The second is two things. One is we are members of the hyperledger foundation or I don't know what they call themselves today. Maybe Dan knows better but we are bound by anti antitrust rules wherever we are. The other takeaway is that we are meant to be kind to each other. That means even if we disagree with someone you don't have to be disagreeable that is the main the second takeaway and without waiting much longer I think we should start the presentation and hopefully I mean what is your preference Robert do you want people to ask you questions in the chat people to wait till the end whatever is appropriate. Yeah I'm fine with interrupting the presentation because that's the easiest way sometimes to address the question. Right away I can say I think everyone is aware of that when you're presenting it's really hard to follow the chat so if there is any question on chat you can feel free to interrupt me and just read out this question and we can address it right away and then obviously afterwards we'll have a time for a discussion with anyway so I will try to to leave some time at the end. Yes I'm happy that you're here guys present earlier decentralized semantics but it's all about taking control of your own destiny indeed up to the extent it's possible and pushing that boundary further and further that is the key key to this topic I think and let's start with the presentation. Okay perfect so let me share the slides let me know if everything looks okay. Looks good. Perfect so welcome everyone thank you very much for having having me today and today I would like to introduce to some of you which didn't heard of yet or those who actually heard of about this concept some time ago an update and introduction to to what is going on in that space. The overall topic of today presentation is the micro ledger and I will explain why and exactly we call it that way and what it means and what are the consequences of this authentic data component which we are using heavily in the dynamic data economy. So my name is Robert Mitvitski I'm a founder co-founder of the human colossus foundation I'm a technical head of the technology council at human colossus foundation. My background is in the software engineering I'm involved in the decentralized technologies for some time already I had a chance to to take a part in the different activities around the standardization and development of the decentralized components I was one of the contributor to the fair data economy guidebook which ended up as working group at the European standardization committee. I'm representing Swiss standardization association within the discussions on the digital identity in the European standardization committee JTC 19. I'm as well a contributor to the hyper ledger ecosystem as you may know me from from cementing an input working group as well the acdc authentic chain data containers task force and some other places in the different communities like the decentralized identity foundation where we are strongly working on the on the components of the key vent recede infrastructure. So today we would like to introduce you the the findings which we which we faced over the course of the last couple of months where we developed those components and we try to encapsulate this know how in a in a decent way to explain to everyone why this approach is better than anything else which we saw so far and we'll see how that how that reveals. So on the high level micro ledger is an event transaction walk. So what it means is that basically have a cryptographically bind bound self-certifying identifiers enabling the possibility to and verify this data structure no matter where it is right you can verify the origin the changes and the way how actually it evolves over the course of the time and obviously it provides you the details supporting this confidence or validity of the data. So what it exactly means we'll we'll need to explain based on on the where where where we started with it. So in the human causes foundation we are working on something which we call dynamic data economy and long story short this is a set of the components which enables us to create a truly decentralized ecosystems where the data can flow where the data can be easily shared and the user or the subject is able to control the data not only from the perspective of the ownership but as well traceability and transparency within the whole ecosystems how the data are consumed by whom and to achieve those goals we came up with this model which allows us to boil it down to a specific characteristics of the data. So we are starting with the pure data at the level of the integrity where in the semantic domain we're defining the meaning of the data and integrity of the data means that you are basically addressing the problem of knowing what it is not where it is not who created it but what it is and only that gives us a very powerful mechanism to be able to already start operating on the data and creating a different types of the data pipelines but obviously integrity is not the only characteristics which we are interested in. Another which follows that is the authenticity there's something which we call factual authenticity of the data where we want to know who created it what was the origin of that information when it was created and this is exactly the the topic which the input domain address with the information of the of the whole infrastructure of the decentralized key management identifiers and all the aspects of who created the data and when but obviously that's not enough because when you look on the data only knowing what it is and who created it doesn't mean or doesn't give you any clue about the veracity of the information so this is where the governance layer on top of that comes into the game which gives you the answers and provides you this consensual veracity which means that maybe based on the reputation of the person who created that maybe based on the rules or different ethical aspects of the of the data exchange within that jurisdiction you'll be able to reason about the veracity of that information. So this pyramid we call it accurate data pyramid and the reason why this pyramid because none of the above component can exist without the underlying component so you can't talk about authentic data if you do not have objectual integrity but that means that if you sign any arbitrary data or maybe a location where the data are with the possibility that the data can be changed and you will not be able to detect that then obviously you can't reason about the authenticity of that information because if the data can change so what that you sign something which could change right doesn't make any sense and and this is very important to understand that those two layers providing a technical or machine security in a sense there is no trust involved in those two layers means there is no governance around that there is no rules around that it's just purely about the cryptographical assurance of the object and who created it or who signed it right all the trust comes from this layer from the governance above so you based on those rules and and the information which you're collecting overall you can figure it out if this information which you have what is the veracity of that information is that really true is that you know it could be subjective true but but based on the rules and the understanding of that you can you can reason on that so that's where we started and and we realized that to actually achieve that we need to start thinking slightly differently and one of the reason is that those two technical layers they cannot be dependent on any governance layer what that means is that you can't operate on the network like a blockchain or anything like that where the given governance actually can control the data no one except the one who actually creates it controls the data here there is no way that someone will be able to to impact that only as soon as the data will start flow and the the governance rules will apply there is a governance around the data flow not the data itself so that lead us to the working task force in acdc authentic chain data containers so for those who don't know what it is is the the attempt to solve the problem of authenticity of the information or find to find find a general model for something which a lot of people call