Good morning. Good morning, everybody. Welcome. I'm very happy that you are here. And I just want to start with one important thing. The most important thing is let's discuss openly, okay? Because blockchain is a hot topic. It's a controversial topic. People talk about it. There's a lot of hype involved. And let's talk like really open. If we don't do it here, nobody else will do it, okay? So that's a good thing. And well, we are doing live streaming. So I have to announce it. And I don't ask you for like to fill out some papers. We don't do this stuff, right? But so if somebody of you doesn't want to be on the camera on the live stream, we can like work something out that the camera will never go to this corner, because the camera will actually record even the people in the audience who ask the question, yeah? Who ask the question, so. But one thing, we are not here to record a perfect live stream. The Cyber Academy team is doing a very great job, I can already tell. And I'm very thankful for that. But if you need to, yeah, I give them a round of applause. But if you feel the urge to just shout without waiting for the microphone, just do it, okay? And do it loudly enough, okay? Good. This was this thing. And well, the Wi-Fi, I wrote a lot of emails. And I tried to make it as open and as fast and as free as possible. But this is like where we ended up in a complex sign up process. And it's fast enough to write emails. Okay, I hope it will like work out. Okay, so the live stream will be under creative comments. And if you hear something that you want to like that is new to you or that you learned during the live stream, I ask you to reference it or reference the content that this person who's talking about it has published under maybe a blog post or somewhere else, okay? So it should be referenced, okay? And this is like for all publishers, right? Who hear this, yeah? And so the speakers, we will not share the presentations in a centralized way. But I ask the speakers to upload their presentations if they want to or share the presentations with the telegram group or upload them to slide share if they want to, okay? And well, we have our telegram group. And we can use the telegram group to share links and do organization, okay? So I'm pretty sure that you are all familiar with telegram. This is like the message of the blockchain community. We keep the intro short. So there will be only a few lines. If you think as a speaker that we missed something, you just added yourself, okay? It's completely okay here. And I think it's a better way than just like coming up with a lot of darts here in front of effort talk, okay? And well, I have one last thing that I have to announce. I've been often asked or we are often asked to do an ICO here, Blockchain for Science, yeah? So you know the token economy and I'm proud to announce the Blockchain for Science ICO today. It's the initial sticker offering. You'll find the stickers outside. So the stickers and on your badge, there's like a field like next to your name. And you are the only one who is allowed to put a sticker there. And like in the social media wall, you and the other person can put a emoticon there, okay? And you can write down what you want to be asked about on your badge, okay? So it's all about integration and communication. Get to know each other, right? And I'm almost done with my introduction and I'm happy to introduce Toshi to you. Toshi is the director of internet-based innovations at the Humboldt Institute of Internet and Society. And we are happy to like announce this conference under the auspices of this institute. Thank you very much and welcome again, yeah? Okay, look. Good morning. Yeah, so it's a pleasure to open this conference together with Zunke, of course, from the Alexander von Humboldt Institute. We support that initiative since the first ideas, I think. Yeah, so and so I'm very happy to be here. Let me give you some information about firstly me and then the Humboldt Institute. Of course, I'm responsible, as you mentioned, for internet innovation and innovation and society. So we do the research about the question, what does the internet does with this earth as individuals, as companies, as society? And so one main fact, of course, is to handle technology. New technology comes up, blockchain, and even in the area of blockchain for science, the idea came up. And so the idea of the Humboldt Institute is to focus on these kinds of questions and find out which are the main points where we could support these ideas. And so that was one of the first days when Zunke started a research group in our institute, and we had roundtables and talked about how could we use the blockchain technology even for science. And so the idea was to discuss this and I'm very happy that Zunke had their initiative to do this conference, of course, to bring people together and from all areas, from friendly other research institutes. And so from experts from the scene, that is also our impact to bring together different disciplines. So I'm one of the directors of that institute coming from computer science and other colleagues, director colleagues come from law, from societal research, from business administration research. So we try to bring together all these ideas and doing research on a broader base. And one of our first projects, I guess, was that open science book Zunke wrote with one of our colleagues, Sascha Frisike, is coming tomorrow, I heard. And so I'm very proud about that, even if I'm not the author, but you have 458,000 downloads on Springer. So that's number one. And one of the first ones who was open, it was kind of an open book download book. So if you never had that download currently, so just maybe you can close the 460,000 gap during these days. And yeah, now blockchain for science and this conference, the idea was to find out what blockchain can do for science and knowledge creation. And so to analyze the impact of science and knowledge creation, and even it could help us to find new ways maybe of funding research with blockchain technology or shared data. So to be sure that the one who own the data and the one who uses the data have the right track and history on that case. And so that might be one point which is going to be discussed in the conference or in one of the workshops, which will start. So our ideas and examples were to think about how to use blockchain technology for data, but also for links, identities of researchers and other cases which might come up. And so our focus is to have more safety on data we use for science and so that could be one perspective in that area. And of course we are thinking about new funding models in research using blockchain technology. And so at this time we did not only analyze and research the field, we tried to influence it. And this conference and Zwinker's vision is to build up a community which is influencing their blockchain for science idea. And so we would foster in that conference cooperation of course between people and institutes, prevent wallet gardens as you said it's an open talk conference and so we try to open up our minds. And this is an integral part of this effort, this conference which is starting today. And even Berlin, you have seen we are part of the Berlin Science Week and even Berlin is in a perfect situation and condition cause. We have a lot of successful initiatives here started in Berlin and so I'm happy that we have that conference that you decided to start the conference here. You could do that anywhere but you decided for Berlin and so I'm very happy and we have a lot of initiative, Bundesblock for example, coming up with maybe a new German blockchain law and so there are a lot of initiatives situated here and we have the chance to look how to enable this idea even blockchain for science idea. And so let's start with that conference and even blockchain might have been a kind of a hype with a very high peak during the last year. Maybe lots of you got a lot of bitcoins and so the crypto economy craziness how you call that that ended maybe beginning of this year after a downslope but now we are sure that we are in the hype curve now on the stable plateau about blockchain, blockchain for science and so we can have a fundamental claim of blockchain to drive that to a real successful story and just end with a kind of an outlook maybe you have seen and heard that this conference is followed by a lot of meetups, small conferences, workshops, hackathons even at my institute and also on code academy and other partners in Berlin so if you don't have it done yet just sign in and so I will finalize it with a great thank you to Zönke for the initiative on your vision to start this conference and I'm happy to be here and have a wonderful conference. Thank you Zönke. Thank you, thank you Toshi for the introduction and welcome and for your support and as you heard we are in the plateau of productivity in the hype curve right and it is a conference so we have to work and discuss and see what is in there or blockchain and science okay and now I'm I'm very happy to introduce the next speaker the first speaker it's Professor Diernagel from the department of experimental neurology of the Charité University hospital and he is known in the open science scene very well and I just hand over the microphone to you. Thank you very much so I hope you won't regret having me invite it especially as the first speaker because it'll be controversial and so if you fire this up my slides are on OSF as always so there's a there's an URL so my slides are there I should start with a disclaimer and the disclaimer is that I'm not going to talk about blockchain and science in general I think there are quite a lot of useful and interesting applications that are coming up what I will talk about is the context of the blockchain in terms of increasing value in I think the blockchain community does have a really big role to play here so there's a lot of great thinkers in this room a lot of great tech people a lot of great researchers a lot of great librarians as well and I think what you all need to do is coalesce together more as a sort of consortium or a community to begin to challenge the the other side of this so for example the STM association they call themselves the global voice of scholarly publishing they essentially do all the sort of politics and the lobbying on behalf of the the established scholarly publishing industry like why don't you want to take them on like build a consortium where you take them on in the name of open science so all of you people in this room come together and don't just make it blockchain for science make it blockchain for open science right how cool would that be and you know you actually come together and you share your ideas you collaborate because you have this common goal which you all want to address and you realize what you're fighting against and the steps that you need to to to take to overcome this and then you can collectively address together the issue of governance of public research and you know who owns access to public research this this is it and you know ultimately I'm going to steal a quote here from Brian Nosek and and Chris Chambers and say you know future generations but this is what we want right we'll look back on the term open science as a tautology a throwback from an era before science woke up and open science will simply be known just as good science or science and the close secretive practices that define our current culture will seem as primitive to them as alchemy is today and that's sort of what we want to achieve right so hopefully a lot of you recognize the logos here and let's build blockchain for open science as well so yeah thank you very much John thank you thank you very much for your talk okay so we'll have three questions okay John yeah okay good so am I a common question or we just continue with the next one John there was a fantastic talk and I couldn't agree with you more but the only question that I have for you is how do we work with the publishers instead of having them on the other side and telling that they do something wrong which is in a lot of ways they do harm but how do you bring them back to the table in order to achieve this logical how do you make them your allies instead of instead of having the other on them on the other side so that's a really good question so you know I don't think necessarily is always us versus them so in fact I think people from here are from digital science and they're working on this amazing blockchain-ified open peer review process I don't know if anyone's here yeah and that's a really great initiative with catalysis and Springer Nature, Wiley, TNF all joining in with us and that I think is really great but like ultimately you have to ask you know what do we all want and can the tension between you know this incredible for-profit motive of players like Elsevier, Springer and others be reconciled with that you know if you have CEOs taking home like 14 million dollars a year and you know three thousand bucks for an APC 40 percent of which just goes straight into shareholder pockets you know or five thousand two hundred in the case of like Nature Communications you know you have to ask can that be reconciled with what we want to achieve I don't have an answer for that I think it has to be assessed on like an individual basis based on the values of you and and your own companies and these are really difficult questions but it's not up to me to define that for you all I would just say think about how you reconcile the tensions and between what you want to achieve and the motivations of these big companies. Hashtag not all publishers. You asked a question regarding if yeah if anyone knows a kind of a secret scenario how to reach your goal well there are lots of literature about change management so this is typically a situation of having a bad habit in the whole system this is a systematic error and it's not really possible to solve this problem with only scientists and from small communities there is an institutional support which is really needed and you have to take along the academic institutions and of course the publishers with you and there are the major issue what I see now is that there are European Union funded projects which are really forcing this this is a kind of top-down effort and then there is a bottom-up effort which is coming from these kind of communities but in between there are these institutions which still have the good old habits not to convince not to go through but if you could tackle that one getting along institutions yeah using change management that would be I think the the possible scenario yeah I totally agree like if if we go back to like the penguin scenario I don't think we're in the phase where everyone's still sitting on the iceberg I think enough penguins have slid down the iceberg now that people are beginning to realize that this is the future like open science is the future open access policies are taking off all over the world at different levels and open science ones too and you know the future is definitively open but we have to be in a position where we're defining that trajectory right because at the moment I still think there are some players who are controlling too much in this space and I think the research community needs to again come together and you know realize what the tensions are and how do we overcome them and get the people who aren't in the room in the room so that we can address their barriers too but yeah I agree nice nice talk John Dave Kuchelko from Artifacts here I'm curious to to ask are there any funders in the room come join us at the front because I wish there were more of you because it strikes me that funders governing they govern the entire economics of the of the overall research ecosystem and and and I take your change your change