Brian Behlendorf: How Hyperledger is Developing Foundational Blockchain Technology (Episode 160)

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by Jax Jax is the user-friendly wallet that works across all your devices and handles both Bitcoin and ether go to J a double x EO and embrace the future of cryptocurrency wallets and by the legend an OS the hardware wallet which sets the new standard and security and usability get it today at ledger wallet common and use the offer code epicenter to get 10% off your order welcome to episode of the show which

talks about the technologies projects and startups driving East centralization and the global Boston revolution my name is Brian for event crane and I'm here Roy today we have a very distinguished guest on our show he's brian behlendorf he has had a long career in the software industry and he's associated with so many projects that I'm sure you must have heard about and so I'm gonna walk through like a list of his achievements and positions that he holds and then we are going to start talking about his current involvement in the hyper ledger project so Brian Brian was is probably best known as the co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation and is currently the chairman

of the board of directors at the Electronic Frontier Foundation EF f he's also on the board of directors for Mozilla and penny tech and his major occupation right now is as executive director of hyper ledger at the Linux Foundation so you're going to talk mostly we are gonna focus this show mostly on what hyper ledger is and what is what it does but perhaps before we start talking about hyper legion we could have like a small intro from from Brian himself in his own words and perhaps the story of how he got to be involved in the blockchain industry Thanks it's a real pleasure to

be here so it is a very long and wine being rode that I've taken to get here from starting being a co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation and very early days of the the web but in a way it kind of feels like the web in 1994 all over again so let me roll through what I would I done the last couple of years I was you know spent most of my time I have spent most of my time in San Francisco I've lived here since 1991 when I started as a freshman at University of California Berkeley and then got involved with the early days of the web Wired magazine building website starting Apache started a company called CollabNet left that in

2007 and then worked for the Obama campaign in 2008 and then worked at the white house for two years 2009 and 2010 working on open data policy open government policy and open source software actually as a way to move forward certain certain policy objectives particularly in healthcare and then went to go work as chief technology officer for the World Economic Forum where I got to see to some degree how world policy is made how minds are changed how projects are put together and both what's possible and what's really hard about doing that at scale and built a lot of friendships a lot of relationships inside the tech

space but but also well beyond and then left there and came back I started to get homesick because I was living in DC and then Geneva came home to San Francisco it wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do so I had the opportunity to join as a managing director at a venture capital fund called mythril and so started there in 2013 and in addition to looking at companies involved in everything from nuclear fusion to solving diabetes to you know all sorts of different kinds of technology well beyond obviously internet and information technology we started to see a lot of different companies pitching us on Bitcoin and blockchain related ideas right and I started to actually get

pretty skeptical about a lot of what I saw I mean add the ordinary skepticism about Bitcoin right and I think there's interesting stuff going on there but there's a lot of it that at its root was kind of about currency speculation but there is also something very intriguing about this idea of the global ledger even from 2008 and when I read all the hype around Satoshi nakamoto's paper this idea of being able to have a single large global ledger of all of the tokens in circulation and who owned them and and keeping track of when they were transferred in a way that prevented somebody from being able to spend the same coin twice that was really

fascinating to me right and so I didn't pay attention to Bitcoin much in 2008 when you could have mine you know a few BTC a day on your laptop but as these companies were talking to us you know I realized it was more than just about currency it was also about being able to change a lot of how the systems of the world worked so bringing what I learned from the World Economic Forum bringing what I learned from my time in DC I started to really pay attention to use cases involving things like tracking the diamond trade in the supply chain in the diamond industry to try to keep blood diamonds out of circulation or reforming how land title registration might work in a developing country in order to not

only make it easier for people to record you know selling a house from one person to another but also keeping corrupt bureaucrats from being able to steal land from people all right simply because once it's digital it's very easy to you know corrupt the and eliminate the paper trail unless you have a public ledger a public record of what's being built so for me the idea of blockchain built on top of all of my passion for open source and open data and trying to see if there are technology tools to reform some of the really deep structural social problems out there in the world and so I'd listened very closely to these blockchain companies and I would get frustrated because they

would want to raise really large amounts of money especially for such an early technology and such an early industry and we'd ask them what they plan to spend that money on and while they talked about all these amazing you know high-level use cases and ideas they were gonna spend the money on plumbing right they're gonna spend the money on whether is a fork of Bitcoin or a fork of etherium or something way down here with the idea that they would be even in a decentralized ledger they could be the Gateway or they could be the the you know everyone would say RedHat but i think in their mind they really wanted to be the Google of this space they're the or the Amazon Web Services of this space right the the one default that everybody turned to and had to turn

to because they just did it faster better cheaper than everyone else intriguing at one level but I also felt like that was very different than both the decentralized nature of distributive Ledger's and also how internet technologies really succeed right which is people companies working together startups and large companies on common plumbing on common infrastructure and then building on top and going in to truly differentiate differentiated areas like I would rather have invested while I was still at this firm in you know a company using blockchain building blockchain based applications for a very specific sector like healthcare or

