2017-01 (January 2017) Meetings

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Thursday, January 26

Agenda:

• Report work

Attending: JeffS, Thomas, Kathleen, Devon,

Kathleen: looking for definitions of "Provenance" (from Jim/Thomas). Thomas: we never did define "provenance".  There is also "proof of existence" - example from JMoehrke where people wish to show they have an idea (i.e. patent) without revealing.

Thomas: how is this done today?  Kathleen/Devon:  example of sending a closed envelope to yourself, timestamped by the US Post Office. Thomas: can also go to a notary.

Jeff: blockchain already exists globally, so easier to use as notary.

Kathleen: new use case. New President wants services to be given to citizens only. So you could use something like blockchain.

Report status. Kathleen already written HL7. Devon working on the legal contracts. Thomas: Rose/Fullbrighrt report. Devon has read both.

Thomas: R3 is working on methods/avenues for dispute resolution.  Devon: contracts have to indicate which jurisdiction it applies in, and location of dispute res.

Kathleen: possibility in future to have a court where parties need to escrow funding for post-transaction disputes. JeffS: if escrow exists, then you can pursue this as recourse.

Thomas: DAO mentiuoned that participants do not have an external arbitration/dispute process. So developer who siphoned off $60Mis correct in saying he was obeying rules in DAO.  Thomas asks Devon: if we wrote a paper-contract and states that there are no disputes allowed, can one of us still go to court of law: Answer is Yes.

Devon: the code in DAO is "law" according the DAO. Permissioned blockchains (operated by private groups) in the future may define its own dispute resolution jurisdiction.

Kathleen: back to the trust question. Difficult to legislate how much trust people must have. JeffS: but that one-to-one.

Thomas: social trust can be seeded by government (e.g. buying car from manufacturer that satisfies gov envronment regulations, eg. EPA). Kathleen: eBay is another example of social trust (between sellers and buyers). Some existing systems/markets may not need to move to bchains as they are working just fine.

JeffS: technologists' dream. Kathleen: when monetary assets are involved.

Thomas: definition of technical trust from TCG. Compute unit must be able to operate unhindered and must be to report outcome truthfully.  Devices that operate as specified, every time, creates technical trust on the part of the user. Thomas will add text.

Kathleen: social trust and economic trust. The "markets are operating fairly". Thomas: social trust is a much broader matter, involves consumer perception (e.g. bad PR from Silk Road/Bitcoin).

JeffS: Social trust is multiple layers. Party who you are transacting with. Enforceability of contract. Enforcer of the contrtact. Trust in the service itself. Some people may not want to play.

Kathleen: car example.  JeffS: Volkswagen issue in the US. So broad, it bcame national issue. National institution got involved. 

Thomas: should gov get involved in overseeing a global blockchain. Example of NASDAQ. JeffS: what will be the jurisdiction. Kathleen: it should be global. What if a bloc of nations refuses to accept. JeffS: like bitcoin, there needs to be incentives built-in. Brokers today need to be registered (e.g. in the US).

Kathleen: which gov dept is doing registrations. JeffS: not sure. Thomas: mentions Treasury's project on LEI company-numbering scheme (like D&B).

Tuesday, January 24

Agenda:

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Verifiable claims: We looked at Manu's responses to Adrian's questions. Adrian is advocating for moving away from federation. Thomas and Eve's analysis focused on being dubious about much being new in the approach vs. what's possible with JWTs, and this being troublesome from the perspective of "respecting and balancing all ecosystem parties' needs". Kathleen comments that for our readers to consider the spectrum of ecosystems (tight to loose), what is the most an individual should "have to put with" just to get the service they want and have trust? The goal should be to find discoverable semantics, and compute the trust you need.

One thing we missed in the W3C charter is that it talks about extensible semantics. But otherwise it doesn't differentiate what it's trying to do from other claim formats.

The temptation is to design a JWT-based format that has the extensions that do what VC is doing! Susan observes that it was ID2020 that was the impetus. She suggests going back to the VC people and asking for a brief analysis that shows a compare/contrast over existing tools in extended form, for the empowerment goals we hold (the charter doesn't mention this goal). Lowering friction in development and deployment is one that we're concerned about (for accelerating adoption and also for reducing complexity = greater security); can they speak to that?

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Hence seemingly a good match for our use case criteria. Colin will introduce them to Eve in email, and she'll send them the questionnaire. SecureKey has gotten investment for blockchain-based efforts, and they are on the Kantara board, so let's at least ask them for feedback on our report, if not as well contributing a use case; Colin will reach out and cc Susan (whose connection is through Mary Hodder and IDESG). Susan can also send the questionnaire to Bitpesa, and we'll see how much time we have to combine what we get.

Discussion of the prescription use case submitted by Adrian (which Eve will forward to the list, for full context): By "The current introduction of hospitals and other institutional intermediaries into the prescription order process" is meant identity management/authentication (for checking the physician's identity) and the management of EHRs (because the prescription is generated within the EHR system). There is rent-seeking by the systems that have performed this consolidation. The goal with the use case is to have the clinician use as many as three apps or more, e.g. one for login, one for proving you deserve to prescribe, one for payment, etc. The idea is that they're horizontal and you'd have way fewer in total.

Adrian has commented that the Sedona report's logical model of EHR discovery trust (p. 64 here) doesn't account for decentralization, which blockchain can enable. Sedona is an influencer on e-discovery; lawyers and Google and MSFT and others do pay attention to it.  So we may want to reflect on this in our Observations section, given that we have several use cases that have implications for health. We recognize that health data itself wouldn't be stored on a blockchain, but the generally accepted approach would be to store a transaction record stating something happened, then a later transaction record stating something else happened (or even some previous record had to be corrected), etc.

Tuesday, January 3

Agenda:

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