management points there there needs to be a bottom-up set of collective activities but there also very much needs to be a top-down top-down drivers and funders are in that position to affect change here and they have every incentive to do so why haven't they why haven't they acted more aggressively and sooner that's a really good question and honestly I think this is part of our collective problem as you know the open access or open science community and that we've just completely failed to engage them on many levels like you know it's been 11 years now since the NIH policy came into play and that was groundbreaking but since then you know that was really progressive for its day and now you know funders seem to just be it seems like everyone's yelling funders are the ones with the power to change this but then we never invite them to the room or we never go out and speak to them um you know the fact that there was only one here you know please everyone go and mob her at the back at the end of us and tell her what you want um I really wish there was more cross stakeholder engagement and not not just with funders as well you know I want more librarians in this space too because librarians again hold a lot of the purse strings in in this space especially now in Germany um they're opening up millions and millions of euros you know after saving all this money from wasting it on Elsevier and they have so much to spend it on including all of your projects so I want more librarians to be here to engage yeah and as well as I you know we should have the big commercial publishers here to defend themselves you know I don't want to just speak to an echo chamber I want people to disagree and I want disagreement from across all the spaces so that we can find out what we don't agree on and what we do agree on and move forward from there and more funders please god yes organizers get them more in the room all right uh it's one more okay it's what one and then we continue oh I have to be sure do I whoa that's loud um yeah I agree with all of this and I wanted to share two things one um I actually did a talk at STM last December on the concept of resilience and resilient systems which is not the normal thinking of resilience but um when it comes to change or okay it comes from ecological research and if you look at systems whether it's like a pond or human systems they all tend to function the same type of way and when you have highly highly resilient systems can be great because they can withstand change but they can also be very damaging because um like Japanese knotweed or something can be very hard to change something and this is my view of the scientific ecosystem is that you so it's just pulling together a lot of these threads that you've got you know funders publishers librarians researchers academic institutions obviously incredibly important for changing incentive structures the platform providers the startups and even though no one I think is wedded to certain ideas like I don't think publishers actually give a fuck about sorry I don't think publishers actually care about the impact factor really that's again not the it's not no it's not the cause of what they care about you know even if you want to look at elsewhere it cares about them I'm just going to go down this route actually um anyway so first up like you need to in order to shift the ecosystem you do have to get all the people in the same route um and in the theory you get different levels so you've got the one level which is also social um scholarly publishing ecosystem and you've got the levels above it and the levels below it so you want to mobilize the individuals within but you've also got to change the um kind of higher level uh things like on the governmental or policy level so what I'm really saying is that you should go and check out like resilience theory and think about it in terms of scholarly publishing and the other thing is that Daniel Ropers of spring and nature did a interesting talk at the frankfurt book fair recently where he said um he's yes here of spring and nature he was saying that really the uh decentralization as it were ironically of um uh public of academics um and the fact that you've got such um distributed um systems of people all over the world and no single like negotiating power has allowed publishers to get too much power which is quite an interesting thing for the ceo spring and nature to say and I feel like the willingness to change and find something else is there um and so what we want is this to be one node um but to go out and find all the others and uh work together to make the actual change sure so I think there are two points that one about ecosystems and one about incentives for change so like regarding the ecosystem I would love someone like a phd student maybe the hig one day to undertake a project where they actually visually mapped the open science ecosystem of a scholarly publishing ecosystem like the players what power they have the financial flows the communication transfer which happens and actually sort of map that out and then we can figure like where little like levers and things are and gears are that we can change to actually move things because you know like you said there is a system of inertia at the moment and very strange relationships that are very difficult to understand and I would love someone to sort of try and map that out to figure out how we can actually begin to change as an ecosystem because you know there's a lot of parasitism happening at the moment a lot of mutualism as well um and I just think it'd be really great as a project where's zenka go and get a grad student to do this for you um and I think that's a really really great idea and it's a great analogy to work through um regarding spring and nature in the ceo yeah he's a bit of a liar so I don't know if anybody saw the recent spring and nature at IPO where they talked about things like how they were going to inflate the impact factor to increase the value of their journal so that they can increase the apcs and the researchers were like um are you kidding me that's sort of like the antithesis of what everyone else is trying to do and then the ceo came out was like oh you weren't supposed to read that that was supposed to be for potential shareholders and then the IPO failed and we all left so again I don't think what spring and nature want is inherently what we perhaps want as the open science community or the blockchain community that's for you to decide again like who do you want to work with and why all right thank you very much john for this um so as you see um Zürnke just kind of forked the chain and put it now on my neck uh so uh I will be uh tearing the next session and also including this talk now this is just the last talk uh before the coffee break I'm very happy to introduce Alexander Sokolovska from the uh Validity Labs uh which is um a crypto education company in Zug and um she will tell us um how we can actually use blockchain uh very well in science and yeah I'm very happy that you're here I'm not speaking very loudly so it's good to have a microphone uh good morning everyone and thanks for the introduction I'm working for an eth spin-off Validity Labs it's a company that is specializing in development of decentralized applications and I will spend the next 15 minutes before your coffee break on um the crisis in research and what kind of opportunities we actually have now for collaborating and making a change in that space so the issues today were already covered pretty well like such as the open science why is the science right is uh it's not really it's really open why do we have a productivity crisis I'm sure every one of you have their own personal opinion and experience in all these spaces like why we don't really have a fair metric also for research impact etc so I'm not going to go through it but um I would like to focus on one particular issue that I think is very relevant and very important and that is that science has actually been going through a transition of 30 years so with this case of the US funding you actually can see um how as a function of time the funding was coming into r&d um that includes academic and non-academic uh research the sector and how the funding with the green line uh was coming was federally funded that is government and uh then the business is a blue line so you see that in the past 30 years the the funding coming from the government has been decreasing dramatically and has been overtaken by the business interests and the business input and uh you know given that we have two types of research who have basic research and that is the one that is actually contributing most to our advancement of knowledge and most groundbreaking discoveries this 50 percent of that research is being done by academia but the funding for that is extremely disproportionate so businesses tend to rather funds apply to research this is also of course important but um it's it's not in the interest of businesses because to translate what we have in basic research it takes about 20 30 years to bring into the marketplace so basic research is extremely disadvantaged and to make matters worse we all know that the number of papers is a function on time this whole uh this looks somewhat like this but at the same time the number of companies that have r&d departments uh that are publishing is actually decreasing with time so the science and the contribution of from them to science is being decreasingly open year by year so what's the natural solution to it and how can we so in a way save basic research well we have to force governments to put more money back into basic research and fund academics that are struggling but this is not realistic so social scientists and economists say that the solution to it is to align industry and academic interests so to try to find a way that we can collaborate together but let's not kid ourselves right I mean already in the 40s people came up with the concept of norms and science so those were four principles that scientists agreed are extremely important for the science output and that is communality so sharing ownership of all the data as a human race that owns our scientific output we do it for for everybody we have universality and that means that these findings should be judged based on the merit and based on their quality we have this interestedness which means a work should be free of self-interested motivation we shouldn't be pursuing wealth but knowledge and skepticism so even if we spend years on our research finding we should still be able to evaluate all the evidence and if this evidence contradicts our body of work we should be able to say we were wrong then there are counter norms and the counter norms are if you look at it and if you're still with me at this point they they are much more applicable to the business sector so this is the fact that we need to protect our our priority in publishing or a priority in filing a patent it's particularism and that means that it's a lot easier with all the papers that are coming out of there it's a lot easier to judge the quality based on the reputation be it the reputation of a university or even a research group rather than actually look at the quality of the of the paper output it's self-interestedness because their funding is so scarce that we are finding ways to game the system right and we compete for funding or recognition or for money and then dogmatism because we spend so much time investing investing in promoting our own work not really thinking so much critically about ourselves and the funny thing is that social scientists were looking at these two norms and in scientists today and they were finding that scientists were rather reporting that they follow themselves norms in science but everybody else follows counter norms so given that business interests are driven by these counter norms people are trying to experiment with technology and try to find some solution that will actually resonate a lot better with norms and provide the right incentives because the counter norms are driven by the wrong incentives and that's in my opinion scarce funding so four blockchain characteristics which come to play they resonate very well with norms just think about decentralization the fact that you try to spread power and influence over a appears over your many peers and that foresters communality this this intermediation that is if you remove the structure that with its reputation you know gives a stamp on the paper that this is a really good work this fosters then the universality economic incentives if we manage to build a system that is going to have right incentives in it and will give more power but also money maybe to the researchers we will be fostering this interestedness and then transparency of course if you open up if you show exactly what you did step by step display your entire workflow you open up to scrutiny and you foster skepticism so this is one of the examples that was done by our CTO Sebastian and by Martin who's co-organizing this conference it's about a research pipeline I don't know how well you can see it but it consists of three parts number one is the acquisition of data in experiment number two is doing a pipeline research pipeline analysis and then three is interpretation and what you can do is you can put that data on to the interplanetary file system then you can also notarize who did what so you have on top the first part was done by an operator second by analyst and third by publisher so in this way you contract the entire pipeline you can actually give people credit for what they have done is this the right solution is blockchain the right solution everybody to the day who was speaking we're saying that we don't know right so finding out will take a certain degree of experimentation so we decided to test uh three hypotheses and that is number one the solution that we're going to find will be propagating well and is going to be sustainable this is necessary for it to make sense right if we first of all educate people and educate them across many um relevant key players that were mentioned before in the question session uh about the blockchain technology what really can do and what really cannot so people don't have some puffed up expectations and b we need to raise awareness about issues in science I'm sure now you're a very uh educated crowd you know about these things but if you ask phd students or postdocs at the department everybody is unhappy about the situation they would like to change but they feel that they're alone and they have zero impact they can make zero impact if you convince them that's not the case you can actually use use their power and use their use their resources now the second hypothesis is that we will find better solutions and they will be found a lot faster if we combine uh interdisciplinary expertise of many people at the same time and the third one is that the transition between um the current state of the art into a new kind of scientific ecosystem will be um a lot more effective if we do it simultaneously among a number of key players in this ecosystem and that's what we call seeding so the method would be what we discussed also during the questions that we really it's really important that we invite to the whole discussion librarians funding organizations publishers executives investors policy makers technologists researchers and whoever else is involved in the whole infrastructure and they have to at the same time be able to in this kind of the same decentralized way make the further step now we put them in Davos in February into the place that hosts an annual world economic forum meeting and they will be for the first two days first of all discussing the whole problems and bottlenecks in the collaborative research space that we made a word of them from