dezell: Chuck Young (Impact 21), Allen Brown (Deixis), Liz Sertl (GS1)
chuck: We'll look at retail (North America at least) and business cases for provenance, and use of block chain
[Review of blockchain characteristics]
scribe: valuable property is
certainty about what happened in the digital world
... standards are important here
Liz: My latest example of
standards is "orange top of coffee pot means decaf." :)
... business can't be successful without standards
... we have at GS1 different standards for different parts of
the supply chain
... a key piece of blockchain technology is to leverage
standard vocabularies
Allen: I am involved in various
standards activities around tracking / tracing including: ISO
TC 307, ISO PC 308, and at W3C verifiable claims wg and (in
development) DIDs
... Provenance is a cumulative record for an asset documenting:
who had it, (etc. see slide 9)
Liz: Simpler: history of origin/source for an asset
Chuck: We now say "Convenience /
Fuel"
... some biz problems that blockchain can help solve
... e.g., vaping
... regulation may involve how many cartridges you can purchase
in a period of time
... retailers will be held to account
... blockchain can help track usage
... another biz case is gasoline
... e.g., correct octane level...we want to be sure fuel is
correctly put in storage tank
... food provenance another use case
Allen: Chain of custody is of
interest both to state regulators and also producers
... in some states, like WA or OR, there is the same "multiple
purchase" problem related to cannabis.
... another use case airplanes...need to know what parts are on
what plane
... in transportation generally there are reliability concerns
regarding replacement parts
Liz: Spinach outbreak led to an
entire category to die for several years
... because of one outbreak in one farm in one location,
spinach category was devastated for 6-8 years
... so provenance really important
dezell: I think that use cases
like vaping will be important online as well
... need tracing across organizational boundaries
manu: we've been involved with US
customs in doing proofs of concept that try to take GS1
identifiers as the identifiers for these events, putting in
blockchain, enabling supply chain tracking
... one POC around "certificate of origin"
... other use cases around things like sensitive electronic
components
... other use case: counterfeit goods
... where also homeland security is interested because
counterfeiting revenues fund other bad things
[Liz on critical tracking events and key data elements]
Allen: We at Deixis interested in
smart contracts running on blockchain...e.g., baggage
handling
... regulations require knowing what bags are on an aircraft,
at a particular gate, what passengers are associated with which
bags
... this is mostly done today using a system created in 1948
(using teletype messages)
... today the teletype messages are sent over the
Internet
... consider a passenger going from LAX->ORD->EWR
... you can track events - entered into system, which plane its
own, which gate it arrives at, which plane it gets on, etc.
until it is picked up
... custodians are "paired" to represent transitions
... each pair has a forwarder and a recipient
... pair exchanges:
1) bag for receipt
2) permission to forward for "certificate of acceptability"
scribe: at which point the next
pair becomes the current pair
... now to talk about contracts:
* Each party is identified
* Each party has "clauses" to execute on behalf of the party
scribe: these clauses turn out to all mean the same thing for all the parties, just with slightly different parameters
* We bind these clauses with tokens.
[Animation of contract execution]
Chuck: what happens when there's a failure?
Allen: The tracking system allows
us to make claims (mathematically provable)
... a recipient cannot have received a bag without having given
a receipt
... a forwarder cannot have forwarded a bag without having
received a receipt
... and similarly for other tokens
... so if the bag goes missing, these properties of the
contract enable you to identify at least one entity at
fault
Manu: Why is this better than status quo?
<Zakim> manu, you wanted to add a few based on work w/ US Customs, retail, IPR -- note that traceability not yet solved problem. and to ask Liz if the "Biz Location" is a GLN? and to ask
Allen: Today's mechanized systems
are closed an proprietary
... two advantages of new system are openness and
uniformity
Chuck: e.g., everybody doesn't need the same scanner, but helpful to have data standards
dezell: These contracts represent pi-calculus and enable provable assertions, as well as debugging when problems arise
Manu: The good news here is that
there have been a number of great proofs of concept over the
past few years
... at least 30 that I know of
... in the ones we are involved in, we are encouraging the
usage of GS1 identifiers, and also DIDs to identify orgs, and
VCs for those organizations to make statements
<scribe> ...new spec coming soon: Secure Data Hubs
UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: those are for
off-chain storage
... enables fine grain access rights
... the intent is to move these three through W3C
... what other technical specifications are moving forward
other than the ones I mentioned (and ones Allen mentioned at
ISO)
dezell: Smart contracts community
group....we have done a little bit of work to resuscitate that
group (who does not yet have a chair)
... I was at OMG meeting last week; they might be doing
something
Manu: Do people perceive missing
pieces?
... also, do we think that a piece we are aware of is ready for
a standards track?
Allen: In communities like
ISO/ITU, their pace of progress is considerably slower than
what's going on in tech exploration community
... so I think it's up to the tech exploration people to
influence these bodies
... in TC 307 there's much more discussion about the use of
cryptographic technologies in distributed ledgers rather than
what use cases are interesting
... So documentation of interesting use cases, annotated with
explanations of how distributed ledger technology makes the use
case compellingly do-able...that would be great
<Zakim> manu, you wanted to mention missing pieces... that we can see anyway.
manu: There are two missing
pieces in my view
... one is to have blockchain to blockchain interoperability.
We are working on this topic
... the other relates to smart contract standards
... there are a variety of approaches today (e.g., IBM,
Ethereum)
... so there might be a need for a higher level smart contract
expression language
Liz: I totally agree
... GS1 is very interested in that interop
dezell: Thank you to the
presenters today, and to the particiapnts
... next meeting currently scheduled 29 July