Blockchains go mainstream…

 

I read an article a while back on Finland’s use of blockchain technology to provide bank accounts and identity services to immigrants (see  MIT TechReview article about Finland).

Blockchains were originally invented as a way of supporting financial transactions outside the current, government monitored, financial marketplace. With Finland’s experiment, the government is starting to use blockchains to support the unbanked and monitoring their financial activity – go figure.

Debit cards on blockchain

Finland’s using a Helsinki based startup MONI, to assign a MONI card, essentially a prepaid MasterCard, to all immigrants. An immigrant can use their MONI card to pay for anything online or in real life, use it as a direct deposit account or to receive and track the use of government assistance.

Underlying the MONI card is public blockchain technology. That is MONI  is not using normal credit card services to support it’s bank accounts, MONI money transfers are done through the use of public blockchains.

MONI accounts are essentially (crypto currency) wallets but used as a debit card. The user merely enters a series of numbers into web forms or uses their MONI card at a credit card terminals throughout Europe. Transferring money between MONI users anywhere in the World is also free and instantaneous.

Finland also sees an immutable record of all immigrant financial transactions,  that can be monitored to track immigrant (financial) integration into the country.

MONI is intending to make this service more broadly available. A MONI card account costs €2/month and MONI take’s a small cut out of each monetary transaction.

IDs on blockchain

I read another article the other day “Microsoft to implement blockchain-based ID system” in CoinTelegraph about using blockchains as a universal digital ID.

India has over the last decade, implemented a digital government ID using biometrics (see Aadhaar wikipedia article). Other countries have been moving to e-government where use of government services is implemented over the Internet (see EU article on eGovernment in Lithuania). Such eGovernment services depend on a digitized population registry.

Although it’s unclear whether Aadhaar and Lithuania make use of blockchain technology for their ID services, Microsoft’s definitely looking to blockchains to provide unique accounts/digital IDs to it’s population of users.

User signon’s has been a prevalent problem of the web for years. Each and every web and mobile App requires a person to signon to personalize their App. Nowadays, many Apps support using Google ID or Facebook ID for a single signon and there are other technologies being offered that provide similar services. Using a blockchain ID could easily support a single signon service.

The blockchain ID (wallet) public key could easily be used to encrypt an authentication transaction, identifying the App and the user. This authentication transaction would be processed by the blockchain digital ID service would use the private key to decrypt the transaction and use a backend ID App repository for the user to check to see that the user loging in, is the person that opened the account, acting as a sort of “proof of who you are”

Storage on blockchain

Filecoin and StorJ are storage providers that use blockchain services to allow others to use your local (or networked) storage to provide storage to the world.

A while back I had written about (free) peer to peer storage and compute services  (see my Free P2P cloud storage … post). But the problem was how do people benefit from hosting the P2P storage or compute. Filecoin and Storj solved this by paying in cryptocurrencies for storage hosted on your hardware.

Filecoin offers a storage auction and hosting service that anyone worldwide can log into and use. The data stored is encrypted end-to-end so that no one can see what’s being stored and the data is also erasure coded so that it  is protected and accessible even with having one or more hosting sites be offline.

Filecoin uses “proofs of storage“, “proofs of space”, “proofs of data possession“, and “proofs of retrievability” as a way to guarantee their storage service works properly. They also use chained “proofs of replication” as “proofs of spacetime” as service validation checks. Proofs of Replication are a way of insuring that storage providers are not deduplicating data copies and charging for non-deduped storage. (See Filecoin’s Proof of Replication paper for more info).

Storj looks somewhat similar to Filecoin, but without as much sophistication behind it.

Compute on blockchain

Ethereum was invented to support smart contracts that run on blockchain technology. IBM’s HyperLegder OpenLedger project (see our GreyBeardsOnStorga Podcast and RayOnStorage post on Hyperledger) is another example.

Smart contracts are essentially applications that run in a blockchains virtualized environment. Blockchain services are used to run an application and validate that’s it’s run only once. In some cases smart contracts use  external oracles to query as a way to verify something or some action has occurred outside the blockchain. Other oracles can be entirely digital entities that check on a particular commodity price, weather pattern, account value, etc. The oracle becomes a critical step in determining the go no go status of a smartcontract.

Advertisements vs. crypto mining

Salon, a news providing website, offers readers an option to see advertisements or to allow Salon to use their computer (browser) to mine crypto coins. (See Salon offers… article in CoinDesk).

I believe this offer is made when the website detects a viewer is using  ad blockers.

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Tthe trend is clear, people, organizations and even governments are looking at blockchain technology to provide basic and advanced services around the world.

If anyone would is interested in providing a pre-paid Visa card via blockchains, please contact me. I’d like to help.

Now if I could just find my GPU’s at a decent price somewhere…

Speaking of advertising… RayOnStorage doesn’t use advertising. But blogging like this takes time and money. If anyone’s interested in helping fund this blog, please consider sending some BTC our way, even 0.0001 BTC would help.