the perspective of also not only open science but also economics of science and then we will train them about blockchain mechanisms governance um economics and also a little bit development then we'll also show a number of applications in research and industry to so that they get a feeling like where it is applicable and then for the next two days they will be subdivided into groups based on their interests where they would like to contribute the most they will be given mentors from those areas and they will be also given design thinking experts and over the next two days they will try to come up with strategies for the implementation of new not blockchain backed solutions and maybe tools in this way we will create new ideas people will be able to pitch those ideas on stage and the decentralized autonomous organization that they will become a part of will be able to pick the best solution in their opinion that's most actionable and the winners will advance to the incubator the next three months is going to be an incubator this is our team and Tsuk and the crypto valley in Switzerland and we will be there and the teams will be working with us remotely so the whole three months will be developed will be um sacrificed for the development of proofs of concept and the teams will have a freedom to make their commitment so they can if nobody in other words has time and wants to become go to the next stage we'll still guaranteeing that it will be executed and we will build it all of our solutions will be open sourced that means we foster the commonality principle of norms and science and the whole point is that after this experiment we want to push a little bit more the whole the whole system towards sustainable blockchain backed but networks for collaborative research or norms and science and that means not only incentivizing collaboration and openness and science but it also means trying to find a way to reward risky projects to fund basic research perhaps as well and to primarily empower the community because you know what there's the situation is so dramatic that research now says that most brilliant people in the academic system that's PhD students the very young ones 33 percent of them are at the risk of the common psychiatric disorder that situation is not dramatic what are we doing so Isaac Newton has written a letter to his collaborator and actually that collaborator his opponent if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants and I really hope that in my lifetime I'm going to see that philosophy in that principle being widely adopted in science and I'm going to be here until Wednesday um including Wednesday so please do come to me and ask me anything if you want to participate in that program sponsor or volunteer whatever ask me about astrophysics because I'm an astrophysicist do that and otherwise thank you very much for your attention thank you alexandra um are there any questions I maybe I can ask well so I liked uh I mean in response also to the talk of in the beginning uh I mean I I think the solutions in the end also this experiment that we did with Sebastian I mean it's very simple right so I mean how do you think this Tao will be working out I mean what's the idea behind I mean because there's a challenge that people may just find it overly complicated or burdensome to engage in this um so actually becoming a part of the Tao is going to be extremely simple people will do it will walk everybody during their training through it and you will have a possibility to vote on the teams that will be pitching in the end their ideas but it won't be and I think it's overly complicated I think even building your own very simple Tao is basically a couple of lines of code and we will also show it during the steps um on Wednesday during during the workshops so it's it's a place where lots of companies are driven to in Switzerland in Zug it's partially because it's a beautiful place in terms of tax perks it's pretty low um but yeah so a lot of a lot of companies go in there it's also Ethereum Ethereum Foundation has their um headquarters and uh yeah we it's just a place where a lot of companies are and it's booming and you basically walk into the city and you see already left and right everybody's basting blockchain all over the town so that's why it's it's it's getting this name of being a crypto valley kind of like a silicon valley equivalent but for the crypto crypto world so just uh I wonder how far are we away from um um a status quo where I can set up my own smart contract or DAO with legal brick like tools so I want to have the benefit of what you described without having to dive into technical details like solidity which is I hope understandable and and I would like to know from you what what do you think about this how far are we into this direction that we have this Lego brick like thing that we can actually do stuff it we're actually very close so there are a number of projects that are trying to integrate different kinds of platforms so that you can very easily either build also your DAO decentralized autonomous organization or maybe you can incorporate um a couple of tools that are not off blockchain but you can build them together and give them kind of the back end uh in a lot easier way right than being able to know solidity and all the but having said that it's also not very tricky like the whole coding and the whole smart contract that you can write can be extremely simple um yeah but there's lots of projects and I think like one of the things I to refer back to the conversation before like why do we need blockchain at all I mean let's think about it like we in order to fix science and fix these incentives that we talked about why even though there's been 20 years of right of campaigning for open science like still scientists even though they have open access journal they don't do it open access it's because it's in our culture it's because we're driven by very scarce funding and competition so if we could leverage the fact that there's a lot of money and a lot of attention and a lot of people actually are very interested in the topic if we use that momentum in order to help our basic research I mean this is this is amazing and we should discuss it nevertheless I know that there are equivalents like peer-to-peer whatever but you need to move people collectively at the same time to make a difference so why won't we use the fact that we're just giving it right now on the plate great thank you very much and maybe just to add why don't we add some science fiction to it right too and so I think that's a cool way to go and with this we are closing the session and we extend the break a bit so there will be half an hour break and we will again meet here at 11.15 okay test test okay cool so Okay, so I think we should get started now with the session. And the first speaker that I'd like to introduce to you is Professor Ali Sunayev from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where he is at the Institute of Applied Informatics and formal description methods. Thank you. Thanks, Martin. So hi. It's great to be in Berlin again, and I already kind of see the vibrations in the room are quite different to those I'm familiar with and more scientific context. Scientific conferences are a little bit more different. So that's why I decided to make my talk a little bit more different. And yeah, just please feel free to ask any questions at UniGid and talk if you don't understand something or so. And yeah, Sunayev asked me to introduce you the core underlying technology of blockchain, the distributed ledger technology, and to show you the kind of most popular example of blockchain Bitcoin. And I also would like to say something about decentralization, about the transformative impact such as technology has on us as individuals, as organizations, or even on a societal level. So where are we standing right now? Well, sometimes I think with blockchain we are right now somewhere we were with the internet like 30 years ago. So 30 years ago almost nobody was thinking that internet will become such a success story. And this is what usually I'm kind of hearing if somebody talks to me about blockchain. And what is actually blockchain? Well, I have a definition for it and I will introduce it in more detail later, but it of course promises to be disruptive technology. And disruptive technology means that you don't have a problem or a use case and you find a solution to, but you have kind of a technology and then it is finding a solution. There is a bunch of examples for it and if you want to hear more on disruptive technology just let me know because I was so lucky to spend some time in Boston at Harvard University where I kind of met Clayton Christensen who introduced the disruptive innovation theory. So I'm really familiar with it. Okay, so probably most of you know blockchain because of Bitcoin. And I will go quickly through this and I don't want to speculate about who kind of introduced it and who is actually the guy Satoshi Nakamoto. But from the technological point of view we had distributed databases and even digital currencies a long time before Bitcoin or blockchain came into existence. So what was new? This guy, or the organization behind this name or I don't know, this guy solved two problems. First, he solved the so-called problem of double spending. You could not spend the same digital currency, the same token, twice or more. And second, he introduced incentive mechanisms to participating parties. So why should somebody, why should somebody provide computing and storage power to kind of run this database? And this was the crucial thing. So what is actually blockchain? Blockchain is a, sorry, I'm a professor so I kind of like always like definitions. Blockchain is a decentralized peer-to-peer database that consists of a network of computing nodes. And this database stores an immutable chronologically ordered and transparent history of transactions. And transactions store the information in a chain of blocks. That's why the name blockchain. This all is kind of, these nodes, they kind of use a very clever consensus mechanism that is based on game theoretical thoughts to negotiate what is actually included into the database. And here you see a figure on how it is done with Bitcoin. So we have some, okay, you don't see it quite well. We have some kind of nodes and they somehow decide on what is the current state of the database. And if a new block is added, it is always time-stamped, chronologically ordered. And these blocks refer to each other. And every block consists of a number of transactions with a time stamp and with the hash values of the previous block and the current block. So I guess everybody is familiar with the hash function. Math, math is really beautiful. And hash function is great. So you can have any text, any length of any string, any letters, any numbers. And with the hash function you can produce a kind of well and specifically defined length of a string. And then you can make it more kind of hard to compute this function if you kind of say, okay, the first numbers of this resulting hash value should have like three O's or so. And I know that Ismail will give a talk just after my talk and he will introduce the consensus mechanism more in detail. So I'll skip this. I'll also skip the findings because this is what Ismail will talk about. I want to concentrate on different things. And of course it uses public key cryptography. This is also kind of a math that every transaction consists of the sender, the receiver, the Bitcoin value, the time stamp and the protocol of the Bitcoin. And it is signed with the public key of the receiver and the receiver can kind of authenticate himself that the transaction belongs to him or otherwise if somebody is sending the transaction it is signed with an own private key so everybody can really authenticate that it is coming from the right person. And here you see everything in one figure. The figure is quite complicated, but the most complicated figures are actually the best ones. If you understand them. So first, this is the first step, the green one. It is validated that there is actually a registered sender receiver. Then it's validated that somebody really has some tokens to kind of transfer them. And if it's validated, if the transaction is validated, it's coming in so-called memory pool where the transactions are waiting to be stored in a block. And as soon as a new block is created, the block is added to the blockchain and distributed all over the network so all the nodes have the same information. And there is also so-called unspent transactions. So you may have some bitcoins that are not transferred to somebody else and they are also stored in the blockchain in the list of such unspent transactions. So the core idea here is that algorithms rule. So that's why we are speaking of the so-called zero trust. That you don't kind of need any persons or organizations you trust to. You trust an algorithm. You trust in math and cryptography. And it's becoming even more interesting with the so-called smart contracts. So if you have processes that are well-defined and that all participating parties agreed on and these processes are atomic, it means they don't need any human interaction, then they can be automatically executed upon fulfillment of specific conditions. And this is great. This is where the innovation is. So we have a new way to store, to process and to use information. And you know for programmers out there, Bitcoin is maybe not the best example, but smart contracts can be very, very powerful. So you can build loops and loops make fun for programmers. All the software you know, probably you know, all the software uses loops. So it can be very, very powerful. You can automate any process out there if it does not need any kind of human interaction. So what do we have next? Of course, we have databases, distributed databases, blockchains, and all of them have their advantages and disadvantages. I know that you are all familiar with kind of different ways of kind of designing a blockchain. But what I want to say is that blockchain is actually not a silver bullet, especially if you're thinking of open science, and that's what I actually wanted to talk about today. And I prepared this slide for it. If you have an environment where all parties trust each other, blockchain is probably making no sense. Blockchain does not solve the cap theorem. Cap theorem says that a distributed database cannot achieve consistency, availability, and partition tolerance at the same time. So it is always a question on trade-offs, like with the movie about fiction, with Samuel L. Jackson, the life is full of trade-offs, and the same is with blockchain. Think of security. It is always a trade-off between availability and confidentiality. Blockchain, it is always a trade-off by designing a blockchain, whether you want to have performance or security, whether you want to have anonymity or flexibility. All these design characteristics, what kinds of this mechanism am I going to use? What about scalability? What about throughput? Guys, even using...  