Introduction

The Blockchain and Smart Contracts Discussion Group was launched in July 2016. This report from the group offers recommendations and observations to Kantara Initiative covering the following scope:

• Solving use cases for empowering traditionally disempowered parties (such as individuals)
• taking part in transactions (such as entering into contracts and information-sharing agreements)
• with parties that traditionally hold greater power (such as companies and large countries)
• in the context of decentralization technologies and techniques (such as blockchain and smart contracts)
• and their mixture with identity (both in the context of requiring identification for transaction purposes course of conducting business/legal transactions and to solve broader digital identity use cases).

...

A recurring theme in digital identity communities ("user-centric") as well as in blockchain communities ("removing intermediaries") is the question of balancing the control between individuals and other entities – others – to enable disempowered entities to rise to the level of a "peer" with others in some fashion. A legal term for the way the imbalance may assert itself in a transaction is a "contract of adhesion" (a standard-form, take-it-or-leave-it contract). Two key Key aspects of this imbalance are:

• Granularity: The less-empowered party must accept a totality of trust and liability, rather than a smaller apportionment.
• Dynamism: The less-empowered party must accept a the contract all at once in time and can't change the parameters now or in future.
• Market choice: The less-empowered party must accept an offer due to limits on available alternatives.
• Transparency: The less-empowered party must accept that the other party is acting as promised.

...add more commentary about the imbalance? ...public and private blockchains have different dynamics – there's a different economic incentive – can't 100% rebalance, we suspect...

While it's important to evaluate technology for its ability to effect change, it's not the end of the story. Technology operates in a business and legal context; hence the popular notion of a "BLT sandwich". We have seen a rise of technologies that address the process of negotiating and executing legal contracts, along with smart contracts that aim to automate agreements while providing required legal context (such as the jurisdiction and the parties).

...to come... listing our technologies and techniques for analysis... ...listing our use cases and case studies for analysis in light of the previous... 

...preview recommendations...

then END INTRO.

Frame the tensions as themes:

...

Blockchain technology is a platform, not a ready-made application. There are “public blockchains” on which applications can be built; two of the most well-known are Bitcoin and Ethereum. (N.B.: A recent (Jul-Aug 2016) hack and fork have left the Ethereum blockchain split into two, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, showing the extreme volatility of this space. See also the Blockchain Graveyard detailing the many startups that have already died due to hacks.) These can be thought of as being something like “public cloud services” for blockchain.  There are also open-source implementations of blockchain that can be deployed internally within an organization; depending on how they’re deployed, they can be thought of us being something like “private cloud” blockchains. There are also many blockchain-related tools, SDKs, and app platforms that ride on top of these base layers, much like other development platforms.

...

Blockchain Types

• Special-purpose blockchains such as Bitcoin
• General-purpose blockchains that can contain anything
• General-purpose "smart contract" blockchains designed for nodes that contain programmable content
  • For more information: Contracts and Transactions (with EthereumEthereal)

Case Study: MedRec

(Kathleen takes writing this one up as an assignment. She'll float some text to the list first.)

IPFS

tbs

...

Other axes

• Permissionless/permissioned...
• etc. (which graphical form(s) of analysis? diagram? matrix? etc.)

Smart contracts:

• "True" contract
• Pile of code 

IPFS

...owner: Thomas?...

Certificate Transparency

...owner: Scott S...

CommonAccord

...owner: Jim...

CommonAccord is an initiative to create global codes of legal transacting by codifying and automating legal documents, including contracts, permits, organizational documents, and consents. We anticipate that there will be codes for each jurisdiction, in each language. For international dealings and coordination, there will be at least one "global" code.

Protocol-Specific Contract Provisions

HL7 (with FHIR) security/privacy/trust/provenance codes, GTRI, GA4GH model text, UMA model text...

Legal Contracts

tbs

IAM Systems

tbs

UMA

tbs...owner: Scott D?...

Sub-type: trust frameworks

• Identity federation
• Access federation

Digital Identity [and Access?]

...owner: Andrew...

...ultimately this has to include access management too, because this comes into permissioning use cases...

...treat "blockchain identity" as wholly separate from "identity and access management" applied over "blockchain" technology, and also separate from the general notion of the identities of the "parties" involved in contracts...

UMA

...owner: Eve...

Consent Receipts

...owner: John W?...

User-Submitted Terms

...owner: John W or designee?...

Use Cases

tbs - present each of the analyzed and approve use cases here, presumably each in a subsection (or transcluded?), drawn from this page

tbs - where to identify and analyze issues uncovered through the use cases?

Case Study: MedRec

(Kathleen takes writing this one up as an assignment. She'll float some text to the list first.)