Blockchain Workshop Position Statement

Author: Juan Benet (IPFS Project)

Your background in blockchain or Web technologies

I am the leader of the IPFS Project, which involves many important Web and Blockchain-related protocols. IPFS is next generation distributed web technology, and it is in heavy use by many blockchain applications. To find out more about IPFS and its relationship to blockchains, watch this talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUVmypx9HGI

Though not a blockchain itself, IPFS is highly relevant to Blockchains. It is used by blockchains and blockchain applications, and its subprotocols (libp2p, multihash, IPLD) can be extremely useful for blockchain standardization.

I am also the inventor of the Filecoin protocol, which is a blockchain storage currency.

I am a participant in the recent WebOfTrust effort, which is producing lots of work related to identity -both standards and technology. This effort involves significant work in how to abstract across different blockchains and similar systems (e.g. store identity, or make identity claims on both bitcoin and ethereum).

I am a developer in the js-ipfs effort, which is producing technology for blockchain applications to work directly in browsers.

What topic you would like to lead discussion on, including concrete ideas on how this topic relates directly to the Web or browser-facing features

• Linking: the IPFS project has produced ways of addressing data and linking across various blockchains.
• Interoperability of Data: the IPFS project produced IPLD, a standard format for distributed hash-linked data structures. Think of it like "merkle-ized JSON". You can see a design-doc here: https://github.com/ipfs/specs/tree/master/ipld -IPLD will be standardized through W3C and/or IETF. And it is highly relevant to the Blockchain W3C group. In particular, it can be used as a format to define Linked Data hash-chains, including Blockchains. (Think JSON-LD meets bitcoin, ethereum, etc.)
• Self-description and future-proofing: the IPFS project produced many important interoperability formats, including: multihash, multiaddr, multicodec, multistream, and multikey. These are self-describing, future-proofed formats for various pieces of distributed protocols. These or others are relvant to discuss.
• P2P Networking Protocols: the IPFS project has produced libp2p, a standalone effort to build a modular peer-to-peer network stack. libp2p is in use by many projects. Many of the protocols it uses are already standardized by IETF or W3C, and some new ones will be put through the process.

Links to related supporting resources

• IPFS Project page: https://ipfs.io
• Filecoin Project page: http://filecoin.io
• IPLD designdoc: https://github.com/ipfs/specs/tree/master/ipld
• Multihash: https://github.com/jbenet/multihash
• Overview talk about IPFS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUVmypx9HGI Overview talk about IPFS
• this post details how to build blockchains on top of IPFS: https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/an-introduction-to-ipfs-9bba4860abd0

Any other topics you think the workshop should cover in order to be effective

• Linking across blockchains
• Linked Data and blockchains
• Common formats to use
• Identifiers across blockchains
• Browser integration and support