Because in a blockchain, every block has exactly one predecessor block and exactly one successor block. But there is concepts of TLT where blocks may have multiple predecessor blocks, or multiple successor blocks, or where you don't have blocks at all, where transactions directly refer to each other. So it is not kind of... It is IT. It enables us to do something. And that is kind of the core of what I wanted to talk to you about, about using this technology for open science. And for me, it's a question of two sides, of system design and of participation. System design. We researchers often deal with sensitive data. Think of life sciences, medicine, genetics. This is very personal data. Or think of, I don't know, think of economics or social sciences. It may... People work with sensitive business information. Blockchain, as a distributed database, retains benefits like reducing or having actually no single point of failures and improving availability and integrity of the stored data. So it allows us researchers to store and to protect sensitive data in terms of security and privacy. Better than ever before. It's not only a question of security actually, how to keep data secured from unauthorized access. It's also a question of what we call information privacy. What information is stored? Where is this information stored? Who uses this information? For what purpose does one use this information? These questions have to be answered. And blockchain may allow us to do so. Why? Because we scientists often rely even on participants who share their information with us. Think of, I don't know, data donors in genetics. Remember smart contracts? With smart contracts, these data donors are able to determine, to decide what of their data is used for what purpose. So if a data donor cares about one disease, cares deeply about one disease, they can decide to share their own data with researchers who work on this disease. And none of the donors' data with others. This is what blockchain may enable us. So it will lead to a higher involvement of research participants. At the same time, blockchain is not designed to store kind of huge data. You know, big data. If I stay with genetics, think of omics data. That's just tens of gigabytes of data. Data size is a real problem with blockchain. Nowadays, we use kind of hybrid approaches. So we store data in a cloud, and blockchain allows us to control the access to this data. This is of course a step into the right direction, but there is still a long way to go. Next, we spoke about open science environment. Yes, our research culture nowadays kind of forces us sometimes even to have data silos. We really often have data silos in research. Okay, it has something with things to do with how we as researchers are evaluated, how do we get our stuff published, how do we get funding and so on. But blockchain may lead to a real open science environment. So in its true in sense, because it is kind of, you know, through this decentralization, it leads to kind of democratization. That the access to research and to research data is kind of getting affordable. So it will not be probably completely for free, but will be for sure cheaper and easier to access. Okay, so and the core thing here is that we have to look beyond the IT value. If we have a new way of store, process and use information, it can lead to a completely new way of data and process management. And this is something very, very crucial. This helps us to leapfrog to kind of a next decade of using data and providing data in a scientific environment. And you know, I introduced my talk. I started my talk with the quote of Bill Gates regarding Internet. Internet is nowadays criticized. And it's criticized for some good reasons. And blockchain promises kind of to solve some of the problems that are criticized right now if people talk about Internet. So what I want to point you to is this transformative value of technology. So I actually don't care about technology. I love technology, but I don't care what kind of technology it is. If it's blockchain or something else, I don't care as long as it affords me to do something. And transformation is a process. And every process produces winners and losers. So I think that what we should discuss in this room is how can we take care of this process that it is run the right way. And guys, before I conclude my talk, I would like to say that if you want to use blockchain, think of three things. First, if you have a decentralization, if you have kind of distributed nodes, then you can go further. Second, if you have kind of intermediaries or if you have somebody you don't trust to, okay, then think of blockchain. And third, if you have processes that are well defined, everybody agreed on, and that can be run automatically, also think of blockchain. So if you guys kind of have an idea but don't know how to realize it, come and talk to me. If you have money and you want to do something good in your life and even become more richer, come and talk to me. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for this great talk. Are there questions? You had your two colored blocks and one was participation. You really didn't articulate what that new participation was and what peer-to-peer or blockchain could maybe do. It doesn't do today for science. Sorry, sorry. So with participation, I meant that through blockchain, we get even more data to do research so that participants are encouraged to share their data with us because they know what happens with the data. First and second participation was about the creating a real open science in the world. That it is encouraged to share their own data with others through blockchain because you can get some intensive mechanism for it. So even for people who are kind of sharing their data for research, that's what actually all the blockchain and genomics platform coming from Yes are doing. You actually can get money for it. Okay, what I didn't mention, it raises, of course, a lot of ethical and regulatory issues. So that's why I was talking about blockchain. It's not only an IT question. But you know, with regulatory, they always need some time. So first we had cars and then we designed and defined rules how to move them and so on and so on, what is allowed and what not. So they always need some time. That's what I meant with participation. The raw data used in science as well as the science results are big enough to store in blockchain usually. And you just said that we are going to store them somewhere else and use blockchain to give access to. But usually where we store those data are going to be a place which is going to be central authority like Google or Amazon who's going to store these in their heart. So how do we ensure that in this workflow the pure decentralization happens and then somebody just gets the idea of the data set and the whole blockchain process is out and then we'll just log in and get the data. I'm trying to get the link. So unfortunately I can't predict the future. I wish I could. I can't. So I don't know if you'll be right. But right now we are using hybrid approaches, yes, because if these are really huge data sets, they are stored in the cloud. As I told you before, blockchain kind of is giving you control who is allowed to assess the data. So the future research will be for sure about how to make it possible what kind of designs are for blockchain. How to make it possible what kind of designs of a blockchain of distributed literature technology make it possible, always a trade-off to deal with bigger data sets. And maybe sometime in the future we will have such a setting where even kind of huge data may be stored in blockchains. You know, it's not always a question of computing and storage power. This is actually not a question. The question is how can all these nodes decide and how can this database be really distributed and stored on different nodes? But we will do this. I don't really kind of worry about this because we guys, we IT guys will not only have to do for the next years, but I think we will find some answers on these problems to these questions. But you know, you mentioned kind of these big companies that kind of rule internet. This is the way it goes. You know, they used a niche. So as introduced, as internet was introduced, and internet is not only kind of worldwide web, internet has more services. It's email, it's FTP, it's voice of IP, name it. Internet wasn't, so let me, let me, let me start different. I talked about this yesterday evening. There were countries in Africa that didn't have a functioning banking system for decades because they didn't have a bank on every corner or not such an infrastructure they have in Europe. But with mobile phones and not even smartphones, you know, they, through SMS, they could transfer money and then they got a functioning system. So internet was not designed for e-commerce stuff or for digital currencies. But this is what disruptive innovation is at. But people learned how to use technology for new cases. So with big ones, you know, do you remember a company named Nokia? They were quite small and then the guys, the guys were very smart. They decided to move on from, I don't know, shoes to refrigerators and from refrigerators to phones. And then it's not as easy. You know, Apple was also not doing very well for quite a while. And Microsoft was not very popular kind of a decade ago. You know, a decade ago all my students wanted to go to Google. Nowadays Google is the evil. So it changes. I, on my own, celebrated Research Gate a couple of years ago. And now it's on the dark side if we're talking about open science. So, you know, I don't know what the future will come but that's what I want to point you to. We, if not we, who should take care of this process, because we understand IT and you guys understand the world outside. So if we connect, I think we have quite a good chance to do something. Yeah, I have a question which I think builds very much on what you just said there because I see the word decentralization in the title talk, which sort of, I am always missing the sort of elephant in the room which is the main property of blockchains which emerges from that and that is uncensorability because two of the five properties of blockchains are immutability and decentralization and the emergent property of that is uncensorability which means blockchains cannot be censored. And this is something which I frequently miss in these kind of discussions. So what about the implications of something being not censorable? Can you speak to that? Well I can, but it's like, you know, just my thoughts. That's nothing which is... It's a little bit like with the printing press in the Catholic Church because they wanted to censor the printing press and couldn't and it was of the devil. So I must be careful if I'm speaking about religions. So you know, if you, actually if you want to get really, really rich I wouldn't even go for a kind of blockchain stuff just to kind of establish a new religion that's probably the way to get very rich. So about decentralization. So for blockchain, as I told you, it's a question of design. So there is also permission blockchains and they are running quite well. So think of hyperledger fabric or so on. So they don't have such problems with throughput or energy efficiency like Bitcoin has. But they are not scalable. So it's always a trade-off. So with the definition of blockchain as you... decentralization is a core idea and your point is actually the same as what people speak about that you reduce intermediaries.  It's a core feature. Uncensored ability. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, thank you for your presentation which you started with Bill Gates and many times you come across papers and people who say and claim blockchain could be the next generation of internet in a sense. And linking to that point, I would like to hear your perspective. In what ways could blockchain be this sort of second generation and what could it offer what the general internet we're using now is lacking from? So I could speak about this for hours. So you know, actually it is not a new internet. We're still using internet technologies. So we kind of have a common sense what internet technologies are that we rely on them and blockchain relies on them. But what internet kind of introduced are these big parties that got big because they had access to data and they kind of store it in a certain way. And that's what actually blockchain is about that this will decentralize it. But of course there will be parties who run, who kind of run this database. You know, not only in permission in kind of open blockchain. So for Bitcoin, you know, there is intensive mechanism. But that's not kind of that everybody or faster runs a computing node for it. But the core idea is that we kind of move from this internet of information that what people are speaking about to internet of value. That you not only kind of store information but this information has value. Like in Bitcoin, you know, there is kind of this digital currency but it's not endless. It's a predefined set of Bitcoins available out there. That's why it's getting value. Because there is an end. You can't kind of just print more dollars. You know, print more Bitcoins. That's algorithm. If you trust in it, that's what algorithm provides. But with this, under this tokens, you can kind of hide values. And it's not only Bitcoins, so there is kind of, you know, other ideas.  You know? So there is, there is, there is for sure, and that's what I told you before. There is for sure a lot of opportunities and possibilities for us also as researchers to shape the future in the way how we use this information which is becoming value in the future. And we will see what use cases will arise concerning of this. This for sure a new way, as I told you, a new way to store the process and to use information which is also value. Fantastic. Fantastic talk. I just wanted to pick up on what you were saying about giving people control of their own data. So I work in sort of human, like cognitive science, human research. And one of the issues that we find talking to patients in our research is that there are concerns about open science, real concerns about open science because currently if you take part in research you have to consent, right? So you either essentially give consent for your data to be shared and then it's open and anyone can have access to it or you don't share it at all. So there's this sort of tension between the rights of people taking part in research and open science. And if we can find a way to solve that by giving people control of their own data so they can say, I want my data to be used in this but I don't want it to be used in that because I'm concerned about the consequences of it or I think that could be huge. The most interesting part is here that if you kind of can control who is able to assess your data you can change your mind and you can kind of, you know, sometimes we don't know what technology will be able to do in ten years even with the omics data. So if you right now are okay to share kind of your genome data with somebody but in five years, you know, oh, this is maybe something I don't want to have not only because of me, because of my family you can change this control and coming back to the question of data size and the blockchain, there is research on, you know, there's also, so in science, I don't know, in medicine, Zernke is a physician he probably knows best. He's obligated by law to be compliant with all this stuff. They have to store pictures for 30 years. This is what I mean with Open Share because, you know, after 30 years there is research on this Genesis block, the very first one, that everybody decides on the state of the new Genesis block because, you know, the information after 30 years you don't need it. Then you can kind of decide what kind of, you provide a new Genesis block and start from you and then it reduces data size and if we speak about open science I see that there is a lot of cases in here so it's about data sharing. It's also about how we are evaluating ourselves as researchers in all these age indices and so on. It is also about how to get people participating in science. It is also about publishing and all these publishers and intermediaries. So, and these use cases are quite different because it's, you know, the problem, the real problem is always kind of a detail question. So it's quite easy for me right now to talk on this level but if we start really to do so and we do it then it's become complicated because then you see a small problem which is a detail question. We are not thinking right now. So, and what, am I talking about this? It's always a trade-off and it's always a design question. So before you kind of start building a house think of how many windows you want to have where the door should be and so on how should we define them. Please talk to us because we observe a lot of solutions out there that kind of say we are blockchain they are not blockchain at all if you take a look if you take a deeper look or they are taking the wrong design for the wrong, for the context. So it is very, very, very tricky here. Be careful. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, we're moving on. So Ismail Kofi is the next speaker and he seems to be doing a lot of things but so we keep introduction short so I just say that currently he's working at Tendermint and he's going to talk about scaling solutions. Not only, okay great. Oops, can we start from the beginning? We got the rundown on my slides. So good morning everyone. I'm Ismail Kofi. I graduated in mathematics at the University of Bonn worked at several companies and in applied research institutes such as Fraunhofer and was very interested inspired by the Snowden Leagues on privacy preserving technology and decentralization and from that I started working at EBFL as a software engineer where collaborated on scalability research on blockchains but also on distributed decentralized systems and privacy. So this work inspired me to join Cosmos and Tendermint which are also briefly introduced in this talk. So let's start. First I will reiterate some basics that are necessary to understand what is this blockchain thing we're talking about. I will present some challenges. One of them is scalability that's already mentioned but there are much more challenges in the blockchain space or many problems that need solving that I will just briefly present and then I will briefly talk about scalability and present one scalability solution which is not just one solution for scalability but basically an ecosystem of solutions that I will explain. So to the basics what is a blockchain? As you've seen there are many different definitions. This definition serves the purpose of my talk the best and it's also very simple because it's just a sentence but there's a lot to digest. So a blockchain is a deterministic state machine replicated on nodes that do not necessarily trust each other. So what does it mean? A state machine, you could think of a state machine you have several states and transitions to this state you have an update function that takes the current state and a transition and updates to a new state. So in the context of blockchains this could mean the state is the account balances and the transition could be a new block containing transactions in a certain order. So this state is not stored at the central server or central service but is replicated on nodes and the tricky part is these nodes do not trust each other. So how do the nodes actually reach agreement on the state if they don't trust each other? So this leads us to consensus. Consensus algorithms are or consensus protocols are the tool that makes it possible for these nodes to reach agreement. There are two types of consensus algorithms roughly one that assumes that nodes can only crash they are heavily deployed in cloud infrastructure for instance if you use Google or AWS your data is also replicated it's not stored at the single server but at many nodes but it only assumes that you are in control of the nodes so a single entity is in control of the nodes and you can trust those so it only operates correctly under the assumption that those nodes can just crash and the more interesting part for blockchain or for nodes that do not necessarily trust each other is that these nodes can behave completely arbitrarily they can expose malicious behavior often called Byzantine behavior coming from a research paper that tried to solve the Byzantine generals problem where generals that communicate through a messenger try to reach agreement if they should attack a city or not. So examples of these are PBFT and tenement tenement I will roughly explain later so consensus can operate in different timing models on the very left we have synchrony which basically means there is an upper bound for an unknown upper bound for the message delay for the message to arrive and there is complete asynchrony which means that you don't know if there is such an upper bound there is no such upper bound and messages could potentially be delayed forever so this is more or less how the internet many protocols on the internet come with this assumption and then a very simple way to explain it if you think of synchronous communication is more like a phone call where you have direct feedback on how people interact synchrony is more like writing an email because you write an email, you send a message you never know when the recipient will actually read it and in between those there are different timing models semi-synchronicity and partial-synchronicity I'm not going into detail there but it's interesting that there is also a middle ground that is interesting to explore if you want to learn more about consensus I can highly recommend this podcast I just linked there historical overview on consensus algorithms and explains them in more detail so now a few limitations on what you can do on distributed systems in general this is not specific to blockchain or any cryptocurrency or something this is a general theorem that states under the assumption of complete asynchronicity no deterministic algorithm can reach consensus under the assumption there's a single faulty node this is a very strong claim and it's important to know so what is interesting here it only says for deterministic protocols and also only complete asynchronicity timing model it doesn't work so it's actually very necessary that they explore the middle ground it sets the stage what we can actually do in consensus algorithms they have probabilistic consensus algorithms they are not impossible through this impossibility theorem another theorem that states what you can do in distributed systems is the cap theorem that was already mentioned by Ali so it basically says you can only have two out of three properties which is the properties are consistency which means if you read from let's say the database you get the most recent right or an error and availability means that you always get a reply from the database but it's not necessarily the most recent data and partition tolerance means if you have a bunch of nodes that communicate with each other on the internet what happens if the network splits and the messages between these two groups or partitions cannot communicate so this is something that happens all the time on the internet and usually if you build distributed systems you have to assume that partition tolerance is a necessary property you want to achieve so you can only trade off basically availability and consistency so for instance bitcoin that was mentioned is available like to trade off availability for consistency because what can happen there is a chain can fork nodes get blocks that were propagated through the network but they are not the longest chain that has been mined so until they get the longest chain they have to when they get the longest chain which is the extra ground truth they have to throw away all the work that has been done and then if you read before from the blockchain basically you get stale data that was not actually representing what happened so next this brings me to what challenges are blockchains currently facing so there is this idea of replacing central authorities the Bitcoin paper itself speaks about replacing central banks I think and there is a large authority and people want to live in a kind of decentral world where there is no power agglomeration on central powerful authorities why don't we see that yet why are we just talking about it and what are the challenges we are facing in these systems so one big challenge that is often overlooked is usability so these systems usually they are built by experts and they often assume that you know the stuff they know and this hinders mass adoption so often if you deal with cryptocurrencies you have to have a basic understanding of public key cryptography that was mentioned but I mean for mass adoption this is not really good because most people probably don't need to know these things so there is a trade-off to be made here as well about educating the people or building the systems in a way that you don't need to educate them this is ongoing research but I think the end-user usability comes after we have actually systems that scale but it's a very important thing to keep in mind if you build systems another challenge is also often overlooked is developer usability so if you want to build on top of a blockchain you want it to be as easy as possible for developers to build on top of that so in the past the only solution around has been for instance Zcash did that which is a very interesting project by the way they forked the source code of bitcoin changed the logic of what happens there and deployed a new blockchain called Zcash and this is quite cumbersome and very difficult to do you have to know a lot of the inner workings of the source code and everything Ethereum changed that in a way that you can deploy smart contracts which are basically programs and you can deploy them on top of the Ethereum blockchain the only downside to this is you're stuck to the Ethereum blockchain and you're stuck with the trade-offs that are made on the blockchain in terms of scalability and all these consistency and availability properties that underlie these systems so this is very cool but it comes with downsides as well this brings me to the next challenge usually if you build such systems if you think of blockchains as basically replicated databases these databases are not connected with each other at all so basically if you have value on one chain you cannot transfer value to the other chain easily and the common approach today is you go through a central exchange or you introduce a central authority again and that defeats the whole purpose of the blockchain so yeah we definitely need a way to interact with each other which does not come with the assumption that you trust a single central authority again another thing that was also mentioned already is privacy actually blockchains are not privacy preserving per se so if you think of bitcoin for instance it basically it basically you could think of it as an excel sheet which is like Twitter's and the excel sheet contains the history of all transactions in the public meaning like Ian Myers said that Defconn recently it's like Twitter for your bank account this is probably something you don't want in the context of this research community you could think of okay if I store records of data or hashes of data on the blockchain which is actually public data that's totally fine it's totally okay to store this data publicly but if you're dealing with highly sensitive medical data for instance you obviously don't want that publicly available or even the metadata maybe of that so there are trade-offs to be made between transparency which is a property that blockchains definitely have so it's very transparent but you also want some form of privacy depending on your actual use case and there's probably also a good reason why there won't be like a single one size fits at all blockchain solution that solves all the problems another challenge we're facing is how do we actually change the inner workings of a deployed blockchain so currently how this often works is there's communication out of band then people kind of try to reach an agreement somehow and propose solutions and then try to convince the community of their approach and there's actually also no transparency here ideally you would have the voting mechanism on top of the chain so it's transparent again and people can vote ideally in some form of democratic system stakeholders of the chain or community members of the chain so something that was also kind of mentioned is energy consumption so bitcoin uses as you have heard something called proof of work which is not only necessary for consensus but it's mainly also something called a civil control mechanism so civil control mechanism is it makes it difficult or impossible for a malicious actor to flood the network with fake identities and take over the majority of the network with that so in bitcoin this is done by finding pre-images of hashers and this is a very difficult task basically what you can do you must basically try all different solutions so it's an exhaustive search more or less energy consuming people use specialized hardware for that but it uses for instance bitcoin annually uses 73 terawatt hours so just to make this number a bit more understandable this is like 7 million US households or as much as the country of Austria Ethereum the numbers are slightly better but it's still loads of energy consumed there are people that argue that's fine because we can use renewable energy and things like this but the question still is is it worth it to have this energy consumption I highly doubt it but there's no clear question clear answer to this and the main challenge and the most pressing challenge we're facing is scalability so scalability means mainly throughput is how much transactions per second your blockchain can handle and latency how long to wait until a transaction is confirmed and this in major blockchains which major public blockchains are currently deployed like bitcoin and Ethereum this doesn't look very nice the transaction per second rate is very low like from 7 to maybe a few hundred at max and this doesn't scale so if the world would actually use bitcoin the system would basically flood with transaction and it would more or less stop working another thing another topic and scalability is how do we reduce the data storage necessary for nodes to participate in the network and also for clients the naive approach commonly used in deployed blockchain system is you have to download the whole chain verify all the transactions it's infeasible for many commodity hardware or smartphones so slightly more on scalability because it's such a pressing topic there are basically two different approaches or two different families of approaches one is so called on chain scalability so this started off with the blockchain debate in bitcoin if you increase the block size in bitcoin or in all these systems you can fit in more blocks but this doesn't really scale it doesn't really solve the problem because it only increases the throughput with a constant factor of efficiency as well there is so much academic research so the research community itself is building blockchains by the way and I put on the slide a few publications the name of a few publications each of which would deserve their own talk sometimes quite complex systems and the thing I want to mention here is probably in a few years we will definitely see a scalability solution even for on chain for single blockchains on chain the downside of all these approaches is again it's like one size fits all solution they try to build one blockchain of course you have to make trade-offs one chain that basically scales but still there is no interoperability involved most of them are academic projects and often there is no proper implementation but for some like chain space there is actually a company that is building the implementation the other family scalability approaches as I said there are two the other family is layer two there are off chain solutions where you take off the processing of the transactions from the chain and you merely use the chain as kind of a settlement layer or