verifiable credentials so how you pack authentic data in a way that it can serve as attestation as a verifiable credential as a authorization mechanism authentication mechanism mechanism and so on because there was a lot of different standards and a lot of different attempts addressing pretty much the same thing but everyone did that in his own way because i'm interested only about authorization so they skip all the all the aspects of verifiable credential for example right and and the initiative which was started by sam smith with the acdc give this way of thinking about that we can create a data container which can be and verifiable and it doesn't rely on any underlying infrastructure and it can be portable and this is very important we'll see the use cases around that can i so we took that yep please before we go further just to go back a couple of slides there is a something which says self certified right which obviously mean the person who or the authenticity is a self certifying identifier uh so the semantics uh to the you know when you have this layered approach you have a building of capability i suppose and on the other hand there is the arrow coming down from the top which you are saying is a problem in certain circumstances especially if it interferes with the free flow of data so in the absence of a transport layer of some sort how you know how can you make that claim because in the end you have to transport it somehow uh whether it is through the internet through uh you know through a through a message through email through whatever mechanism we have so all of them have governance that can actually stop the flow of that data and actually yeah so to answer that question the reason why it's done that way is that you can realize that as soon as you do not have a dependency on the governance in those layers anytime on top of that you can add this governance by for example how how the transportation will happen it's really depends on the use case right you could say that okay we are transporting data over a simple hdp because we have a servers and you know server client architecture and we're exchanging information that way but you could think of the use case where you have the two mobile devices communicating over bluetooth right and then because they are not dependent on the transportation layer and the governance you are able to do so because if you start with the limitation of the of the governance on those two layers then you obviously limiting the use cases and you kind of came up with the general concept of how actually you can compose that so everything related with the transportation and how the rules applying to the flow of the information is starting on the above layers which allows us to be very flexible in the context of what type of the infrastructure or the use cases we can we can apply. So there are two other things with that one is there is a discoverability of the semantics which is usually through registries or some common place common location unless you transport the metadata along with data saying this is what I'm sending you and this is what it looks like and then you will say depending on a minimum set of acceptable characteristics whether you're signing it properly can I discover who's signing by looking somewhere else you know so there's always even if the data is completely portable there's always mechanisms by which you'll have to look outside that packet the lowest layer even if it's coming to you so there you know that is taken as a given I suppose in this context. And just shortly I will comment that and if it's okay for you I will add that later on on the example of that. I don't want to stop this because actually I will mention about exactly that one how this works because it's just about purely assumption of the security of those specific layers but then this security allows you to have much more flexibility on the on the level of the discoverability because of the thing how you're addressing it in the context of you care what it is not where it is then it allows you to have a different types of the infrastructure for the resolution mechanism I will address that at the latest later slides we'll show the examples. So yeah so what exactly this pyramid is trying to address is changed the way how we think about the data that we secure in the data not the location so we know always what it is then we are attaching authenticity to it so we know who say so and who say and this who is very tricky because who it could mean that is just identifier and we have no idea about identity of that person because there's another part of the who comes from the governance like for example is that identifier a really a doctor is that identifier a really part of our supply chain right so that's that's a split here which you need to be careful when actually you're thinking about that but what we mean here is that who from the perspective of uniqueness of that identifier within the ecosystem which the signature sorry signatures represents so having said that we started thinking about the mechanism which actually we started developing in a cdc authentic chain data containers and we started realizing that actually a lot of people uh try to build a similar solution like a cdc and for whatever reasons they didn't want it to go for a cdc per se and there was a couple of reasons for that one of them was a very strict way how the cdc encouraged to build those data structures and do not let's say there was no room for doing a mistext and the cdc is designed that specifically that way just to assure about the security of those objects all the objects needs to be mutable all all the objects are linked through the cryptographical hashes there is a set of the different properties within the cdc as a base where you have identifier of the person or entity who creates that you have the information about the data itself you have the information about the semantic and you have the information about the rules which could be applied sorry could be applied to the specific data which you have here for example uh consent or a purpose of the usage of the data data agreement or maybe other rules which can be applied or eventually cryptographically enforced during the process of processing those information so we try to look on that from the perspective of all the bit more generic um aspects and we came up with this um a concept of the micro ledger because it was easier to explain to people what exactly acdc is because technological speaking micro ledger is acdc if you if you dive to the details and now we'll show you exactly how that how that uh rolls out um the reason why we picked the micro ledger as a name is always a reference towards this what people are talking about the blockchain that we have this magical blockchain which ensures you about the verifiability or immutability of the content right micro ledger is exactly that thing it's a blockchain but it's a one node blockchain you just basically have this list of cryptographical data linked together so the micro ledger characteristics as you see on the slide there is a bunch of them but here's the most important one um starting with the end verifiability so this is what everyone is so interested in the blockchain because it gives you exactly that prop the properties what it means is it's a very simple concept which is pretty old but it's very powerful that you have a blocks which are chained cryptographically each block is linked with a previous one to his identifier and this way you can uh you can create a data structure which you can verify from the perspective of the of the chaining mechanism so you have this digital fingerprint which represents the whole block right whatever is inside this digital fingerprint is basically one-way function over that block so it's tied to the content itself so it means that if you're pointing to it you know that you're pointing to exactly that content whatever is inside right and if the content will change the digital fingerprint will not work right so it will be different just one bit one bit off and you know that this is not the block which you are looking for right so that's a very simple concept but it gives you this this mechanism of linking the data together not only that whatever you put inside the block right we always putting that in a form of the seal what is seal