supply chain but building on top of plumbing that already existed or for which maybe they were one tenth of the total needed in order to build that plumbing rather than building all their own plumbing so so I got frustrated at this and and you know looked around it kind of how the community was trying to address this and the Bitcoin community was still very much coming from a payments centric point of view the etherium community was really focused on building that decentralized Airbnb and the decentralized uber and have a lot of resonance for that model I mean I like the payments idea to it certainly there's a lot of disruption and decentralization that has to go on in that industry but I also felt like internet technologies and even the web were successful because they allowed you

know while we had our wild-eyed advocates we had our Richard Stallman's and our John Perry Barlow we had you know these these these long term visions of where we wanted to get to we got there by bringing the systems of the world along with us and and you know kind of going through a phase change where we could turn these information systems into decentralized information systems and gradually kind of get ourselves inside and then and then we can be disruptive and take over and so when hyper ledger launched I certainly paid attention I first heard about it December 17th of last year was when the first announcement went out I and and so I started tracking it learning more

about it listening in on the the technical steering committee calls and following the mailing lists and that I went to the consensus conference and at that point said okay there's something I could tell by the lack of something like building a foundation and I'm hiper ledger that there is a need for it I mean I and I had been talking at that point with Jim's Emlyn who is the executive director of the Linux Foundation I've known him for a very long time and I think he's been eager for me to find a way to work for him but at some point anyways so I you know he said we could use some help here and I said ok sign me up we figured out a way to meet up make it work and so I joined hyper ledger

officially in June of this year cool well that is a very comprehensive sort of story of how we got there now you've been involved in these early web technologies and since the very beginning and there was a lot of idealism I think around that write them in also with the IFF that you're part of those has always been this idea of the internet being a place of freedom of open expression what is your view about the state of the Internet today and what you think is irrelevant for blockchain for the state of the Internet in the longer term I find myself going back and

rereading John Perry Barlow Declaration of the independence of cyberspace quite often now it was written in 96 he actually delivered it at the World Economic Forum meeting and it was a very strong statement that what we're building on the Internet is the sovereign independent space where governments were not even welcome and that's I strongly resonated with that when it came out I still resonate with it quite a bit and I think what we've discovered is you know when all of us get on board we bring our government with us right we bring our part of systems of value systems our priorities our passions our differences I mean you certainly see this in the last the

events of the last few weeks you know where so much passion was poured into a really bitter fight and yet as an American society at least were farther apart than ever right and and that's been a been a rude awakening in a way and I've always believed the progress has been made by a combination of revolutionaries and evolutionary's and so I find myself resonating quite a bit with people who want to find a way to read i centralized the web I think the Internet and the web today has at a certain level grown over centralized for sure I mean here we are recording this on Google most people have a gmail account so much of our lives is

dependent upon a couple of very few providers and that is you know not only economically that means a lot of the rewards go to a few a few organizations and the whole ecosystem it also is not a resilient right what happens if Twitter runs out of money and goes out of business suddenly an entire channel of communication is cut off because there isn't really a great alternative and others may step in but that's that's fragile and so I'm I'm really worked up about figuring out how do we focus on anti fragility right and for me block chains are a big part of that whether that's happening at a global scale like the etherium and Bitcoin networks or whether that happens at a

very local scale getting a small group of nonprofits or or banks or you know political organizations to be able to have a shared ledger public or private but governed by its own sense of governance and the way that we have overlapping networks today that collectively we build into something called the Internet you mentioned before that when you went to consensus you saw that because there wasn't something like hyper letter that was missing so what exactly did you see there what kind of unmet needs that you felt hyper ledger would fill so there wasn't really a an open source community that I felt embodied what we saw at the

Apache Software Foundation so the part that I'm proudest of at the at the ASF was launching and and certainly there are a lot of people who helped refine this and build it it wasn't just me but but certainly at the beginning there is this sense that the community is what comes first and you have to get the dynamics right you have to make the project a multi-vendor project you know a multi-stakeholder project you have to have a way to bring new developers into the core you have to give a way for core developers to exit otherwise they burn out right you have to have some feedback loop with the with the public and and also some way some effective governance around the open-source project itself

and the ASF I think has served it very well for this there's now 300 different projects under Apache the focus there is on community over code you you if you have a healthy community good software is practically a natural byproduct and and so that's that's the DNA to get right that's what I'm trying to spend more time now focusing on than anything else I also felt like and this is you know something we may touch on later in this in this conversation but that there was really a need to separate out the the governance and the process of writing a software and and the governance and process of managing standards and then thirdly the the governance and process of managing a

global consensus right so you can very much think of this as the difference between Apache building a web server the internet Engineering Task Force built deciding on HTTP standards and I can let's say do or the the see a browser form let's use a more direct example managing the global certificate hierarchy for for the top level for the top level certificate authorities that we all preload into our browsers and servers right all of these are three different these are three different functions that the cryptocurrency community was combining into one and I think they had to to bootstrap but that was causing tensions and that was causing tensions between