Our BTC wallet address is:

1MqBbAvMo6QbCVD6ZwtbLaPxmcUZGj9Ghw

Photo Credit(s): Blockchain and the public sector on OpenGovAsia.com

Unleash your design teams with single signon on Unifilabs.com

Understanding the difference between P2P and Client-server networks on LinkedIN

Blockgeek’s guide to smart contracts

Blockchain, open source and trusted data lead to better SDG impacts

Read an article today in Bitcoin magazine IXO Foundation: A blockchain based response to UN call for [better] data which discusses how the UN can use blockchains to improve their development projects.

The UN introduced the 17 Global Goals for Sustainable Development (SDG) to be achieved in the world by 2030. The previous 8 Millennial Development Goals (MDG) expire this year.

Although significant progress has been made on the MDGs, one ongoing determent to  MDG attainment has been that progress has been very uneven, “with the poorest and economically disadvantaged often bypassed”.  (See WEF, What are Sustainable Development Goals).

Throughout the UN 17 SDG, the underlying objective is to end global poverty  in a sustainable way.

Impact claims

In the past organizations performing services for the UN under the MDG mandate, indicated they were performing work toward the goals by stating, for example, that they planted 1K acres of trees, taught 2K underage children or distributed 20 tons of food aid.

The problem with such organizational claims is they were left mostly unverified. So the UN, NGOs and other charities funding these projects were dependent on trusting the delivering organization to tell the truth about what they were doing on the ground.

However, impact claims such as these can be independently validated and by doing so the UN and other funding agencies can determine if their money is being spent properly.

Proving impact

Proofs of Impact Claims can be done by an automated bot, an independent evaluator or some combination of the two . For instance, a bot could be used to analyze periodic satellite imagery to determine whether 1K acres of trees were actually planted or not; an independent evaluator can determine if 2K students are attending class or not, and both bots and evaluators can determine if 20 tons of food aid has been distributed or not.

Such Proofs of Impact Claims then become a important check on what organizations performing services are actually doing.  With over $1T spent every year on UN’s SDG activities, understanding which organizations actually perform the work and which don’t is a major step towards optimizing the SDG process. But for Impact Claims and Proofs of Impact Claims to provide such feedback but they must be adequately traced back to identified parties, certified as trustworthy and be widely available.

The ixo Foundation

The ixo Foundation is using open source, smart contract blockchains, personalized data privacy, and other technologies in the ixo Protocol for UN and other organizations to use to manage and provide trustworthy data on SDG projects from start to completion.

Trustworthy data seems a great application for blockchain technology. Blockchains have a number of features used to create trusted data:

  1. Any impact claim and proofs of impacts become inherently immutable, once entered into a blockchain.
  2. All parties to a project, funders, services and evaluators can be clearly identified and traced using the blockchain public key infrastructure.
  3. Any data can be stored in a blockchain. So, any satellite imagery used, the automated analysis bot/program used, as well as any derived analysis result could all be stored in an intelligent blockchain.
  4. Blockchain data is inherently widely available and distributed, in fact, blockchain data needs to be widely distributed in order to work properly.

 

The ixo Protocol

The ixo Protocol is a method to manage (SDG) Impact projects. It starts with 3 main participants: funding agencies, service agents and evaluation agents.

  • Funding agencies create and digitally sign new Impact Projects with pre-defined criteria to identify appropriate service  agencies which can do the work of the project and evaluation agencies which can evaluate the work being performed. Funding agencies also identify Impact Claim Template(s) for the project which identify standard ways to assess whether the project is being performed properly used by service agencies doing the work. Funding agencies also specify the evaluation criteria used by evaluation agencies to validate claims.
  • Service agencies select among the open Impact Projects whichever ones they want to perform.  As the service agencies perform the work, impact claims are created according to templates defined by funders, digitally signed, recorded and collected into an Impact Claim Set underthe IXO protocol.  For example Impact Claims could be barcode scans off of food being distributed which are digitally signed by the servicing agent and agency. Impact claims can be constructed to not hold personal identification data but still cryptographically identify the appropriate parties performing the work.
  • Evaluation agencies then take the impact claim set and perform the  evaluation process as specified by funding agencies. The evaluation insures that the Impact Claims reflect that the work is being done correctly and that the Impact Project is being executed properly. Impact claim evaluations are also digitally signed by the evaluation agency and agent(s), recorded and widely distributed.

The Impact Project definition, Impact Claim Templates, Impact Claim sets, Impact Claim Evaluations are all available worldwide, in an Global Impact Ledger and accessible to any and all funding agencies, service agencies and evaluation agencies.  At project completion, funding agencies should now have a granular record of all claims made by service agency’s agents for the project and what the evaluation agency says was actually done or not.

Such information can then be used to guide the next round of Impact Project awards to further advance the UN SDGs.

Ambly project

The Ambly Project is using the ixo Protocol to supply childhood education to underprivileged children in South Africa.

It combines mobile apps with blockchain smart contracts to replace an existing paper based school attendance system.

The mobile app is used to record attendance each day which creates an impact claim which can then be validated by evaluators to insure children are being educated and properly attending class.

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Blockchains have the potential to revolutionize financial services, provide supply chain provenance (e.g., diamonds with Blockchains at IBM), validate company to company contracts (Ethereum enters the enterprise) and now improve UN SDG attainment.