seal is basically one-way function over the data which you want to want to anchor on the block and here and the reason for that is actually there is a couple of reasons first of all the size of the seal is pretty much predictable means that you can grow this block this micro ledger to a lot of blocks without impacting the performance of verifiability of those of those blocks you could anchor for example a terabytes of the medical daytime there without impacting the performance of verifying of the blocks all together right another reason is the privacy because you don't know how this micro ledger will be used and where it will be transported in many cases if you are dealing with a sensitive information you don't want to put them in a visible and easy accessible way so in many cases you will seal something which could be even encrypted in addition right and then you'll need to have additional mechanisms for the resolution of that seal right so how i will get the actually content within that block and this is where this resolution and discoverability mechanism comes into play and you have two options one is you basically attach the seal content as attachment to the block so when you're transporting it and encoding it for the purpose of sending it out you basically attaching the information all together to the block it could be a semantic it could be a data it could be one of another or it could be everything altogether right so everything is self-contained you don't need to reach out to any other source for the information but if you want to have an additional for example controlling mechanism in the context of who actually can access the information right you could or you could apply a different cryptographical methods to actually attach it to the seal attachment means that it's encrypted and only people with a specific key can decrypt that or you create a seal registry where actually you have a separate repository where people can reach to ask for the content related with that block in many cases especially that true for a lot of different transactions is that the data which is inside here is not very interesting from the perspective of whoever receives that and we'll see that on the supply chain example but for the auditor or someone who actually will need to verify in case something bad goes wrong he will need to reach to the seal registry retrieve the content and verify that this is exactly the content which was part of that data exchange as as it happened right so this way you can split the variability of the data set from the data itself because in many cases you don't need to have them upfront you could use a different methods of the zero knowledge proofs attached to the block and the data outside in case if it needed and so on so there's a lot of uh flexibility into that so uh following next one a compressibility uh so the the reason of the so the data structure is relatively simple and this gives us a powerful methods of creating any I see the hands up if uh yeah yeah thanks Robert I'm sorry to interrupt but I wanted to ask so the the seals you're saying are our hassles of of the data that you're sharing or right okay so so uh yeah this is hyper ledger identity working group so if there's identity data personally identifiable information including potentially biometrics let's say so you're saying this seal could be a hash of personally identifiable information that's stored on an immutable ledger exactly whatever that whatever you store it it doesn't matter uh because uh that's that's the basically a specific to the use case where you put it and what is reasonable in that specific use case but it's exactly that thing you have you run one with one way function for on the content which you want to attach it if it's a self sorry sensitive information which you don't want to reveal you just put a hash of that which then eventually can be used to prove that actually those sensitive information was part of this transaction without putting them in the first place it's like a lot of people talking about this anchoring mechanism the blockchain is basically the same idea you're just putting a cryptographical hash of that content or whatever data attributes we are talking about and anchoring that into the block and another point is that this can be called a commitment which obviously the english word assess it all because you're saying i'm committed i've committed this particular information to the to the to a global witness and once i've committed that i have no way to go back and change my commitment because i exactly very good point yeah and the reason for that is something which we'll see later on because it's all about accountability within that chain so if you're using that within the supply chain with i'll talk later a little bit uh you'll realize that this is exactly what what the entities wants to that in case if something bad happened i can always get back and figure it out okay what did you commit to what was the transaction data which we're exchanged during that time yeah no thanks for that the main reason why i asked is is gdpr article 29 that hashing is a form of pseudonymization but not anonymization so we have to be careful of what we're what we're hashing and and putting um especially on an immutable ledger where it cannot be deleted ever right exactly why did they say that if it's a one-way function because it's still associated sorry i was jumping on because it can still associate it with a person um a real-world person right so if you and bachenheimer one-way hash it's it's pseudonymized but it's linkable basically what you're saying is if the data parts of the data are known uh but you know i mean if if somebody is hashing dan bachenheimer yes but if it's um lots of other information along with it plus a salt or something that makes it um not back you know you cannot get back the data it's a one-way function that essentially removes information quite a bit of information so it depends right i mean in the sense that yeah if it's just your name yes you can try everybody's name and see where the hot hash comes out to be and if it matches you know that it's the name dan bachenheimer yeah yeah so bottom line is yeah it it you're talking about a well designed situation where you're aware of these vulnerabilities uh and you're dealing with them that's all i wanted to bring up is just to make sure that the meaning of a seal is a one-way hash of data and and now we've exposed some of the considerations as we just been talking about so yeah thanks for that sorry and plus uh he also mentioned that you could actually encrypt the data which is um exactly and actually depending on who you ask some people will say actually that encrypted data and the hash of the encrypted data is still linkable because if you will have all the components you can link it and figure it out that actually it was that but obviously it's like kind of overkill to uh because we already have all the information right what's the what's the value in in in the linking mechanism between that if you already have it but anyway that's that's that's something which i think it's very um i think on the political level it will be really hard to solve that problem because there is always a danger that it could be used in a in a wrong way but uh i think having encrypted data and attach the seal of the encrypted data in the blog um let's say mitigates all most of the risks which could arise from that and obviously if you are super concerned about that you should never ever use your sensitive information in any ways that you will not be sure about so that's um then um robert excuse me yeah problem excuse me i've got a question this is brawlin for i i would want to know uh if in your concept um is is this the practical ash of the seal that is the proof that um when you perform an audit frame on the data is it really the the ash that is uh the clue exactly that's something which can be used for the audits and prove that this is exactly as as bp mentioned commitment what you did for that specific transaction and then you can uh because in many cases uh auditors actually have access to more more data than actually those people who are actually performing transaction imagine a situation where you're exchanging a package from one provider to another they don't need to know too much about that except that they