the interests of the miners the interests of the people writing you know smart contracts and and the interests of people holding holding tokens and the interests of the companies trying to build businesses on top of these platforms that tension was not being resolved when you had all three of these different functions happening in the same broad community so that was something that I felt you know was something that both the Linux Foundation had figured out how to bring to Linux the Apache Software Foundation I think had figured out how to bring to its projects and you know it and with hyper ledger starting it made sense to take advantage of the the companies now interested in moving the ball forward

with this as a focus let's take a short break to talk about Jax Jax is a multi coin wallet created by the people at the central now in the past if he had a whole bunch of cryptocurrencies it was a pain to handle them you either had to leave them on an exchange which was insecure or you had to have all these different wallets which was a hassle fortunately now with Jax knows medieval days of Darkness misery and suffering are over Jack supports multiple cryptocurrencies and new ones are being added but it's not just storing cryptocurrency so you can do with Jack's but you can also exchange them directly from whip inside the wallet thanks to their shape shift

integration and since there's only one seed Jack's makes it super easy to backup and sync to your other devices Jack's works with Windows Mac OS Linux Android iOS and has browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome so go to Jack say oh that's J a double X Co to download the wallet and get started today we'd like to thank Jack's for the support of epicenter so uh before we go on so like many of our listeners and including me we are very well versed with the governance problem of the of the cryptocurrency area because like we follow it and we see that this is a system that has all of these different stakeholders like

miners and developers and companies and in individual holders and sometimes they are at odds with each other and this has repeated across all of the projects that that we have followed but can you give an example of what kind of divergent interests exist for a body like the UNIX foundation or the Apache Software Foundation like like you said you're saying that this is in some way analogous right so I'm just trying to ask the question like what kind of conflicts are what kinds of divergent interests exists in the world that you are familiar with and that your background is from well so a divergent interest that the Linux Foundation

include everything from you know Microsoft starting out its experience with Linux calling it a cancer upon the software operating a software world in 2001 2002 I think when they were starting to that actually acknowledged the existence of open-source - now in 20s and 2016 joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum Member that's a perhaps a long term see change on Microsoft side but certainly and certainly they are late to the party in some way I mean we've had other large companies other major technology companies as a part of the Linux Foundation for a long time and yet where does most of the energy come from an

innovation come from in Linux it probably comes from the people who are working on it with because they have a bright idea for a new kind of file system or they have an idea for a different way to you know scale it down to something the size of a raspberry pi zero or they're working on a super computing cluster you know they need to make it work there it runs on or 196 I think of the 500 largest computers in the world right and so much of that is corporate I mean IBM and Intel and HP and all these other companies are certainly doing their bit to invest into Linux and so the Linux Foundation has had to kind of be a balancing act between all these corporates and do that in a way that

doesn't disturb what makes open-source projects actually effective which is getting developers together in a room and talking objectively about what do we want to build what's the right way to build it how do we you know measure and quantify and put our egos aside right and and talk about how to actually converge on a common body of code and sometimes that's by allowing you know 20 different file file systems to coexist inside the Linux kernel knowing that over time one or two of them will actually settle out and become you know the predominant ones right and so that was that's a culture of that we're adopting at hyper letter right the idea is let's allow the architecture to organically emerge over time let's not

you know put too much hero-worship into one one architect or one developer who has to carry the burden of the entire project on their shoulders and say here is the right way top-down to build something let's let this be organic let's have a couple of different distributed ledger technologies let's have a couple of different smart contract engines let's look and see are there zero knowledge proof engines out there that might be you know interesting to add on top of this and might even compete competition isn't bad let's you know if we're all under the same license if we're all pulling for the same team globally right then I can borrow good ideas and code from your project you can borrow it from mine and we can let Darwin kind of tell us which of these

ideas ultimately are better or not and so so I think balancing that tension making sure that developers are at the heart of setting the priorities setting the process but that we're also responding to the public in some way that's that's a balancing act that's an art form and that's something that that we're hoping to do at a hyper ledger so if you think about the longer term and if you look at the blockchain space what kind of you know let's assume hypothetically be great success it really kind of accomplishes any of the things you would like it to accomplish what kind of impact will that have in the community and what you think could happen on the negative side if nobody

does this work right if neither hyper let you succeed nobody else steps up right well certainly the scenario that I saw emerging at the beginning of this year 2016 that caused me to wake up and go can I can I help with this is the sense that there is this constant churn at the lower levels of the the technology and constant debates that were very very kind of ego driven and also very much driven by the tokens that one perhaps had in one's pocket you know that can often color ones technical opinions unavoidably right and and that kind of poisonous atmosphere I felt was was forcing us to spend all of our time in the plumbing and none of our time actually or very little of our time

solving some of the big problems that we could solve I mean I don't get up in the morning thinking about you know can we come up with a new consensus mechanism today or can I squeeze out another you know twenty percent transactions per second I mean those are those are interesting questions those are useful questions I get up thinking about can we can we apply this technology to improving the food supply chain right so that when bad food gets into the systems we know where it goes can we use this to give identities to refugees right get granted by nonprofit organizations serving them rather than having to depend upon a central government to issue an ID right these are things that if we could spend less time thinking

about plumbing and more time about applications we can get there further and faster and so that's that was that the success story for me would be every good idea about how to do a consensus mechanism how to do a smart contract is given an opportunity to flourish to find collaborators and to move as quickly as possible from a good idea to production quality code so we can see how does this really compare with the others right and failure is one where those good ideas don't even get a chance because we're debating how large the block size should be on one one single chain right that's that's that's what drives me today's magic word is Apache that's a PA

