference system model. And I'm going to have to get used to that. And I'm going to get beaten up by heart when it comes back.
What are the characteristics that we want.
And this is standard in some case the and I'm going to go back to you and those who are who are really building and using us. But this also becomes a characteristic of the architecture.
So if we think about public blockchains it seems pretty clear that we, that the bulletin board model is the right model.
Everyone sees the messages that are being sent back and forth to everybody else. Everybody has visibility into the transactions.
I don't see how to get around and we may hide the details of the transactions, but everybody sees the existence of the transactions.
What do you think about that as the model as opposed to something that becomes more reflective of the kinds of approaches that
You know fabric with channels is really trying to construct multiple bulletin boards, each one of which are isolated from others.
The ordering service then has, at some level,
A secondary bulletin board.
That's at least scoped over all of the channels over widgets operating
That again feels a lot more complicated than what we want.
What are thoughts about what the right model is for this.
Well, that's a
Tough one then because the fabric in mean there are some major issues with the way fabric approaches.
Some of it.
Okay.
So, Stan. Remember that think of fabric and it's like
If it were working ideally RIGHT IS IS THE is that model of channels and separate
Private communication groups, a reasonable model and in your mind. Yes.
Yes, the. So if we take the fabric model and
Again, just as a kind of like the way you described as before, like at the beginning of the call.
As a
Basically, like a network of bilateral
Side channels so that's that's the extreme case, which is probably
I don't know how
Workable that is in terms of the privacy and confidentiality, that is the ideal system.
It is not very practical. So where it becomes more practical is in a way fabric model.
If we were to another improve them that it is really
A network of really low population Ledger's
Right, so you can have a, in a way, it's kind of similar to the way I really like
The way corridor described their high level approach.
Where you designate
The visibility scope for all of the data. And then if the owners intersect that creates the chain.
Right, so the way they had it kind of visualize as kind of a Venn diagram.
And then the communication happens only at the intersection between the consensus and communication only happens at the intersection
Of great so it's within the domain, you have your watching, but then you can only cross the domains at the intersection points.
Yeah, so this this privacy as you've just said, Stan, I think we all agree with that.
So literally, the intersection is what's included in the set. It's the same as saying I've got a wallet and I'm going to put so much things in it.
And therefore, it is my own private domain of what I put in that wallet, the same concept with
private channels as well as data private data collections, because the data collection is a collection of stuff that sits somewhere on the blockchain.
Even if it's not part of the legend. I just shared. So it's privacy, whichever is better. I like divided the Venn diagram concept because it identifies it set of things at a particular intersection and that is five h and outside the full scope so
Yeah. Again, we have to be descriptive. What would be easier than also where we tried to get to them it
So yeah, so so
Be a little bit careful here of there's
There's a trap. We have fallen into when we had this discussion before, which is we start to mix sort of characteristics of the system with
Requirements.
So,
I hate to use this analogy but you know when you're writing a patent application at some point you have to say method and apparatus. Right. And then there's the sort of apparatus part which is the physical incarnation of what you're building right
So,
So I agree that we can talk about privacy in the abstract and in these sort of channels, but that but that doesn't help us with
The characteristics of the physical system that the
Incarnation of this. And I think with with this reference model. What we're looking for is the incarnation. That is it, it's reflective of
The implementation details, not of the requirements. So what we're looking for would be for example. So going back to your, to your comment Leonard
Those might be things where we described requirements that is visibility is a set of requirements on which we could analyze Korda and fabric and sawtooth and others for their ability to do that. So, in, in some sense, we're looking for something which is
reflective of the characteristics of the implementation. So let me go back and and and be a little more precise right so
We may say
That what we have are physically isolated collections of channels of communication channel. And I'm not talking about channels and the fabric sense just network connections right we have physically isolated network connections.
Because if all of this stuff is going over the internet. Then, it really is. It's, it's a bulletin board where we impose on top of that bulletin board.
Some cryptographic primitives that allow us to isolate to create those isolated communication channels.
To agree, yes.
So, so if we're talking about communication over the Internet, then, at some level, we have to describe this as a bulletin board.
But if we're talking about physically isolated if we're talking about letters that are being deployed a physically isolated networks, then we can start talking about. And again, this will sort of that that and I know Stan, you may some of these references before
You know, do we have leased lines that connect
Institutions for the purpose of performing transactions or interactions between those organizations that are not part of a public network.
For example,
Yeah, and and and I think the answer what you have said before, and what VIP and has said is that yes, those exist.