need to take this package from this guy and send it there right but if the audit uh will came in they could have access to information of the personal identity of the guy who actually did the transaction and then additional information on the other side of the specific person who actually received that package right and then everything that can be done through this kind of ceiling mechanism where you can point it to the registry of the data where actually those information could be retrieved you could split it you could basically attach any data objects into there depending on the use cases but that's the predominant use case of that that you can achieve a high level of accountability uh and the security um from the perspective of the audit trial so so you confirm that that's the ash is the cube yes thank you okay um I think we can move on so the next characteristics it's about uh the possibility to compose those micro ledger right so imagine that we have a one data structure and you want to build on top of it something which continues that information outside of the jurisdiction of whoever actually started it and uh and a very good example is in the supply chain in a after sales market where you're buying something you basically in most of the supply chains that's the end of the chain right but actually if you buy a car and later on you sell it right or any other goods right you could continue continue that and um collect additional information about the good which you are uh which you have and um and that's true for any type of the data I imagine that you created a book which you're creating in the form of this kind of micro ledger and then someone takes it and remix it in a sense that uh derive a new version of that book or create a new story a new chapter the same of the remixing of the musics there is a powerful mechanism where actually you can compose that for those who are technical who's work with the docker containers that's a very good analogy what the docker is doing with the docker files that you can actually build uh a new extensions to the underlying layers of the data structure which is in that case the docker container you're just adding a new staff to it and you have a cryptographical link between them so you can verify this exactly the layer which you are referring to and here is the truth that that's true for the micro ledger that you can anchor a previous another micro ledger and connect them with the one which you created right and this gives you a possibility not only to have a linear uh chain but you could have a DAC you could have a three structure you could have any type of the data structure which which is valid for your use case so the next one which is pretty cool and maybe not very much intuitive the ownership because by definition of the ownership the micro ledger doesn't have the owner per se and not in the context of the as you could think of it's much more as a custodian of of that specific block so the reason why so is that because we wanted to have a data structure which is portable right so obviously if you think about the revival credential that's not very useful because i mean given the revival data structure to a person we don't want to let him transfer that to someone else there's not many maybe actually there's a bunch of use cases actually which could leverage that but if you think about any arbitrary data like a package which traveling through the whole world right you want to make sure that the information will be consistent and verifiable but each time when you're passing to another person you kind of giving away the control to that person so he can take care of the continuation of that block so no one needs to go back to you to ask you for a permission to add something to it right so you could imagine that you have you're starting a micro ledger with Alice and Bob and they those two entities through the multisig controlling the mechanism of of those blocks not only to the multisig you could have a threshold signature different types of the techniques where you could actually say that two out of five keys needs to sign the block to be valid there is a flexibility into that and they continue extending the blocks and then in a point of time they saying that okay we're passing that to Charles and now only Charles is allowed to control that micro ledger controlling that data structure right you could imagine that as a form of having a book which or any digital content which are passing IP rights to another person to continue to work right and actually there is interesting use case which we are working on leveraging the micro ledger to combine it together with the Git repository where each commit which you are doing will include all the information about the IP rights about the patents about all the necessary information which allows you to truly give it away to to let's say open source ecosystem so you will not need to have a governance around the code to trace each individual developer to actually figure it out if they didn't claim something later on or if they didn't you know change their minds and stuff like that right so there is a cool stuff around that which which we could discuss later on so and the last one is the kind of flexibility of that construct and this is why this was one of the reasons why actually we started creating something outside of ACDC and create this generic concept of the micro ledger because we realized that a lot of people claim that they will not like to use ACDC because it's used these are after encoding instead of something else it use a controlling identifier which we don't like or we would like to use another one or it uses specific types of the signatures or digital fingerprints and things like that right so each of the components within the micro ledger is it can be swapped and can be changed depending on the case which you have right so the encoding interface so how you encode the blocks and how you transport them it could use a different techniques you could use Caesar as it is used in the in the carrier ecosystem you could use a multicodex you could use some existing stuff you could use something which doesn't exist yet and later on you basically apply it here as a module and then you use that specific technique for for that specific module and each of the mechanism like seals digital fingerprints there is a bunch of techniques right now available on the market which could be used for that to implement or to provide the implementation of the specific component but the micro ledger as a concept doesn't doesn't assume that there is a specific techniques used because in many cases for example a lot of people would like to use a PKI a centralized PKI solution for managing identities of those who actually controlling those those species of the information and that's fine I mean it won't be very portable but maybe for that specific use case it will do the job right obviously from our perspective from the truly decentralized ecosystems currently we implemented the micro ledger based on the Caesar based on the Kerry as a controlling identifier this keeps us a signature interface so the self-certifying identifiers which comes from Kerry self-adressing identifiers for the digital fingerprint and time stamping authority as a mechanism to actually anchor a time when this information was created and obviously you could use a different mechanism like a blockchain and you know things like that and currently we have implementation of the block attachments but as well like external repository which is a customized repository similar to the repository which we are using for overlays capture architecture and taking that into consideration you see immediately that decoupling is from any specific vendor or any blockchain any network it gives you the possibility to move around those blocks across a different networks right and allows you to have this truly decentralized and portable decentralized in quotes in a sense depending on which components you will use but you can really achieve a truly decentralized portable data structure which can serve a different purposes so this is pretty much how how we started the kind of reasoning about that where we said that okay we started with this micro ledger and then we realized it's okay but the micro ledger is not necessary for a lot of use cases the the thing