CHD head over to let stomp it kind of calm to signing into the magic word and claim your part after listener so one of the one of the interesting stories from my own life is in Switzerland and Basel Switzerland and I along with with a few few folk we give workshops on on blockchain technology so if somebody wants you know some form of education on it we go and deliver it to them and we were at this I post conference this year and you know like people were coming up to us and requesting us different kinds of workshops and like one of the most common requests I was getting was we

want a workshop on hyper ledger and I was like okay fine I had heard of hyper ledger I had not studied what high polish it was and I was like okay this will be like a technology like you know he cerium that probably we could learn and we could deliver it technically and then I had a conversation with Brian crane and he said like but you know hyper laser isn't a blockchain or it isn't a blockchain design now wow I didn't know that so if it isn't a blockchain design then what is it and then I kind of look through like like your stuff and like like hyppolit is doing something that is totally unique right it it's it's it's not it's doing something that cannot be really fit into

a category that the others can like for example you see many companies they're probably building a blockchain platform you see other companies they're building a blockchain application like hyper laser is kind of it defies all of the other categories and it's is its own unique thing right so perhaps like you could just tell us about the internal structure of hyper ledger right like what does it consist of who are the people what are the pros 6/6 oh sure and I'm sure it's tough partly because you know hyper ledger is the name for the community and we have many different projects underneath and so very much like Apache right I would have totally envisioned training

becoming something you could do in fact we should talk because we get the same request for for some of the specific projects like training on fabric or training on Sawtooth lake that sort of thing but to to give a broader picture of it so so there are multiple projects underneath the hyper ledger banner right underneath the umbrella is kind of the the metaphor that I've been using each of these projects is very much like an Apache project it has a specific mission it has a name set of developers who are called the maintainer 'he's right and those developers should be looking to bring in new maintainer 'he's over time so there's a healthy kind of growth in that in that responsible group they set

their own agenda their own roadmap their own priorities they decide when they want to make a release i they and they so there's a couple of things though that we try to encourage in common right so everybody must be under the same license the apache license and we can talk about that in a bit if you want to what my perspectives on why that's that's that's the appropriate thing everyone has to use roughly the same naming convention for their packages if you call it 0.9 or 1.0 or or a beta that sort of thing we actually have a nomenclature for how that works we you know every project needs its own individual name and it needs to be fairly distinct so hyper ledger fabric

Sawtooth lake but they also need as communities they need to be paying attention to each other and looking for opportunities to plug together and potentially even opportunities to merge efforts this is perhaps where we're different from Apache Apache doesn't really care what the what the codebase is due at all right they don't care if they ever converge they don't care if there's ever only five users of a project right that's fine and a certain degree I agree with that and there may be room inside or ledger for a five user project at some point but what weird I think trying to do is encourage these projects and say competition is great but let's see if there's places you can integrate and

if one of you feels like you're unique you know consensus mechanism actually makes sense as a pluggable option in fabric or I you know Minoo you the three of you are working on a smart contract engine that really could be condensed into one that that they're encouraged to do that not as a top-down imposition but as a bottoms up encouragement right and I think that's the way that over time will actually get to a very a smaller number of standardized architectures all right so there may be in a long term multiple DLT engines a distributed ledger engines inside of hyper ledger right I don't

believe in the kind of the the Highlander there can be only one kind of like battle to the death but the same reason that say in the database world we have my sequel and we have Cassandra right because they are very different architectures they make very different promises to the layer above them and you know that and that means you know down to their core they are very different kinds of kinds of databases so I'm completely open to the idea that diversity is something that is is something we need in order to to to move fast to to try out new ideas and to actually build the highest quality software it does make it very hard to explain to the outside world when

everybody has like a sports analogy metaphor in their mind when it comes to technology you know who is the one who is the winner right if we can get people to see that it's you no matter how it wins or how you put together that if you're combining hyper ledger code together then you can have some guarantee of you know the trustworthiness of the code certainly the legal status of the code certainly the fact that bugs can get fixed you know all of the kinds of things that actually matter when it comes to building software so Brian what is what is kind of the deal and to offer there and you know what what why do companies and organizations showing hyper ledger you know what what are their incentives and in what ways do they contribute to your

project right that's a good question so so the Linux Foundation is a consortium right very different than the Apache Software Foundation which is what in the States we call a 501 C 3 non-profit which is a public charity its membership based it's kind of like the Sierra Club or or maybe a union right instead the Linux Foundation is more of a traditional industrial consortium looks like you know there are a lot of standards bodies that are also in this mode and what it means is that our work is funded by companies who are members both of the Linux Foundation and then of the individual projects at the Linux

