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Provenance Groups

Transcript By: Bryan Bishop

Tags: Sidechains

Category: Workshop

Give the name of your tech topic table. You have three minutes to summarize. When you have one minute to summarize, I will give you the one minute warning. When you have zero minutes left, you will be thrown out the window.

Media rights

We talked about media rights and payments. The ability to figure out the incentive structure for whether we can compensate people who create page views with people who have view rights and how that all works. One of the ways this works out is … the blockchain world is not instagram scale. If instagram was monetized on bitcoin blockchain, the entire blockchain would blow-up. Maybe sidechains would be more appropriate.

Incentive structure is where we spent most of our time. If you don’t have the rights then you can’t access the file. Well, that feels like DRM. If you get people to engage with media, then you are participating in a value chain. If you are RDJ and you have an Iron Man mask somewhere, then you should get paid. How do we get people to declare their rights and get incentivized, so that in return the money flows back through those channels.

How do yo uget this valuable media on the blockchain? Some of our use cases, the idea would be to reward good behavior rather than hunting down bad behavior. There are lots of artists out there. They should be paid for their work. If you wanted to put that in the contract so tha teveryone could benefit, like for example an actor or character that might have had an interesting flare on it, and keeping in the ethos of a particular company’s desires, there’s no particular reason why the artist couldn’t be rewarded for that and continuing to have good actors and the IP that the company might want to enforce.

Legal questions

How do we integrate the legal framework that we have now, into a blockchain? How do we validate and bring it into the system? The other issue is how do we think about things like the DAO and new organizations that the blockchain has enabled and created? One example we talked about was the Vermont ruling here, the “evidence statute” that says that information within the bitcoin system could be used in the Vermont court. Even if bitcoin were to falter, it would still be legally recognized, the information within the coin system.

Other people in the group were asked if they have other legal issues. There were some conversation about projects around land and title. Could a blockchain trigger through automated contract things like closings or notarizations for registries of deeds and so forth. The other thing was around how should the law, another one was the law itself is a primitive, like statutes and regs, can we have that in the blockchain instead of going to West Law or Lexus Nexus, perhaps under a uniform electronicifization act.

Intellectual property

Most of the people at our table were pissed off that artists keep getting screwed over. There’s a tension between artists feeding their family, people creating art, and the cultural commons.

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other

missed some stuff

Physical assets and archival science

We are looking at linkages on the blockchain between the blockchain and other data stores. We looked at three different use cases. We looked at commodities, student record keeping and real estate. The problem of linkages is a big problem. We did not have solutions. We recognized we do not have standards. What is different about record keeping with a blockchain versus databases? The mechanism for authenticating is separate from the actual object itself which is different in databases, where this is usually combined together. There are continuities and discontinuities. Maybe we need a standard for record keeping on the blockchain that would allow us to be confident about proof of a degree, or proof of real estate and so on. We talked about different data models, in particular in real estate, the idea that the hashed record, the reputation of the asset is stored off-chain. You could also have the asset represented by attributes which are hashed and put on chain. The physical asset is on chain as opposed to off-chain. You could have smart contracts where the asset, having been tokenized, the public key is moved about by transactions of the asset or entity on-chain as well. Next steps would be, we moved towards this idea of working on persistent linkages. We don’t know how, we think standards could point in that direction, there’s some sense amongst some of us that a standardized approach could be useful. Also that these are socio-technical systems, the institutions and the laws have to co-evolve with the technology.

Supply chain

Supply chain is a large problem. The part has to be shipped through an entire chain of different companies holding the parts. In this particular case one of the key themes we wanted to focus on was a second aspect of it where the origin of the part its provenance and its flow-through how could that be managed where you have the parts getting combined into a group of parts going into a container that would get into the logistics mode. And then it would begin to take on the entire shipment piece and logistics. We introduced the IoT concept where the barcode could manage its own identity, it could be traced across back and forth, and the solutions would be known how it gets manufactured and it all gets in a central place, and it gets replicated to some number of blockchain nodes and it could get traced back. Its composition could come through with smart containers which have intrusion detection all facilitated through a smart contract across a blockchain and it would go through the LC financing across teams with one side to the other side managed across border, non-correspondent banking system and there could be sensors to check that the entire chain is managed appropriately and finally make payments. We really have to break this down into different pieces, like API and IoT teams could come in handy. Some of the part-centric teams. And standardization of the shipping side could come together to make that happen. And also the financing team and the regulations teams. It’s a large problem. But I think pieces of this can be taken and solved and moved forward.