which actually is pretty much enough is something which we call nano ledger right now which is basically a cryptographical link of the data and you can see that in the networks like BitTorrent a different data exchange OCA repositories heavily use that concept where you don't care who controls that or who created it you care what it is because of the use case doesn't require to know who actually controlling that or who owns it or who who issued that right but definitely the most interesting one is the mechanism where you have actually controlling identifiers the kind of state logic and the signatures around that because then you can encapsulate a lot of different interesting use cases around that concept and saying that obviously the micro ledger itself can be used without any layer of the governance but as as there was question before in many cases actually the governance is necessary how you for example reason about the time when it was created right so you need to have this authentic timestamp which means that there is authority which everyone trusts within the given jurisdiction that this indeed is a verifiable time stamp issued by this entity so this is where the governance comes in and you have this time stamping authority you could use a blockchain as a global kind of time stamping mechanism for that specific blocks or any other sorts of the time stamping authority which which people trust it really depends on the use case but then you have a different mechanism of the duplicity detection and this is the topics of the NFTs like non-fungible tokens that people are claiming that I bought this for a million dollars this picture belongs to me is that okay who say so I can copy it and say it's mine right so it's really depends on the governance around that and how you actually enforce this duplicity detection and make sure that actually people obey the rules in a given jurisdiction right um there is a bunch of stuff related with uh semantic of the data that you could have a rule saying that if you are for example anchoring the data medical data they need to follow a specific semantic um you know including uh sensitive information or stroking out sensitive information and things like that a glossary for example what what is named how and what is the definition of this what is inside how we understand the definition of that of that information the trust registry which obviously allows you to identify who is actually controlling controlling identifier and here example is like if you have a car and you're servicing that car right you want to make sure that the service was done by authorized um uh dealer right so you can verify in the trust registry that this controlling identifier belongs actually to that car dealer uh which is which uh which then brings the value of the data itself and not that you have any kind of car dealer which actually fix the car maybe it could be a fake one or maybe someone who are actually not following the the quality standards are still expecting right um and there is additional of this data sharing engine i will not talk much about that just mention about this as soon as you have those micro ledgers you can pack them in the something which we call data sharing engine which allows you to create a kind of a data pool of uh like a place where actually you can query this kind of data uh data pools in a privacy preserved ways and exchange those information in the in the global uh or local or global scale doesn't matter but you have interfaces how you like a repositories for those micro ledgers if you if you if you think that way so here is uh what uh just an example of what actually can go into the seal and this is this comes directly from the acdc uh example that the seal uh uh can include the semantic of the data the rules for the data like data agreement the uh terms and conditions the purpose where the data can be used so you can actually have something which will be meaningful for the auditor in case in your company let's say you're buying a data set of the users for your campaign and you can show to the auditor that actually you collected those information according to all the rules according to the gtpr according to the all the uh legal framework which you're operating in that you have a concept of each individual user allowing you to use the data for that specific purpose right and obviously the data itself um yeah so that's just uh repetition of that there's a bunch of the references here um if you like I can share that those slides for those who wants to you know uh have it um it's not a problem but now uh what I wanted to uh give you is that like okay nice concept sounds cool but what we can do with it right so one of the kind of motto which we have uh is this phrase which you see on the screen is data is like electricity it has value and it flows right and this is exactly what we are trying to achieve to have a portable data structure which allows us to send the data whatever we need or whatever we want to right not as a part of the network not as a part of a specific ecosystem but whatever I want to I want to parse the data to give an example uh let's say I'm based in Austria I go to a doctor I retrieve my medical records from my doctor now I would like to share those medical data with a doctor in Germany because I have a friend of mine who is a a specialist in uh in that space and he could advise me and provide me a medical advice and that's what I did so I would like to send my medical data in a secure and authentic way to him and obviously he's not part of the Austrian ecosystem and the and infrastructure for the medical doctor so he will not be able to get that information through the official channel so I will I would be able to take it package it ship to him and then he will be able to be sure that the data were not tempered that he can really work on the data from the perspective of the medical aspects so one of the predominant use case where actually we are using micro ledger trying to apply that is in the supply chain and briefly I'm pretty sure that most of you know what is supply chain and how it works depending on the scenario and the use case you always kind of have this a chain of the entities and the actions which are necessary to to reach the goal normally starting with the raw materials providing to the by suppliers to the manufacturing where the they producing a product and there is a distribution chain then you have a retail locations where this goods are distributed and finally the customer purchase those information and as you know the economy is very complex it could happen that you have a product raw materials coming from China going to India India as a manufacturing provider building the products to the distribution chain they are distributing it to the Middle East then the Middle East distributed further on to Europe and they end up in the store in Berlin and then the customer comes and buy it right getting all of those guys on one platform impossible right and why we actually want to address those problems so there is a bunch of benefits which are coming directly from the supply chain ecosystem where you have you want to manage the demand so you want to know how when and you know properly balance the the necessary materials how many of them or how much you need for the production what is the demand on the market and stuff like that you need to have a data for that carry the right amount of the inventory so again the same pretty much information necessary to understand how much you need to be prepared dealing with the distributions disruption sorry so in case if something happened you need to be react fast and reaction depends on the authentic information and proper information in the chain so keeping the cost of the minimum meets their customer demands in the most effective way possible and something which is not possible currently a feedback loop on every step of the chain and I will show you in a moment how that works so a lot of people say that okay blockchain came we solve all those problems a lot of companies try that they fail and it's really a huge companies which did a project with blockchains which failed in the supply chain because they thought okay we need a blockchain because we need to have a timestamp we need to have a tracking automating transactions smart contracts what's not everything