Foundation so it might seem strange that Linux is doing something in the blockchain space but let the Linux Foundation has actually gone beyond the Linux operating system into a book into 30 different projects that are all kind of related it's all still something you'd consider plumbing right whether it's cloud foundry and the cloud native computing foundation or or open daylight with Software Defined Networking all of these different efforts are still fundamentally about getting industry who benefits tremendously from open source to pony up and actually commit the resources to facilitating these projects and now there are plenty of open source

projects that obviously operate out there without funding involved in in ways you know that that the Linux Foundation does and I have a lot of respect for them Apache for example while there are some corporate sponsors Apache has no full-time staff they do pay contractors for systems administration to maintain their systems and the end 4pr resources as well and a few other things some legal advice that sort of thing and and but they don't pay a full-time executive director they have a full-time executive assistant actually the secretary but not a executive director and that's fine that can work but that volunteerism also comes at a price it means that the people who can

afford to do that kind of work are those I you know who have been able to get to a position with their jobs that allows them to work full time on things like this which you know is is rare you know and there's very few companies in the world that actually allow their employees to do that kind of thing so you know at the Linux Foundation we've taken a different approach to thinking about how to fund all of the things you need to do to make an open-source project work and that's that has nothing to do with writing code so we don't actually pay anyone except Linda's Torvalds and and a few of his lieutenants right we actually don't pay

anyone to write code what we do pay for are things like lawyers right so to reassure companies that you can use this code not only do you have to have an open-source license but you need to demonstrate the provenance of the code where that where did it come from and was somebody sitting there and watching as submissions were made to make sure that everything followed the the proper rules about it should come from the people who wrote the code or otherwise have the clearance to make that kind of contribution right so that there's never a worry about a submarine patent or you know somebody you know depending of building their business upon this and then discovering in three years that somebody else actually has rights to that code right or marketing right marketing sounds like the last thing and

that an open-source project needs to think about and yet you know people out there in the world need to understand what that project is building the press o is is asking what what what goes on and so having staff focused on getting the word out and doing that in a way that is fair fair to the developers fair to the businesses you know avoiding a letting any one business dominate the conversation that's that's critical and that's part of the Linux foundations DNA right so and then finally you know when you do have these funders they kind of need to be you know managed expectations but also very clearly you know told the fact that you're writing a check and and

supporting this project doesn't mean you have any special privilege when it comes to the code right you don't get veto rights your patches don't give priority if you want to alter the direction of a project then you have to also contribute in the form of developers right who are willing to write code willing to fix bugs willing to not only throw a big patch over the wall and say look at this I've contributed feature X but to actually engage the rest of the cut of the community in a conversation about whether feature X is the right thing and if this is the right way to build it and and does this meet quality all of those kinds of criteria so long story short you know art the model is bring these companies together and we have now about

a hundred in fact we just crossed 100 sponsors of the hyper ledger project and they are companies like IBM and Intel banks like JP Morgan a lot of international organizations - in fact of that hundred about 25 are based in mainland China so I'm gonna be spending a lot of time in China the next year big companies like Y way even Chinese startups doing energy blockchain projects right this is really exciting and it's a really global effort and I translating that commercial interest into developer momentum is one of our big focuses for the next year one of the

things people are really excited about in the blockchain space it's this idea that tokens and using tokens is an entirely new way of funding exactly that sort of plumbing infrastructure and of course that's become very popular with with crowd sale starting wavy theorem but but now many others and and the idea here is very much that we can this way also monetize something that before previously wasn't monetizable and and this fontys project now it seems to me that what you are proposing right or what high polish at a vision you guys have is is a very

different one do you feel like what some of those projects do in terms of how they are trying to turn these underlying infrastructure protocols almost into corporation like entities do you think that's a mistake it's a good question so anytime that you turn something into a currency you can't avoid but introduce two things government attention because governments have a lot of opinions about how currencies should work the more fungible your currency the more they pay attention and so it introduces regulation when maybe you don't don't need it the second thing is it

introduces speculation right and you know it'd be nice to work on a protocol so for example DNS what DNS have worked better or or email SMTP have worked better in the early days if every client had to send a penny when it made a request to a server right certainly would have made a lot of DNS servers a lot of money would have created a business model for running a DNS server maybe that wasn't great it would have potentially if we ran it on email stop spam because spam was you know took advantage of the fact that sending email was zero price right and yet we would have ended up with a very different internet at that point I think it would have been something that what was even more commercial

potentially less free and and and and when you bring the speculators into it the speculators themselves are driven to to take advantage of where there's information gaps in in again a project right in in an environment and that that taking advantage is something that I you know people who don't think that way like me you know ends up costing us real money their gain is that our loss right and so there's a lot of applications out there that I don't think you need to tokenize the consensus process around right so this is what Bitcoin in aetherium with mining is all about right