another analogous would be if you transfer money you only use the blockchain as kind of a court if there is disagreement so there is the lightning network riding if you are interested in those you should look them up in the audience people that are actually building payment channeled networks so the big advantage of this approach is that you are building on top of existing well established systems that have been around for a while and the downside is you are still limited via the main chain which is often like Bitcoin or Ethereum so throughput there, transaction costs all these things still exist often they don't incorporate interoperability as well and they sometimes introduce the risk of centralization so what if you could use you could use another scalability approach where you have many parallel chains they operate in parallel and you do the transactions on the particular chains for your particular application or use case so there are two major projects, Polkadot and Cosmos Cosmos I am going to explain the comparison of those I linked the blog post that does a fair neutral comparison on the trade-offs made there so now to Cosmos as I said it's not yet another blockchain but it tries to build basically a whole ecosystem of application specific blockchains instead of deploying your own smart contract on something like Ethereum you could also build your own application which is their own chain or other chains and with this approach we try to solve scalability, interoperability and usability so Cosmos is powered by Tenderman BFT which is the consensus algorithm if you remember so it's a perfectly Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm which operates in the parts of synchronous or in this middle ground so the key takeaway here is it's very fast, it can take thousands of transactions per second and produces a block every one to three seconds so for the civil control mechanism we replaced proof of work in the main chain with proof of stake or delegated bonded proof of stake which is less energy consuming and also gives you the advantage that you can incentivize honest behavior or punish malicious nodes for misbehaving and not acting according to the protocol also enables governance so I want to highlight a little how Cosmos works and what you could do with it you could use Tenderman consensus algorithm and Tenderman core which wraps the state machine by using something we call the application blockchain interface and the cool thing here is if you're thinking of building any blockchain or consortium chain or proof of authority chain you could use this approach and basically you can use this approach and code in any programming language so if you develop a chain like this so how do we connect those chains we connect those chains for a protocol called inter-blockchain communication protocol so the details are a bit difficult to grasp for example if one chain wants to send a token to another chain it basically locks the tokens on the first chain it sends a proof to the other chain that the tokens have been locked this proof gets signed by validators of the first chain and so then tokens with the same amount get created on the other chain so it's like the very basic idea here with this you can sovereign blockchains can exchange value so now how do we connect all the chains if they exist naively you could connect all with each other this would lead to a large communication overhead because for N nodes you can think of like everyone's connected to everyone this would cause for instance 400 nodes you would already have 5000 connections instead we use the approach of a hub or hub and spoke approach where the hub connects the different chains often we call them zones the zones don't communicate directly with each other but instead through the hub where the hub itself is a peer-to-peer network so if this is not enough for you you still think maybe there's an easier approach how could I build a blockchain myself I recommend you to check out the Cosmos SDK which is a set of libraries that makes it extremely easy for you because some design decisions are already taken care of and the only downside is you're stuck to the programming language go for now we also build other SDKs soon and this is ideal if you want to build a public proof-of-stake chain and it's a modular design you can use existing modules you still have to quote but it's much easier you can learn more on the homepage I linked there so the main takeaways are many challenges in the blockchain space that are hindering mass adoption although there's a big hype scalability is the most pressing one there are many smart people and well-funded smart people that work on the scalability problem so we will probably see a solution there it's appropriate to be optimistic here Cosmos is one scalability solution that tries to establish a whole ecosystem we often spoke of trade-offs and not every application you want to build has to use the same trade-offs so here you can explore all kind of different trade-offs and build your own zones according to the specific needs you have and the cool thing about this you can also if this research continues and for instance privacy research continues you can plug in another zone that makes use of this and it's the whole system still exists and operates in the same way thank you very much I hope I didn't confuse you too much thank you thank you very much for your presentation maybe we take one question if there's a question yep the most challenging trade-off with regards to scalability so I think you always have to make trade-offs between things like decentralization security scalability basically so these are the trade-offs you have to make and I think there is no one as I said I think there is no one solution that will solve the scalability problem in general for all use cases it's more likely that we will actually see an ecosystem of different chains actually we are already seeing this but they are not connected I can't answer this question because there is no single answer to it it depends on your use case I think for the sake of time there is going to be a panel as well we will switch also Zunke kind of sacrificed his own talk now but I just maybe want to use this moment to highlight again that this entire conference is really I mean we are all sitting here because of Zunke and we should give him an applause yeah and we should have like a flower bouquet or something now but we are not as fancy yet so we can think about something until the end of the conference if you guys have an idea then just send me a mail what we should give Zunke a bitcoin maybe cool and now I am happy to introduce Bela Gibb he is a professor of computer science and just recently moved from Uni Konstanz to Wuppertal University and this is a moment in history we have to highlight that that I know Bela now for like 16 years and we met here 16 years ago because we were both winners of this context called Jugendforst which is like a science fair in Germany and when you win that and you are invited here and so we had some legendary time in Berlin but the other thing that I find interesting is that Alexander before spoke so the founder of Validity Labs is Sebastian Birgel and he is also in this year of Jugendforst winners and then with me and I guess there is one more there is four out of the 12 guys in 2002 that were at the final of this science fair that are now working kind of related to blockchain and I found it kind of a good statistic and interesting and don't know what it means that something is happening right? Very much. I suppose it means that we are all working on something really interesting so in my talk I will talk about trusted time stamping. What is trusted time stamping? Trusted time stamping allows you to prove that you had certain knowledge at a certain point in time or that you had access to a certain file and I think this is a very central question to the question of doing science and doing openly because that's where you can prove that you had for example an idea at a certain point in time. The project that I will present is not just my own project but a project from my research group that's why I want to briefly show them some of them are also sitting here so it's a joint project so the service that I would like to present is called Origin Stamp I started this service in 2010 2011 and the motivation for starting this service was that I had some student projects on our university web page. Back then I was a PhD student and I wanted to motivate like bachelor or master students to work on certain research projects and then I found out that someone like copied these ideas and a company actually then made some money with that so I was thinking how is it possible to prove that you had a certain idea let's say a master project and how can you do that and I mean nowadays I think it's very clear you use the blockchain for that back then it wasn't that clear what some people did was I can skip that now what some people did of course you could go to a notary agent or you could maybe tweet the idea and this way you would have a timestamp from Twitter or Facebook or something like that but it's not really convenient so that's why we decided to develop the service. Another possibility a bit old fashioned would be simply to describe the idea you had and put it in an envelope and send it to yourself and don't open it so you see it's a possibility it works but it's not very convenient so the service that I want to present I will give a live demo I need a live demo so if you want to try it yourself you can also use your mobile phone and what I'm doing now just try it yourself so you go an origin stamp you open the web page and it's completely free so please open originstamp.org and not com because .com that's the commercial page but for research we have this completely free web page and when you open the web page you can see here this option stamp here or you can actually also just install the mobile phone app but I think it's easier if I demonstrate it now using the web page so if you click there you have the possibility to either upload a file that could be a photo, a pdf document word document whatever or you can also just enter text here in a box and I do demonstration if I type in here test I mean we heard that before that this hash function so we the text I entered it's really hard to read but I entered test and then you see that at the bottom we have this hash that corresponds to that text and whenever I change the text here you see that the hash changes I say now stamp I would actually see that I did that before at another conference in 2014 and you can see that this text has already been entered before and the same is true of course if you upload a powerpoint file or research data maybe some data you got from your microscope so whenever you have any kind of data that you use for your research you can just timestamp it in this way to prove that it already existed at a certain point in time you can also click here on the certificate then you have all the information you need to verify this timestamp and as you can see it's really easy to use you basically just do drag and drop of the file and the file is not transferred to our servers because the hashing is done within the browser we never get really access to it over the years we offered now for even more than 7 years it has been used nearly 3 million times now and you can try it yourself as I said it's free and you can also see here that every few seconds it's used somewhere in the world okay I go back to the slides are there any questions regarding the usage okay I was just wondering like in the context of how IPFS works or this IPLD system so if I made a very small change to my data is there a way that I can link that analyze or change data to this original it's not possible but of course you could timestamp that as well so that would be the only way so it's very simple actually the way we do it we upload a digital file let's assume that you upload it a video then we just as I said gets a hash within the browser and then we do a transaction within the bitcoin network and ethereum so that we have a permanent record in the blockchain of this file and then it can easily be verified of course since we offer this service for free and we don't want to bloat the blockchain we don't do a transaction for every file that you want to hash but we like gather all the hashes of the whole day and then every 24 hours we perform the transaction we have also some extensions that you can use for your research projects for example git so if you want to if you use a version control system you can like timestamp all the source code development of course you cannot just use git for source code but you could also use git for when you write a publication for your latex file or whatever so you can really prove the state of your research on every single day we have a plugin for wordpress, the javascript plugin and also for backup solutions for timestamps, the state of your backups and we have a free to use API that's linked there for non-commercial purposes here you find some information how it works so it's all documented on the web page and another possibility is that you can try our mobile phone app it's also very easy to use, basically you just take a photo and then the photo is timestamped and you can even see on a map where it was taken so wait a second so that the people can find it later and of course it cannot just be used for for signs but also many people use it to for example when they get a rental car and they see okay there's some damage to the rental car maybe there's some damage to the windscreen then you can just take a photo and if you return the rental car a week later a company asks you to pay for the damage you can simply say no that was pre-existing damage and another possibility for example that I know people that used it when they moved into a flat and there was some damage in the flat and later when they moved out the landlord asked them to pay for that so that's another possibility let's see whether that works maybe you've seen that I think it's also it's it's a video that shows a new technology using machine learning and it allows you to the playing so you have the source sequence on the left and the artificial creation on the right and I think that's also a nice application of trusted time-stamping because we don't really know what is real and what is fake anymore also in signs so let's think about the situation maybe in 50 years we want to know what President Obama said or President Trump said and I mean everyone can just create these very, very realistic fake videos and of course if you time-stamp all this information then it's kind of preserved also for in 20 or 50 years and since more and more information is digital it gets always easier to fake this kind of information here we see another short sequence so it looks really realistic and I think in 2 years maybe 3 years we will not be able to distinguish a fake from reality anymore and I think as I said also in this area time-stamping is really important then I would like to come to some other applications another way what you can use it for is we all know these videos they are called dash cams and in court if you have a video of a crash you cannot really use it because it's not a real evidence and it can be manipulated in the meantime so we developed an app that is a dash cam but uses also this kind of trusted time-stamping and after an accident of course in a mobile phone you have sensors that can detect accidents that they can change in acceleration and then the video is time-stamped within seconds after the crash and if later you have the court hearing you can present video evidence that already existed only a few seconds after the crash so you have the data from the airbag for example when it deployed and you have the