needs to be solid and works reliable then they would like they would like to minimize the involvement of the intermediaries right such a bankers insurance brokers because of the smart contracts and the smartness of the blockchain right set up the wide range of the self-execution contracts allows you to automate that process right so make it way efficient and way faster you don't need to rely on the papers and you know passing stuff and things like that the quality and the proof of the quality and proof of the provenance the payments performance all that stuff could minimize counterfeiting and the fraud within the whole chain right and obviously they had a promise to make it easier faster and cheaper because of the technology right but it didn't work and why it didn't work why you don't want to use the blockchain for the supply chain one predominant problem is that lack of interoperability and the interoperability I means that I start in one measure and move to another ledger if you don't have that one you need to onboard everyone to one ledger if you're onboarding everyone to one ledger then you have a problem with the governance framework who decides who can join right a lot of organizations are afraid of that that there is just one entity or even a consortium deciding who can join that specific supply chain right and it could be used against some political regimes or other way around it's basically hard to convince everyone that this will work right not mentioning about the scaling and the privacy issues related to the blockchain it was mentioned before that you know privacy preserving mechanism is not a domain of the blockchain because as soon as you put something there it's immutable you can't remove it you can't hide it it's available to everyone who have access to the blockchain right so the micro ledger come really handy and we realize that actually we can design a system where you can leverage carry as a decentralized key management infrastructure to actually create identities for all of those guys who actually participating in the network package it into micro ledger data containers and pass it as soon as the goods are moving around right so we have a bunch of the containers identified by decentralized identifier and by the way when I'm saying decentralized identifier in that context it's not what you think and I'm sorry for that but I couldn't find a better word for that decentralized identifier is not the one which is following the DID core spec it's something which we try to so this is what the carry introduced is that this is a decentralized identifier without the namespace you have just a prefix as it's called it's a hash and it doesn't rely on any method or any network or any namespace it's not it's not needed for that and and this way you achieving the the true portability of those objects so here is an example of the vaccines the production of the raw materials suppliers manufacturers you have the here is a Cal key event log for from the perspective of this micro ledger structure so it's events chain together or the piece of the information chain together about the specific product how it was produced by whom when and and so on and this information is floating through the whole system back to the customer and distribution centers and actually oops sorry for that there you go and where where you can get to the customer and what I wanted to show here on this another example this is about the car the flow is pretty much the same the principles are the same it's just I wanted to show this or highlight this after sales mechanism where you have a customer who actually normally the supply chain ends here where in that case because of the portable data structure you can pass that information to the customer be and so on without need to actually be on boarded to any system without being on boarded to any vendor or whoever is behind that is is truly decentralized approach for the secure data transfer in the in a very vast ecosystem so a kind of summary of that what we are able to do with the micro ledger is not only to solve the problems of them of the supply chain in a generic way or the data flows in a generic way but what what we are able to enable is that you can have a feedback loop from any part of the chain back to any jurisdiction entity whoever is interested in that so for example from the perspective of the vaccination you actually can have a privacy preserve flow about who at the end got the vaccine so you can actually leverage that for the counterfeiting programs or to understand how your product is distributed or to establish a relationship with your customer without need to onboard him to any specific platform like let's say you always buying Audi you are loyal customer so next time when you buy Audi you just get a discount or you get treated way better because you can prove that you did that even though that you bought that car from the second hand or maybe your third or fourth owner of that car right so there is a lot of interesting aspects which enables this feedback loop on every step of the chain so just briefly before we'll go to the questions I just wanted to mention about what we are doing with that and how actually we are proceeding for those who will be interested in that matter within the Human Colossus Foundation we have something which is called supply chain harmonization program this is a place where we created a natural ground for the entities who actually are interested in solving the problems in the supply chain in a truly decentralized way and we're working heavily on those technologies and providing our POCs and the expertise in the field of those technologies helping those who are actually building a business case is on top of that that they don't need to think about how to create own blockchain or how to solve all those problems so if you are an entity which is interested in participating or contributing as an expert in that ecosystem then obviously let us know and we are happy to get you join the program yeah there's the structure of how the program is structuredized I will just leave that slide so you can look it up later on and then how that works from the perspective of the financing and organizational point of view is that you can think of it like a foundation within the foundation so the Human Colossus Foundation is a non-profit foundation based in Switzerland in Geneva which is a solid ground for decentralized components and building technologies around that topic and we are providing programs for organization who are interested to apply a decentralized technologies into specific application and the supply chain is one of the one of those programs where we have a separate wealth and asset management and the steering committee composed of the of the organization who are willing to join and so we we're trying to build it in a way that that that will truly solve the problems of of those organizations in a truly decentralized way so that's it I think I don't know what is time but if you have any questions comments or or feedback happy happy to hear yeah we can probably extend it I don't think there are any people who are using this zoom link right away but you know maybe five minutes or so there were a couple of questions about how is it different from rollups how it's different from you know those kind of off chains side chains those that's the question that came up from sandy thanks weapon yeah so if you could please touch on that that'd be that'd be good so I see I think you mentioned here like one place uh that uh this is like like we don't want to use supply uh blockchain since the supply chain industry because of the the reasons you mentioned uh I I understand your points over there I'm trying to understand like it's like two quick questions here and we can go back and all the data state how is this going to be different uh than side chains for example like I mean if this is just a container where you can have uh basically pseudonymized data not truly anonymized then how is exactly different than and uh also uh I think you also mentioned that you can probably use this also for transfer ownership I think that I found pretty uh interesting thing like so so for instance if you uh I'm going to bring an example here from the gaming side like say you have an asset you create an NFT you create a micro ledger out of that