how do you reward for just in global consensus and I don't think there's a better way to do it then proof of work maybe proof of steak hopefully a theory and we'll figure that out and and tokenizing that if your goal is millions or hundreds of millions of nodes right that all share a common a common ledger right but for a whole lot of the consortium chain applications you just don't need a token to consent to incentivize participation in in consensus right if you have 20 banks implementing a you know a shared ledger to record their transactions there's inherent incentives there for all of them to participate in that consensus mechanism and provide the appropriate resources to do that just

like running a DNS server inherently or running a mail server inherently has so much value we don't have to tokenize the underlying protocol so so and then finally yeah you know so much of the internet was built from peat by by by people whose motives was to interconnect and and enhance the lives of people and you know making money and not that it was a secondary thing because we all have to have lives we all pay have to pay rent we all have to figure it out and there's times when I really wish we had a better answer for the publishing world about how to reward during quality journalism rather than you know at advertising I think we're at the end of that cycle as as the person

who put the first ad banner online I've started to feel really guilty about that really recently right so I there's some things I look I think I think currencies have the role I think I think I'd like to see more of them more competing currencies actually but but as the basis for funding every decentralized application I'm not into it and I think there's a lot of people who've stayed out of the the blockchain space because it's been so currency focused I think if we can we can help people understand that that's one of a set of applications they'll warm up to it very quickly and and then we can bring the mainstream of those of the computer science field to

us in the mainstream of the application development field let's take a break to talk about the ledger nan OS the new flagship hardware wallet by Leger I'll let let your CEO in a clash avec tell you all about how simple to nano s makes it to securely store all your private keys the legend an OS is our latest generation Hardware wallet this is a multi currency Hardware wallet it has a screen and buttons to manage everything on screen you can generate a new seed restore recede or set up your pin on the device your seed will never be exposed to the host computer on the nano voice you have different apps you are the Bitcoin app you have the eighth hero map and you have the Fido u2f app

for strong authentication and for instance with Google Dropbox or github you can manage your crypto currencies with the ledger wallet Bitcoin chrome app or the ledger wallet is serum chrome app with the nano ace all your Bitcoin and ischium addresses are derived from one unique seed with one seed you can have in the same time Bitcoin is your is your classic balances and also if your restore your seed you will also recover all the keys associated to other apps such as Fido u 2f s SH G B G so it's very simple just one seed and multiple applications the Nano s sets the new

standard in Hardware wallet security and usability you can get yours today at ledger wallet calm and when you do be sure to use the offer code epicenter to get 10% off your first order we'd like to thank ledger for their support of epicenter when we were talking about how like corporations interact with hyper ledger one of the things that you pointed out was licensing right like like that hyper ledger and like Linux Foundation broadly like it focuses on sort of follow the legal process around software and how software is licensed so could you explain to us hyper Ledger's approach to licensing and what it requires of its participating projects

and why that was Susan right so the inbound license for contributions to a hyper ledger project is in the form of the developer certificate of origin which is very similar to you've probably also heard of contributor license agreements right both of these are basically ways for developers to attest to the fact that the contribution they're making either they wrote themselves or they have permission to contribute right and this is important because there's a lot of people who you know because they might be naive will simply import you know a third party library into a check in you know and when it turns out that the license on that third party library was LGPL or something incompatible or even a

wacky you know self declared open-source but not actually technically open-source license that says hey this is great except you cannot use this in any government purposes right or you can't use this in commercial purposes all right so all of that you know is a it's a reminder to developers to check the licensing and be it's a reassurance to users downstream not to worry about the the legal integrity of the project the outbound license is the apache license and you know yes i have a little bit of fondness for it having played a role in writing it but it was it was designed very carefully to be a license that was as permissive as the original bsd

license right you know that apache started with wasn't the first apache license was inspired by this right but we started to realize you know especially as companies we're using this code that there are a number of things that started to matter just as much as granting all these freedoms that you'll also needed to grant reassurance to all of the users that you know anybody who had a patent that might read on their original contribution that patent rights also flowed through right we also wanted to make it very easy for that license to essentially serve as a contributor license agreement back anytime somebody made a derivative work and so the apache license is is just as free as MIT or bsd

but it has that extra surance around patents that you know we don't have for example with Satoshi nakamoto's code and that's one reason why we were we were somewhat at risk when certain individual in Australia started angling to convince the world that he was Satoshi Nakamoto he had a commercial interest in that which was filing patents with Satoshi's name attached to them on the original Bitcoin concepts and then if he had succeeded in convincing the world that he was Satoshi he would have had a patent right on all implementations out there of the Bitcoin protocols potentially other any other

implementation of proof of work had Satoshi released his code under the apache license instead of the MIT license then we would have had all implicit rights to any of satoshis patents even those that had not yet been granted and this is really important because if you're gonna build an industry on top of a foundation like proof of work you want to know if if somebody has you know a magic golden ticket to not now but five years from now or ten years from now be able to seek you know a penny per transaction or whatever number they wanted from anybody in that system and so for long as we still have software patents and hopefully I don't know I don't have any optimism about this right now but it'd