time-stamp from the video in this way you can prove that you didn't change anything because you simply didn't have the time to take any manipulations this was also just cited from Germans supreme court so it seems that the value of dash cam footage will change in the future the way it works is very simple I think I don't have to explain it here in this audience I would like to say a few words about the current users the time-stamping service of course researchers are really important to us and I get maybe one phone call a week of a researcher that used it for example when they synthesize proteins or some other things and they have some questions so they are I would say the biggest group of users but also journalists use it for example in the war in Syria I know that they have used it for cases of insurance patent lawyers and so the possibilities for using trusted time-stamping I think there are really there's a lot of possibilities okay that was my last slide do you have any questions you said geographical locations are also stored as metadata but is there a possibility also to geostamp but then the whomever stamps it has its geographical coordinate assured right is it ever possible so of course these geographic information that we include in the stamp can be either manipulated because we rely on the sensor data of the mobile phone it's more for yourself that you know for example if you were hiking and you saw I was in these mountains three years ago and I had this idea then it's maybe difficult to find it but if you know okay I had it when I was hiking in these mountains it's very easy to find it but it can be easily manipulated so it's not should not be considered as evidence I wanted to quiz you more on the granularity of your time measurements so you said you're doing it once a day but in Bitcoin the best you could do was 7, 8, 9 minutes that's fine for current science maybe but the IoT is the world of science millisecond so there's the project from Google called rough time I just wonder if you're aware of that and what innovations you thought you could implement to give you that per second time stamping at scale okay I didn't know about that project I'll look into that of course it really depends on the use case I think in the case of scientific ideas and scientific data in most cases the accuracy of one stamp the time stamp a day is good enough we also have this commercial service originstamp.com for example I think I can say BISF is using it for time stamping like things in their production and then they need a higher accuracy so we use at the moment Bitcoin and Ethereum but if you want to have higher accuracy of course it would be better to use other blockchains as well to allow of a higher resolution I agree I have a question that's a little bit related to the whole kind of mechanism of time stamping because if you have a data set and then you hash it you get some kind of unique identifier but if you want to prove say I write some code and I want to prove that I was the first person to do it and then you change a very little thing and this B equals will become A equals and the hash looks completely different I wonder are there any solutions out there for being able to prove like the similarity maybe of code or I mean what you would need is kind of fuzzy hashing in theory that would be possible but I think the easiest solution is simply to for example if you talk about writing code that if you use something like version control system you simply time stamp every commit you do and that's what we do with this plugin so each time you commit your data it's automatically time stamped so you don't have to do anything manually but it works completely automatic so I had a question regarding I found it very interesting the German Supreme Court rolled on this dash cam recording using some of the research do you have any court cases that are in regards to research data being verified because I'd be very interested in seeing if from a legal standpoint if this time stamping was used to back up research or patents that resulted from research yeah I don't know of research that was discussed in court but there are like court cases where time stamping on the blockchain I mean we are not the only ones anymore several companies that do that where it has been used in front of court successfully I can send you some information about a court case in China for example yeah I'd be interested okay I think that thank you very much and it's for free it's for free when you open the web page go on the .org not .com and I look for it like early on and we have the largest and most secure blockchain for signs already set up it's bitcoin blockchain right so what's the point of having more for signs okay yeah thank you very much okay no I want okay so I want to call up the panelists now so Vlad Günther is not here he want to like lead the panel the panel is off we changed it slightly like Ali Lombard and Ismael and can you come here for the panel please yeah yeah here you want yeah it's okay yeah we just take a seat here okay yeah so we changed it a little bit so what is blockchain and what is blockchain for signs yeah we like when we first designed the conference we were into the technicalities and now we are like more on a definition level right so we can just take a seat okay the one that didn't speak it's only you okay you just introduce you in like two lines is that okay and like how you ended up here yeah okay so hi everyone my name is Mo and I'm CEO of Celer Network working on off-chain scalability and I'm here because we just came back from the DevCon and this is awesome event and we want to chime in what we're thinking as a platform builder and how to contribute for signs for blockchain okay cool thank you very much so what is blockchain yeah that's a good question okay so we have the technical stuff we discussed it and I just want to like use it like one limitation is energy consumption yes and do we all agree with that this is like true for certain blockchain setups right I just mentioned energy consumption of the well established systems like bitcoin or ethereum it's not necessarily true if you use proof of stake for instance you don't waste energy in that way as well there are other chains or if you use a consortium or private chain where simple control mechanism is just oh this set of nodes is preset and you cannot change that well then you don't need proof of work as well yeah exactly so this is like one misconception right we just want to clean away right some the fact is that the well known established systems like bitcoin or ethereum waste loads of energy yeah and then there is like one thing people say like blockchain it will expose all data to all people all the time so it's just a design question right you can design it true there are also other projects like I mentioned Zcash for instance that tries to hide the transactions they use advanced cryptography something called ZK Snarks which is like zero knowledge proof this is also ongoing research and there are many many new interesting advances in this area and we probably will see something actually ZK Snarks is also scalability solution because you can kind of compress what you have in a succinct which like kind of means short proof what happens so if you think of state transitions you could also have a short proof like from the genesis block to the current block what happened in this time using ZK Snarks so there's loads as I said ongoing research but there's loads of things going on there and the cool thing about ZK Snarks is it doesn't only solve privacy but also scalability to some extent yes to some extent yes so we have like this there's a cap theory even the graffiti artist put it there's a triangle with a cap on top the CAP and there are a lot of people in blockchain space that want to like solve this problem but to square the skeptical triangle it would be really revolutionary if you would have a system so we all need to be skeptic but we have like several like a real world trade-offs as you mentioned exactly so which one is the best and like even the state channels on top of a blockchain system they are not decentralized right but they have interesting new reproductions here so these are so we I'm pretty fine with all the technical things that we discussed in terms of blockchain up until now right and in the beginning we had like while we need cultural changes right so where do we see blockchain in science that we can like support cultural changes in science where we have like the time stamping now well we could like also send our hashes to Elsevier right but I mean manipulated right but ok so but we have like one thing the time stamping of that there was a conference once that there was a guy who said like a blockchain the only thing that blockchain really does is decentralized time stamping of anything a friend of him told him so he was a blockchain skeptic blockchain application in science ok I think it's great and this is like a right thing blockchain does time stamping in a decentralized way and it's as good as saying the internet is only good for sending bytes around right it's as useful it's useless yeah so ok it depends on what we time stamp and what we do with the data on top yeah and I would argue that actually blockchain can offer a lot more than just time stamping and in the specific context of science and scientific research you know there's a lot of things we can do on the crypto economic side and the one specific topic that I want to introduce to the audience is something called token curated registry TCR yeah this is good we've heard talk about this and this brings us to the crypto economy right this whole new token stuff so you would summarize that on the blockchain too includes the crypto economy yeah so you know just to give a brief overview of that TCR what is TCR you can think of we will have this later we will have this tomorrow it's a perfect we will have a talk on that oh ok ok so no no no I just want to like let's talk on this ever like what is blockchain and like we would summarize crypto economy about it yeah we will have a talk on that tomorrow yeah so I would say that blockchain is a new way like there was like this thing blockchain can be used for everything and blockchain is not useful for everything you know we have like these both things like well and I think it comes do you agree with the statement it's like well blockchain is just a new way to organize all online stuff right so if you can represent something online like fashion like science like anything basically right you could do it in a blockchain way right what does this represent to you if you think of like we have centralized first parties at the moment that provide services and I want to include institutes to this that are open science institute publishers mind being archive but it's also centralized right if they shut down they shut down right so to have like let's say an open access journal on IPFS it's to me it's more open science centralized open access repository somewhere right and so to like to define what what blockchain means is that you organize an online service that we already had in a distributed way they are not such just some plugs that you can pull but you have to pull a lot to stop Bitcoin in other blockchain it's like decentralized that means that there's like no central entity that can manipulate the system and it's like it can be immutable right it can't be changed arbitrarily it can only be changed as described and it's like provable to the outside and then and then one guy from a result institute came to me well we had systems to design provable systems in 30 years but it's and then I want to like bring it to the hype it's also a hype because we are sitting talking about these things right now here right it's not 30 years ago when they had the system to make a computer system provable yeah is it okay so I'm I mean like what's your like yeah is it like so thank you so you're mixing up a lot of things I must admit that as a professor I have a strong opinion on almost all of these things you brought up so let me maybe first kind of sort it start with maybe cryptocurrencies so what I think is a lot of people are afraid of fridge relations and so on I think it is the best thing that can happen if it is regulated because you know if it's regulated it kind of leads to trust and if people trust this leads kind of to acceptance and if people accept it and they use it so it's a kind of an easy path for the trade-offs we talked a lot about them all these designs and all these things like anonymity and so it's they have their own benefits and they have their drawbacks so for open signs you know there is countries in the world right now in the 21st century where people are afraid to tell their opinion like what I do I openly say you what I think they can't so sometimes anonymity is good because then they can time stamp that they were the first who brought up their idea and they are not they don't have to be afraid that they will have some negative consequence because of saying this on the other side anonymity is sometimes criticized because you know if we kind of publish a scientific paper and somebody criticizes it maybe without reasons or with good reasons but it's done not in a polite way because of this anonymity it's sometimes also not good so it is everything has its benefits and its drawbacks and it depends on the context and that's what I kind of struggle with here guys is that we mix it up as Donke this was the best introduction we mix it up I told you in the ads of my talk open signs is quite big and I don't need a particular specific kind of use case we should talk about but it is completely different where what matters and for sure for every of the single questions I guess blockchain may or kind of the underlying technology DLT may provide some opportunities that we maybe could go for okay thanks I mean there are a lot of ways you can think of blockchain you can think about from a technology point of view which is kind of a decentralized ledger or decentralized state machine for a question but another way you can think about blockchain is from application point of view from the from the scientific society and also like in this community the way I would like to say blockchain is basically a way to create the decentralized trust it's basically this thing that creates trust among mutually untrusted parties in the old world you and I cannot trust each other and for example in the time stamping case you mentioned if we have like a notary service maybe you cannot even trust a notary service in the beginning if it's like a huge Nobel bonding discovery but with blockchain you can actually trust that this thing actually happened and with TCR the same thing that you can basically create this kind of decentralized trust among trust party so that is like a one-sentence definition I would give for blockchain to this community but do we have a trust problem like if I submit my paper to a publisher and it will like be received on this date we trust them right I mean there's no scientist that argues like putting it wrong times on my paper there are cases where people submitted their papers to conferences they appear every year they really liked the idea so much that they declined the paper and published it themselves so this is documented that really happened that's why we also have an extension for an open journal submission system so that when you submit your paper to a conference it's automatically time stamped I have to add Bella you're absolutely right and you know what why we need sometimes blockchain or this trustless trust in our community and the scientific community scientists per definition, per principles per our identity don't trust each other even me on my own if I don't know the authors if they are not coming from the institution I