And
Whether they are implemented over at AMP T fiber with a special leased line.
I think we can treat them as physically isolated.
Channels.
I think
Yeah, I think make we can make some some assumptions right you know of the different you know it's almost if you're going over the public internet, even if it's encrypted you you're going to assume that the adversary has the ability to actually see the flow of information.
Exactly. Another
Word is important. Yeah.
Right. The second level could be, you know, you do assume that there's
Private communication between
Participants but you know the adversary is only able to see some of the communication. Not all the communication. Right.
Assume
That they're not able to see pairwise communication between every
Now part of entities. Right, right.
So the third strict us would be that, then you know you
You know the adversary doesn't have visibility into the
Into the communications at all right. It's
It's completely physically isolated. So let me, let me ask you something wrong. And so, as we've been talking about sort of
reference architectures for these platforms.
It, it seems like we can't assume just one communication style because most of these are assuming multiple styles.
And again, I'm thinking fabric right that that there are channels and those channels can be implemented over physically isolated networks.
But at the same time. There's the ordering service which does represent a bulletin board and does leak information.
I mean, it may not leak.
It may not lead specific
Plain Text transactions, but it's still leaks information.
Right. Yes.
So,
First time we tried this and the second time the third time we tried to get this section worked out. We kept trying to go with one or the other of those would it makes sense to try to combine
Both of those
So I don't think I don't think heart minds that we have
One trusted third party.
But maybe we should describe these
More hierarchically, and again, I don't really know. I'm throwing ideas out here because we got to get past
This this barrier.
Yeah, maybe it's, you know, three different variants of the model right instead of one, if that's what you're getting at.
And I think with the adversarial model we're already
Kind of
Having a bit ID right so
I kind of want to say that the very practical systems. That's they say we have exactly exactly that combination, some of the data little
Above. Yeah. Yes.
Over this bulletin board model and some of it goes over the physically segregated channels.
And then there is a cross section at each party right
Welcome
Interesting. So if you were thinking about. And again, just
We've
The typical approach and using the ideal system model is as you have a trusted third party and you're running some protocol through that trusted third party right
Again, not, not wanting not wanting to
Speak for heart who's really the expert on this and
I, I HAVEN'T SEEN PAPERS where they described the reference model or the ideal model in terms of multiple trusted third parties, each with a specific
Domain of trust.
But when we, when we think. And again, I'm, you know, I'll stick with fabric architecture, because it's the easiest one to talk about the isolation.
The ordering service represents a particular entity.
With the particular visibility.
And we can assume that
There's a certain set of communication that goes along with access to the ordering service. So the ordering service becomes a trusted third party whose job it is to perfect
Ordering and make sure that all things are ordered correctly. So it is an Oracle to which we can ask the question. Did this happen before this.
Then the peer sods
Excuse me, the peers that are associated with each of the channels.
And the execution of the contracts in those
In some sense, represents another trusted third party. And I don't mean individual peers. I mean, the pure set and not that trusted third party is basically responsible for
If I apply this transaction to the state will I get this state out
As a result of it.
And so it has in some sense of different role.
It should we
The danger in expanding our model is it becomes the model becomes so complex that it's not useful as a basis for analysis.
What do people think about kind of different roles for these these kind of trusted third parties and our model.
MC. I'm trying to understand a little better hair because really, that's all part of consensus isn't a consensus, meaning a set a set of Piazza set of nodes and Glee in that this is watch it should be.
Right so consensus.
Consensus was a particular way of implementing the trusted third
Party, which the ideal trusted third party does this perfectly every time.
But consensus is not perfect, right, in particular, if you end up with
More compromised peers that matches your endorsement policy, then it's not perfect.
And there will never be a perfect system.
Is and I will never do it. That's exactly right. So what we
Like sigma nine, you can get
To 99.999% but cloaks. Yeah.
You're close but you can't get perfect. And so the the point of the of the trusted third party is to say
If we could build the perfect components. This is the behavior of that component. Right. So the perfect ordering service always answers the question. Did this happen before that.
And it answers it correctly.
Every time
Right. Yes. And
All the call a centralized all the call because it can't be 100% accurate at all times. That will be fair that says that will be hacking attempts, there will be issues over time, whether it's based on quantum hacks or otherwise.
The distributed nature of consensus still seems to be more alluding to more protection than anyone.
With lies.
Okay.
And again, to go back just for clarity sake on this.