be nice to do away with software patents but as long as we have that we should view software with that that is just under a bear MIT or BSD license as potentially having this risk that any of the contributors could one day wake up and say we have a patent right and there's never been a court case that's demonstrated at the BSD or MIT licenses have an implicit patent grant as well they only talk about copyright well that's one thing to worry about the other is I just think Apache is more thoughtful when it comes to using language that corporate lawyers understand and you put the apache license in front of even the most conservative corporate IP lawyer and they'll go okay i understand how this

works i understand its obligations on us as a company I even understand if we contribute what that means our obligations are and what others can do right if you put the GPL in front of them you know it's more and more lawyers are coming to understand what the GPL means and what it doesn't mean and that's good but two things are going on one is at least in our industry we're talking to a lot of companies who are still brand-new to open-source maybe not their developers but their legal departments are brand-new and there's this tremendous learning curve to get them over to where they understand and can get comfortable with the idea that the GPL is not going to be a cancer on their own IP we all know that it isn't but right now it still represents you

know many additional months of waiting at least but some perhaps perhaps more for a legal team to understand and accept that in order for somebody at a conservative bank to be able to use let alone contribute to an open-source project secondly there's a lot of different opinions out there about how to enforce the gpo letting alone the fact that gplv3 and the a GPL get even stronger right so Linna store vaults famously has you know kind of come out against people who have tried to use the GPL as a weapon against companies that have been bundling Linux inside of their their physical objects in their software right and I do believe that if you're using

the GPL you should follow its rules and you should release derivative works that you create of that project and things that are tightly linked to it but that boundary of what's linked to that object and what's simply in the same package that's something that is gray area and and that's where you get a lot of differences in enforcement and all that does is scare away people scare away companies scare away potential you know collaboration of partners on a project like hyper ledger and that's why apache is really right for us it's why i tend to be more religious about this then then I am about almost any other issue and and people understand that once you work walk them through it and they

understand why you know an Apache License project and still significantly reward people who build derivatives and add-ons to come to bring their brought their contributions back upstream right and and that forking is a risk no matter what license you're under so I we've been able to make the case and I and I and all of our projects are and and that's you know it's it's it's a good conversation to have because I think it puts us whenever you as a project talk about it it puts everyone on kind of a common understanding of the community dynamic and the kind of project that we want to build going forward so that's a very it's very interesting important I think it's point

where a few and it's narrow a few people in the community are really aware of particularly not some who are not as deep in the development side but let me just try to rephrase that or sort of restate what what the main differentiators are from apache to GPL so one is right there if GPL you have this obligation that if you know I'm gonna take this GPL project I'm gonna make some modifications to it I'm not allowed to you know make my own proprietary project around that but I have to contribute that back to the open-source side and of course that might deter some companies from doing that in the first place or from for

making changes to it so that's one thing and then the other thing you mentioned was that it's less known to corporate lawyers they are not as comfortable with the language is not as clear maybe it's not as predictable what would happen in court are those kind of the main differences and do you think there are legitimate reasons why a GPL for some of those projects in the blockchain space can still be the right choice I think you phrased it correctly I'm very interested in seeing how quickly can we get to plumbing that we never have to worry about right that is ubiquitous that is standardized that we can take for granted because it's everywhere and people are updating

frequently and you never have to worry about convincing somebody about that a long contract is acceptable in order for them to get on board with with your with building a chain together right and so I I part of this is really Mike the goal is saying you know these technologies become as ubiquitous as Apache technologies have underneath the web and and I think the license has a big part to do with that I you know I I think individuals have respectable reasons for wanting to license their own personal IP under a GPO they may you know be very they may believe that that's the quid pro quo is that's why

they spend their time is to convince other people to release it back I also understand the human rights angle I mean I used to joke 20 years ago that when you know Stallman was right it was just perhaps 40 or 50 years ahead of his time when their software in every door knob and software in every vehicle and their software and every everything you can do in the world having the underlying source code to that software is not just a good idea it's a human right right so I'm very sympathetic to that notion and it's funny how quickly that arrived it wasn't 50 years it's 20 years now that there's software and well not every doorknob but I think we're getting close right and so the question is one more of tactics is it the better tactic to say I'm not

going to play with you unless you open source everything you do well releases GPL specifically everything you do or is it better to say I'm willing to give you the fruits of my labor you know without compelling you to do anything in return I am convinced that once you discover how good this is and how productive this process is you'll turn around and contribute back and if you don't want to contribute back I don't want your contributions anyway it's the carrot versus the stick right and I'm very much a carrot kind of guy and and I think the people I want to work with the people I want to collaborate with should probably be cared people rather than stick people Frank could you could you walk through the difference between MIT and Apache and can you also bring MIT and summarize that so the MIT

and the BSD licenses are very short right they they basically say here's the software do whatever you want with it you know don't blame us when it breaks right don't you can't sue us for it right and it incorporates software from these other people right but caveat emptor right and but here it it's a no obligation back and you you know it no obligation to there's nothing in those licenses that requires you to publish let your modifications or you know it can carry the same license forward or anything like that it does require you to give them credit you know to credit to the original authors or anybody else who contributed whenever you