and uh now I think the example you were taking for docker was pretty apt that you can have a docker template so similarly you can have an asset template but now you want to apply a different layer on top of that so how does that really work in this context like you can basically take it but who's really doing the consensus of that right so um okay so one by one I mean first of all regarding the question about the sidechain actually the question should be what's the difference between between the blockchain the sidechain because that's the important to understand because the thing is that depending how you structureize the sidechain and how we are incurring it and where and who actually controls that sidechain gives you basically to the same position as having a blockchain right there's not much difference in that in that respect so the difference between the sidechain and the micro ledger is that you don't rely on a specific network you don't have to rely on in a specific place where this information is put you can basically imagine that right now having a sidechain you're basically cutting off whatever the whatever is related with that specific information which you put there or you anchor it and you move it to another chain right or another place or a centralized system or whatever right so it's really it's really about this kind of um um way of thinking about the data as and not the location where it is or even anchoring it and stuff like that but the data as a whole thing as a self-containing information which can be tagged and send somewhere else and you don't care if there is a if it was starting on the sidechain or the blockchain or centralized system or whatever you can have the whole thing all together with you so that's the um I hope that explains the difference in the way of thinking about that um the second thing about you ask about this concept of the NFTs and the assets and things like that uh this is a kind of uh tricky let me get back to the uh where we have it oops yeah let's let's stick with this one actually this one is better so um when you have the chaining mechanism right so let's say you're starting with the item in the game and then it's owned by Alice and then you eventually be selling it on ebay to someone else and someone else actually passing it to someone else and so on so without having a proper governance around that it won't work because then you're relying on the assumption that whoever will look on that data set that they will be able to verify it up to the governance and in that case it will be the game itself right because you want to know that this item was truly generated in the game and if me as a Charles buying that item outside of the game will get back to the game and I will be able to use that item then it's good for me right so it's really depends how you create the governance around the way how the data will be interpreted because this is what I mentioned about the NFT is is that you have the NFT let's say a Rembrandt right you bought it it's yours right who say so right I can make a copy of that and say I bought it as well right and now someone needs to decide where is the origin or what is the root of that information that someone actually purchased it right so if you do not have this trust anchor at the beginning somewhere this governance who says that this is the information which are distributed then you know none of the chaining mechanism will help you could say that yeah uh you can the same problem is on the blockchains he's saying that yeah it's on blockchain I was first right doesn't mean anything until the whole ecosystem will agree that yes we'll we'll take that into consideration and we'll respect the rules that as soon as something is on that blockchain we'll take it as uh as approved that you're the owner because that's what we agreed that's what are the rules this is why I pointed out here that this pyramid is exactly addressing that problem that it doesn't matter how secure your data are if you're operating on a different governance right you uh you can actually change the way how this information will be interpreted let's say the NFT in Europe will be taken seriously because it's your Rembrandt but in China they will say that no it's someone else right so I hope that that helps to understand the concept here so it's not that the micro ledger address that problem because that's the problem laying in the governance layer which obviously it's really depending on the situation where you are in the use case thank you thank you Rob so I think I have I'm gonna have other questions later on but I'll loop back but thank you I'll switch back thanks yeah I have to give you more I'll have to learn this stuff so Dan do you have anything or Ronda anybody this is helpful I mean just I put in the chat if yeah we'll take you up on the offer Robert of sharing this if you if you you know we will put it in with the meeting notes if you could share the document yeah I think Deepin I can shoot to you the presentation and you will attach it right yeah yeah I will just we'll do so on the meeting notes which is normally yeah that would be great thanks normally the case so fascinating presentation and I can you know I want to just make a couple of remarks here just to sort of broaden my mind hopefully one of the things is this brings forth is the fact that it's an interoperability mechanism in a certain sense nothing prevents there being a blockchain somewhere in the middle but it extends it both in a sense before it enters the blockchain and after it goes out of the blockchain so you could use this this portability mechanism to come in and go out come in and go out as many times as you want in different blockchains in different entities and so on but in the end it's the legality behind the registration mechanism and the recognition of that data as valid that counts and which is exists outside of all technical structures in a sense but I have a feeling that we have this political problem like the one that that Dan and and and Drummond brought up about this GDPR and the hashing and why they think a one-way hash is they look at the very simplistic use case and then they say oh that reveals information but you know so is many other ways of techniques of doing things you've got to have a certain amount of sophistication and you've got to have a certain governance behind it otherwise that mechanism can be broken so that's one thing now we are looking into interoperability in DC GI interoperability of digital currencies and one of the mechanisms that came up was something called message-based interoperability which is nothing but something like this because you're basically sending a message and that message is self-contained it's got either pointers to find where the metadata is which you said were two types the schema itself the structure and the rules in addition to the actual data so there is in polkadot for example there is XCM which is because it's inside their ecosystem they can control it but nobody thinks about how can data come in and go out in a cryptographically secure and authentic way I think that is that is a key for interoperability and we are actually there is a lab in hyperledger we started defining what we call cross-chain settlement instruction which is it's almost like a swift message but it's got cryptographic veracity I mean ways to see you know to check veracity embedded in it anyway so this is all you know and also there's something called DCPI I think in in WEF which is for sending it was in the you know in a trade finance context it is also a message they define a certain number of fields and these have to be there it includes of course the cryptographic you know signing fields and hashing fields and so on but it's also means been verified that it's legal under the Delaware law which covers a lot of ground and it's it's an interesting take you know DCPI I think it has many similarities to this and I hope we can bring back the DCPI we have the DCPI folks we have the Kerry folks we had you guys doing the decentralized semantics now we have all of this put together in a way in the microledger concept and my thought about blockchain was always the very words blockchain it's a data structure so it you know ordering comes later you know it's it's you have to inject some other mechanisms in order for ordering to