Consensus a particular implementation. A CONSENSUS, RIGHT, whether you know
We can do what what people are currently doing with Kafka, or we can use raft, or we can use some PB FT variant or we can do some talking about a variant right
All of those are approximations of the perfect ordering service for the purpose of the reference model we assume a perfect ordering service.
And then we take our particular implementation. So we say this is an ordering service. Now if I apply if I'm using raft in my implementation, I can do an analysis that says raft does not meet the characteristics of my perfect ordering service.
The perfect ordering surface does not have to be build a bowl.
We postulate its existence.
So you're trying to get to the gas approximation.
Exactly.
Okay. Oh, I agree. All the hypothesis and language line to get to at some point in time, it will lead to an implementation.
Or it gives us a basis to evaluate existing implementations. Yeah, I mean,
That's more where we
Where we want to end up with this paper is
It gives us a way of saying
You know,
The fabric ordering service has these
Characteristics.
And it's
Slightly different in the following ways from
Our trusted third party and therefore we can do
Some evaluation of it. Yes.
I think that's a good way to analyze the fabric of fabric like model right and and I think there are several, you know, it makes sense in any system which is separating ordering from
From you know the smart contract validity validation then and and we see that as a pattern that's that's kind of more general right so
I think that's
That's a good model to go with, how does it apply to kind of for instance sawtooth and so forth.
And
Honestly, I
Well, the new sawtooth architecture pulse consensus out it might actually
We might be able to do it there as well.
Done, I think. Let's go with it. I like let me say, let me say this a little differently.
When, when we wrote up the architecture, the sort of overall architecture paper and we talked about things like ordering services and evaluation services and state management. A couple of other components that we talked about.
Yeah, I think we were right.
That the level at which those are integrated with one another, how tightly. Those are integrated is different for the different platforms we have
But they all exist.
Yes.
So,
I think being able to talk about how we map.
Each of these systems into something
That just clearly component that's ordering
And there's clearly a component that's responsible for
Sort of evaluation of correctness.
Yes. And more and more those
Components for modular ization are being isolated from one another.
Yes.
So I guess.
I'm not too worried about
sawtooth I think we could describe it and make it work.
Okay.
So, and I like that. I mean, it ties back to our overall architectural
Functional
Description of the modules. Right, right. So, and to that extent we can tie the model.
To that description you know saying, hey, we've described consensus with ordering
And you know dependency on correctness and the correctness is through
You know the smart contract layer. So you have a model where folks are agreeing on correctness and then you're, you have the ordering mechanism to deal with the ordering and together we achieve consensus. Right. Yeah.
Exactly.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
And in fact, I think that's a great idea that we should really reference this back what we should do is go back to that white paper.
And use the
Architecture, we came up in that white paper as our as the shape of our ideal model.
Yep.
I like that.
All right. Um, so
We're more or less out of time for today. Um, why don't we plan on an agenda for next time of going back and opening up paper up
And walking through
That piece of it right
Just to to kind of read it back make. So what is interesting is by the
Time the ideal model to our kind of reference architecture where we say, hey, there is
The
Consensus part with ordering separate from the smart contract layer which is about correctness.
Right.
Time composition
And we do a composition, saying, you know, there is one
You know, smaller set of guys are dealing with a trusted third party which is representing the set, who is dealing with the correctness check and there is the another third party which is dealing with consensus and ordering
I think that's exactly that.
That feels like a more
Like a path that both is consistent with what we've had discussions around on a path that's reflective of
The actual architectures of our systems.
Yeah, let's give it a shot and see where we go
Okay.
All right. Anything else for today. Then from anyone.
Just a quick anecdote. I can't even find
An ideal reference model by us. God
Or or the NSA
Like papers I do find there of course there. They've been published that clear for published but it looks like
That domain over there would have
Papers.
Or at least would be referencing academic academic papers in this area, but I don't
There's a pretty rich set of academic papers that are using ideal model.
I think we've got a couple of references, way back in the notes. Okay. And the heart provided for us, like the UC model, for example.
Okay, I'll look at those things. Okay.
All right. Um, and I'm going to close things down for today, then
Thank you very much for your participation.
And we'll see you in a couple of weeks.
Yeah.
Thanks, everyone.
Great discussion.
Have a great weekend. Everyone
Says, bye. Bye. Thanks.
Joe, thanks.
Good morning. All this is rich
Hey, so that sounded like a lively discussion what group was that
I
Was the architecture working group.
Architecture. Okay.
Very cool.