kind of am aware of if they are not publishing in a journal I trust, I read I don't even take a look at the paper and that might be bad that might be evil because maybe they have kind of something in it that is just true this would solve a lot of problems and the cases that Bella mentioned they are really so sad that they are true I think it's very true it's good that we are skeptical I mean just in the news a few days ago they found out that there was a bug in Bitcoin that would have made under some circumstances double spending possible I mean that's something we all agree of course that's not possible with Bitcoin but even in that system it was designed to achieve that it was possible and we can okay Lambert do you want to add something? Yeah, let me maybe introduce to give a little bit of another perspective on why we benefit from this trustlessness of a protocol let me introduce an example of blockchain in another but close field and that is higher education so since two years or so institutions worldwide who notarize allow people to notarize educational certificates so for instance diploma and so on on a blockchain and this is a huge imagine a country like Malta they even changed their legislation to support this and why do they do this as you maybe know for some weird reason I never get this why but for some reason it's hugely popular to travel to Malta and learn some language but what happens now is some school, some language school goes down the drain or take for instance Hungary they just outlawed one major university within their country for political reasons so there are lots of reasons but do not have this want to rely on the trust relationship to your alma mater on the long run but instead have a proof that you received some certificate on the blockchain and this is a well established case they even have standards governing this use case and so on and we can learn a lot from this imagine this kind of autonomy for learners applied to researchers that they literally own the transactions between them and there it's not about receiving a grade for your diploma but it's about other forms of assessment like for instance peer review this is super important or you submit an idea and you can collect likes for the idea for example or people retweet your idea and then we can like in blockchain world we could create new economies around that this is not possible in research gate because we know that research gate people can sit down in theory or springer nature people or LTV people and can change the likes with the admin password in the database this is super important because as a librarian I'm very much concerned about the economy of information markets and this has potentially a huge impact of how these markets work because if you imagine where like learners own their certificates where researchers own all kinds of transactions between them in a very literal sense not in this figurative meaning of oh we have some kind of peer to peer network no, literally they own this then you have these kinds of information potentially as a commons so people can build their business models for like delivering analysis of this data and so on upon this but there is no privileged access to this kind of information and this is a huge difference to what happens today day by day we rely on closed platforms we got used to it and these valuable branded platforms they have privileged access to certain types of information and they make use of it and we can bring hope at least so there is a decentralization we don't have a central third party anymore that can manipulate the data who owns the data they don't own it anymore but this brings problems as well if you don't have a centralized entity they can manipulate the data anymore then we don't have a centralized entity that can manipulate the data anymore and this is like the problem whoever has experienced running an internet service understands how hard it is to maintain the database in a state that is useful to the people you don't want to have 300 articles the same articles with different numbers or identities big companies like facebook there are a lot of mechanical turks working to cleaning up the database so that it's useful if you don't have this anymore we need to build game incentives structures around so that it's a good database and that's a tough problem for many things for bitcoin transaction it's easy in a way you really have to reestablish trust and reinvent some aspects of information markets and make it so that the people decentralize become creator of this data of this service we have projects that work on this and they understand that it's a tough problem so maybe decentralize services will be combined in the future or we will see like centralized services exist for low value transactions and for high value transactions like grant money distribution and things we might have a blockchain-ified thing is that a possible future? I think centralized services can still exist in the sense that it can be a major or main participant of some decentralized systems imagine we have this awesome journal that is newly established and the old school publishers can still be a participant in the TCR for example this is entirely possible I wanted to add some more skepticism to this whole decentralization idea for instance if you trust a well established institution for instance your bank and you lose your credit card or someone tempers with your credit card and buys something you can go and complain and get your money back if there is no such central institution for instance the big point equivalent is someone steals your private key your money is lost there's nothing you can do there's no one you can talk to there's another problem I don't think that decentralization can try to achieve but for some systems it makes sense for some systems it makes sense to decentralize trust for some systems it might not make much sense and I'm pretty sure that both concepts will still exist in the future decentralized and centralized system probably we have to make sure that the centralized data processing systems that they don't have full access to the data as well because privacy is becoming more and more of a concern because cryptography comes in so I myself don't really trust institutions or academia, academic institutions necessarily as well but I trust the math behind the things we are doing so I trust the cryptography that we are using and for instance I mean the bitcoin paper itself is not it might come from a well established institution but at least it's not labeled as if it was coming from a well established institution and look at Ethereum it's like an 18 year old guy who said oh maybe we can replace the scripting language and make this tour incomplete oh then he got money from Till Foundation boom there's Ethereum there's also not a well established institution so I mean yeah I think we will still need established institutions and central authorities to some extent but for important things and especially where it's feasible expensive we should aim for decentralization but I think the trust will change I want to give one example we know about these manipulations with car engines the diesel scandal and I don't think that something like this will happen again because nowadays I mean there were a lot of people that were involved technicians, people that wrote the code, people that it's a code, a lot of people knew about that but it could kept secret for several, several years but nowadays for example with the service I presented with your mobile phone even if you adjust the person that I don't know serves or changes the water bottles in the meeting room and if you hear okay this team here is discussing a possibility to manipulate this kind of data you could make a small voice note and say I was just in a meeting attending and they were discussing that they kind of manipulate the data from engines and if this would be documented in the blockchain then these big companies that were involved in this kind of fraud they would have to pay billions more in fines so I think by having this kind of transparency and the possibility to time stamp any kind of data people will have to be more honest or they will have to pay high fines in the future so first I want to say that in most parts I agree with Ismael and Bela so I think it's like in Star Wars if I stay with movies there is always a dark side there will be always people who will try to do something bad for money so I wouldn't go so far so to say that something like this would never happen maybe it will not take years that we will kind of get knowledge of it or maybe it will be in different settings so like never say never but what Ismael said I really like it and I would like to come back to the decentralization question by you Isamge so I think that we should go step by step here so I think what we will observe during the next years will be kind of such hybrid approaches we will have kind of central parties, big parties who still do the work and they of course get incentives for it but they will combine it with some decentralization that they will involve all other parties to participate they just need seconds to verify that the central party is acting according to the rules so there is somebody who has to provide computing and storage power there is somebody who has to do something and there is incentives like in Bitcoin and there will be kind of these hybrid approaches that they will open it up like in a blockchain that if they kind of compute the hash value they will do it because of course they will get something for it but it will take seconds for everybody who wants to see that they do it right and it's not only about hash value it's all about these processes and I think this is what will be the next step this combination so it's not like tomorrow there is only blockchains and there is no central parties anymore it will combination we will see some kind of central parties going down we will see some central parties going up who really better understand the new idea it's like with the internet some parties want, some parties love it's always winners and losers let me expand a little bit on that this is super interesting I think when we go further into the implications of making up these game like incentivation rules which are most often about and to regulate parts of real life through this made up games then we are quickly we have to be concerned about dark and potentially dangerous sites of these games as well so for instance there is a very well established notion in the economic research on comments that when you have some activity that so far is done out of an intrinsic motivation take for instance things like Wikipedia and when you introduce to such a system a monetary incentive you can easily destroy the system so think about what we do and this is not easy this is not an easy yes or no question but many of the systems we hear about today and tomorrow are about introducing monetary incentives to things like peer review and as you know so far this works just from the motivational standpoint more like Wikipedia you feel inclined to give back to your researchers your peers community by doing peer review so this is really something we have to keep in mind and this is why I'm grateful for people like Alexander von Humboldt Institute because they are doing this kind of qualitative research that we urgently need next to developing technical solutions about this kind of questions very good and I would like you to take the responsibility because you know there is libraries so we as society we as people pay taxes for society and this money on something society is crucial like doing research like educating people you have money to provide this computing and storage power to run these kind of databases without looking for other incentive mechanisms so if we as society decide that it's worse for us to have something like Wikipedia is great and it's also chronologically ordered you can see the whole chronology of all the articles libraries would run this and not compete with Starbucks for places where students can kind of drink coffee and learn but kind of do real crucial thing then this will be a great mover because we as scientists and students will for sure trust more the libraries that's your advantage than others so if we as society decide to fund such things make it possible you know I would yeah I think these are a great point but I would like to respectfully argue against the cautious thing you mentioned about like gamifying economic incentive and monitoring incentive I think having blockchain govern something called crypto-economics is actually extremely beneficial maybe we're still in the early stage but we're moving to the right direction the reason for that is what is crypto-economics is really economics plus code and that code actually dominates and you know explicitly how everyone how this economic mechanism is going to work and I think that is about 100 times better than what we have today which is a very ambiguous obscure way of governing the economic mechanisms yes there are a lot of challenges to make that explicit code work including governance including how to like you know there are people trying to acting as central bank these days you know to issue stable coins to have like a reserve and a bond system programmed as a smart contract but this mechanism I think could work and could work better than today because it is transparent basically talking about the society I would like the experts what's your opinion about how soon can we expect a technology based on blockchain so that elections local provincial or national level starts to become a little more real participatory democracy is there any hope for that anytime soon can you see that technologically speaking I would say the technology is far enough and I think also when we think about elections in Spain you know when they wanted to get independent if we think about how everything would have worked out differently if this technology would already be in the hands of the like normal person I mean what did the government do they send police forces to ensure that people couldn't go to these election rooms but if you were able to vote without going anywhere then maybe the whole outcome would have been differently so it really I think your question is a really good one because blockchain technology can have a huge impact on other society questions as well but let's stay with science and research we can like say vote on a good idea next good flying concept okay yeah yeah so it's opened up basically yeah yeah I'll have to go back to the election just for this one comment so it's actually happening already I just wanted to say that the mayor of Tsuk where our company is is super forward thinking and there were already possibilities for people because Switzerland is extremely democratic so to go and to vote on some local aspects actually taking this election example it's cool and it's like the blockchain and I completely agree to time same things but there's one big problem that is unsolved and that is in the science world the same problem that blockchain is not about replacing trusted third parties or like get them like get completely rid of them but we have to have new third parties for the real world blockchain interfaces and one of this is the identity problem so even the mayor of Tsuk has to have to find a way to prove the identity of somebody to participate in the election right so and we have this example and we talk about this right and then we have some problem of like how do we feed data into a blockchain if I totally immutable data set or whatever if you can't trust the sensor right we have a talk on this we have a talk on identity and we should focus on these discussions as well and then okay and then I want to like include one more thing into blockchain like al