remain an immutable and so on but anyway it's a fascinating hour and whatever actually if I may add a comment to this one which I like and kind of summarize this but a lot of people think that the blockchain will replace your governance that's not true you need to have a governance even if you will choose any blockchain like you mentioned about the crypto moving but crypto moving between the different ledgers is that I could create my blockchain issue on million tokens and now I will be able to transfer it to blockchain like a bitcoin no I will not I need to have a governance around all those stuff which actually set the rules and if you split up this governance on top and the rest cryptographical assurance below then it will be easier to address the problems right and then solves them in a proper way so that's something which which I think fascinating that a lot of people are actually still missing that and and and this is why we have those hypes with NFT blockchains and all that stuff well it's it's all about the genesis right I mean the not genesis the coinbase transaction in bitcoin for example is the money supply can there be other sources of money supply or supply you know coming from the outside and if so how do you enforce that or are you just saying that okay you're going to just take whatever comes and point to that place and it's you're basically shuffling information not actual on-chain value which is what bitcoin is all about and you know so we have these two different concepts right I mean you have the value sort of standing as a guard to the other stuff you have to pay gas you have to do this you have to do you know all for rate limiting and preventing malicious behavior because you know so that's that is the way the governance works there but it's all self-contained and in the end you know you got to have other other people who have a foot in both chains like a you know cross-chain exchange wrapped Ethereum or wrapped bitcoin so you have to have a party there anyway yeah and and maybe one more thing regarding that which when you're thinking about decentralized ecosystems and obviously you're thinking about the blockchain as a one of the component think about it that the blockchain is not truly decentralized on all the layers what it means is that for example if you cut in the half the blockchain it won't it won't work anymore right but when you think about the data flows and the data supply chains right or data chains my data or whatever data I'm operating on are completely independent with your data which you are using right so it should be possible to cut whatever we are using in the middle and split those data completely and it should continue working as it is and this is the biggest problem of those guys who are actually trying to apply blockchain within the data space that they don't get that the data are completely independent in the sense that there is no global consensus about the flow of the data right there is no there is no need for that and the specific case of that example is identity identity doesn't need to have a blockchain and Kerry proves that that actually solves a lot of problems and actually if you use the blockchain you introduce a lot of problems because of that and and and this is a slightly different way of thinking about the data as a secure ecosystem or secure data flows in an authentic way that it needs to be truly decentralized technology to be able to achieve that otherwise you're missing some of the properties of that and and you basically losing a characteristics of the decentralized ecosystem thank you I think my my speakers are are not coming through properly my microphone anyway unless you have more to say I think we we can no I'm happy to close the day so obviously if anyone would like to continue the discussion getting get in touch the email address is on the slides I will share the slides so yeah thank you very much for your time and wish you have a nice day or evening thank you thanks a lot bye everyone this is that was very good thank you


I'm not sure whether this is helpful or not. What I'm going to do is to talk a little bit about economic geographies perspective on containers. One of the aims of economic geography research at Auckland is knowing and making new economic value relations in agri-food and marine industries. This big picture research investigates, among other things, how New Zealand is a territory with distinctive and changing activities in people is mapped or not mapped as part of other places. This social knowledge of the global and local is vital if we want to create and keep economic value in New Zealand, something that seems to elude our collective capacities over the decades. I use dairying today to illustrate why retaining value is so difficult. Estimates say that the world has 17 million shipping containers with around 5-6 million on the water each year. Containers are a 20th century phenomenon. They became the heart of global trade in goods from the 1970s. This development and moving goods coincided with a surge in multinational companies. These companies outgrew their national base and they reorganised the geographies of their investment, production and trade. Soon global trade became mostly inside these entities, obviously they were also trying to optimise their activities amongst the regulations of different countries. By the mid-1990s, global supply chains of companies had become a prominent focus for company growth and survival. New Zealanders journeyed with the container revolution. Most of our goods, exports and imports are container-shipped in increasingly dedicated supply chain arrangements by small and large companies. Fonterra, and you've already seen a slide there, New Zealand's global dairy corporate has been supplying ingredients, mostly milk powder, to the world's food manufacturers. Nestle, for example, is Fonterra's biggest customer and Fonterra is Nestle's largest supplier. International trade statistics, and here's a good map and you'll notice the absence of New Zealand in the right-hand corner, readily available by country but not by companies. The trouble with aggregated statistics is that they don't allow researchers to delve into the dynamics of global supply chains or to look at the ecological, social, cultural and political conditions in places that make links in global supply chains possible. What might we see if we could map company-specific trade flows and obtain better knowledge about where, what and how value is being made? This is to build an information base that uses our global setting. But before we try this, we must recognise that a big box or container holds us back and there should be a map now of New Zealand. Thank you very much, James. It's a nice shadowy map and it's an analogue for administrative, statistical, material and mental boxing in. We find it difficult to think outside the New Zealand map and others find it difficult to think about us as we saw in the previous slide. The world seriously is a stretch, yet that's what we must do if we aspire, for example, to keep value created in the New Zealand economy in New Zealand. Following the formation of Fonterra, Auckland's Global Dairy Research Group mapped Fonterra's internationally traded dairy produce. The group included a senior Fonterra manager and also Christina Stringer and myself and several other colleagues. The globalising snapshot, which is the last slide for me, shows flows of product almost all transported by containers. It is the matrix of flows. We can ask the question, is the matrix of flows part of the New Zealand economy or only Fonterra's dairy system or something else? The big lessons from the map lie in the fact that Fonterra is multi-locational, multi-national, a mix of created value from almost anywhere and yet some places in particular. And so finally, in a globalising world, value that counts or should be counted is unlikely to be just in our territory. This encourages new questions, including the obvious, value for whom, where, by what means and what mechanisms for distribution to whom. The answers aren't contained solely even mostly in New Zealand. New Zealand's collective focus becomes more like how do we all responsibly work in the complexities of the global economy, inventing new behaviours and supportive institutions to generate value that sticks in New Zealand.