Welcome to the new blockchain world.

Photo Credit(s): What are Sustainable Development Goals, World Economic Forum;

IXO Foundation website

Ambly Project webpage

Earth globe within a locked cage

Blockchains at IBM

img_6985-2I attended IBM Edge 2016 (videos available here, login required) this past week and there was a lot of talk about their new blockchain service available on z Systems (LinuxONE).

IBM’s blockchain software/service  is based on the open source, Open Ledger, HyperLedger project.

Blockchains explained

1003163361_ba156d12f7We have discussed blockchain before (see my post on BlockStack). Blockchains can be used to implement an immutable ledger useful for smart contracts, electronic asset tracking, secured financial transactions, etc.

BlockStack was being used to implement Private Key Infrastructure and to implement a worldwide, distributed file system.

IBM’s Blockchain-as-a-service offering has a plugin based consensus that can use super majority rules (2/3+1 of members of a blockchain must agree to ledger contents) or can use consensus based on parties to a transaction (e.g. supplier and user of a component).

BitCoin (an early form of blockchain) consensus used data miners (performing hard cryptographic calculations) to determine the shared state of a ledger.

There can be any number of blockchains in existence at any one time. Microsoft Azure also offers Blockchain as a service.

The potential for blockchains are enormous and very disruptive to middlemen everywhere. Anywhere ledgers are used to keep track of assets, information, money, etc, that undergo transformations, transitions or transactions as they are further refined, produced and change hands, can be easily tracked in blockchains.  The only question is can these assets, information, currency, etc. be digitally fingerprinted and can that fingerprint be read/verified. If such is the case, then blockchains can be used to track them.

New uses for Blockchain

img_6995IBM showed a demo of their new supply chain management service based on z Systems blockchain in action.  IBM component suppliers record when they shipped component(s), shippers would record when they received the component(s), port authorities would record when components arrived at port, shippers would record when parts cleared customs and when they arrived at IBM facilities. Not sure if each of these transitions were recorded, but there were a number of records for each component shipment from supplier to IBM warehouse. This service is live and being used by IBM and its component suppliers right now.

Leanne Kemp, CEO Everledger, presented another example at IBM Edge (presumably built on z Systems Hyperledger service) used to track diamonds from mining, to cutter, to polishing, to wholesaler, to retailer, to purchaser, and beyond. Apparently the diamonds have a digital bar code/fingerprint/signature that’s imprinted microscopically on the diamond during processing and can be used to track diamonds throughout processing chain, all the way to end-user. This diamond blockchain is used for fraud detection, verification of ownership and digitally certify that the diamond was produced in accordance of the Kimberley Process.

Everledger can also be used to track any other asset that can be digitally fingerprinted as they flow from creation, to factory, to wholesaler, to retailer, to customer and after purchase.

Why z System blockchains

What makes z Systems a great way to implement blockchains is its securely, isolated partitioning and advanced cryptographic capabilities such as z System functionality accelerated hashing, signing & securing and hardware based encryption to speed up blockchain processing.  z Systems also has FIPS-140 level 4 certification which can provide the highest security possible for blockchain and other security based operations.

From IBM’s perspective blockchains speak to the advantages of the mainframe environments. Blockchains are compute intensive, they require sophisticated cryptographic services and represent formal systems of record, all traditional strengths of z Systems.

Aside from the service offering, IBM has made numerous contributions to the Hyperledger project. I assume one could just download the z Systems code and run it on any LinuxONE processing environment you want. Also, since Hyperledger is Linux based, it could just as easily run in any OpenPower server running an appropriate version of Linux.

Blockchains will be used to maintain the system of record of the future just like mainframes maintained the systems of record of today and the past.

Comments?

 

BlockStack, a Bitcoin secured global name space for distributed storage

At USENIX ATC conference a couple of weeks ago there was a presentation by a number of researchers on their BlockStack global name space and storage system based on the blockchain based Bitcoin network. Their paper was titled “Blockstack: A global naming and storage system secured by blockchain” (see pg. 181-194, in USENIX ATC’16 proceedings).

Bitcoin blockchain simplified

Blockchain’s like Bitcoin have a number of interesting properties including completely distributed understanding of current state, based on hashing and an always appended to log of transactions.

Blockchain nodes all participate in validating the current block of transactions and some nodes (deemed “miners” in Bitcoin) supply new blocks of transactions for validation.

All blockchain transactions are sent to each node and blockchain software in the node timestamps the transaction and accumulates them in an ordered append log (the “block“) which is then hashed, and each new block contains a hash of the previous block (the “chain” in blockchain) in the blockchain.

The miner’s block is then compared against the non-miners node’s block (hashes are compared) and if equal then, everyone reaches consensus (agrees) that the transaction block is valid. Then the next miner supplies a new block of transactions, and the process repeats. (See wikipedia’s article for more info).

All blockchain transactions are owned by a cryptographic address. Each cryptographic address has a public and private key associated with it.
Continue reading “BlockStack, a Bitcoin secured global name space for distributed storage”