redistribute just redistribute it but but no obligation and that's nice I but those licenses only appear to cover copyright they don't appear to cover patent they also don't say anything about trademark but that's kind of less of an issue because everybody in the open-source community cares about their trademark I think if you don't care about your trademark then you don't care about kind of defining your community very well and that's a whole separate issue MIT and BSD I like them for their simplicity they're for people who say I don't want to think about it I just want it out there and if people like it great Apache adds some things to that but still fundamentally are that same

principle I want people to use this I want them to feel comfortable using this I'm not ever going to come after them for using it but it adds some extra protections for the user in that it says on a patent basis nobody that has contributed to this codebase will come after you about a patent in this code days right it's a little bit longer but it's so that we have greater clarity around many of these terms and hopefully greater predictability in how forest so there's a bunch of projects part of hyper ledger at the moment but I know there have been discussions about some of the Hyrum project Hume clients or EVM implementations joining hyper ledger what would the implications of

that be especially when it comes to governance as well since there's been all these governance issues on the network level like how would hyper ledger function in or be involved in those conversations so we think of it like you know these communities are code communities right and they're defined by a mission and they set their own agendas and priorities and they should be looking at the broader community at hyper ledger when they think about what they're building and so you could easily see an etherium project joint that has as a mission as its goodness you know as its as its statement as its goal a scope you know implementing the etherion

protocol and being designed to be a high production node on the etherium network but that's not all it it has to do I mean software can do other things right so there are a lot of people today exploring using aetherium clients if there are nodes in consortium chain settings and that's a place where there's other consensus mechanisms that may work better right because especially when you don't have to reward mining then and you don't need a currency then you can't use proof of work you have to use something else or a proof of stake even there but you might still want to have some way to have gas for the smart contracts that run inside of the EVM so

so these are still hard questions to answer and a project that has the freedom to the software project it has the freedom to explore other consensus mechanisms other ways to do smart contract engines and yet still be conformant to the etherium standards and participate in the etherium Network I that's how I would think about a project related to a theorem hosted at hyper ledger is this really clear relationship and and and I think somebody can be a member of both the etherion community and the hyper Legere community at the same time you know we're aren't in conflict we're not at each other's you know we're not we're not trying for different things right we all I think want to work towards some common things so that's

that's how I think of it and and and I think there's been a lot of resonance with that out there I and we'll see we'll see where it goes I mean ultimately as well I should say hyper ledger isn't saying that the cryptocurrency world is a bad idea and while I have my personal concerns about coins and currencies I there is a spectrum a spectrum from unpermitted and global and one big chain and tokens right - you know consortium chains highly permissioned may be designed for five participants may be designed for five thousand right and there might be room in between there Sawtooth lake implements something called proof of elapsed time which has the sum of the

antes well some of the civil attack protection characteristics of proof of work without having to burn a lot of CPU time right which makes it potentially very easy to have a permission chain but one where granting permission to join that chain is a very lightweight process and so we need to explore this spectrum we have to get out of a dichotomy view of this as dearly about you know unger you know uncover noble single computer you know single worldwide computer kinds of things or this being about just big banking systems and nothing else there is a huge spectrum here to explore and and I'd like to see all those different ideas under the hyper ledger umbrella

so so like because hyper legit is this umbrella we haven't kind of discussed any of the individual projects that are inside the umbrella and we haven't even named them but you in in the previous answer we talked about saw sawtooth Lake and I'm aware of this other project called fabric so perhaps could you like take a few minutes to just walk us through what projects are there in hyper later and what what they're special these specialities of each of them are just so that we have a rough idea sure so fabric it was the one that perhaps you know really kick things off and has seen the most collaboration it is a permission chain DLT with written and go with a smart contract engine that also

implements smart contracts and go using docker as its container kind of as its VM if you want to think of it that way and I it was originally started life as a project inside of IBM and then was open sourced IBM still contributes a substantial amount of the software development activity around it but it also has contributions and active development from companies like digital asset DTCC London Stock Exchange Y way there are a number of companies and that that community is growing our long-term goal is that IBM is just one of many companies and is a minority of the the contributions and I think like any young

project sometimes it takes a while to get to a true multi stakeholder goal like that start sawtooth flake has also been a part of the project since day one it's it came from Intel and it also has seen contributions from from some other companies and developers and it uses an extension inside of Intel's most recent line of chips we caught something called the SGX extensions to basically implement it's something that is kind of the equivalent of proof of works use of burning CPU time as a way to implement a fair consensus and yet it doesn't burn CPU power it just makes it really hard to bring up you know more than one node

I unless you have more than one CPU so so what that so what that gives you like I mentioned it's potentially the ability to have larger consortium networks and it's an interesting project is also written in Python so if you're more familiar with Python that might be a place to consider starting there's another DLT that recently joined it called a Roja and it came from some of our Japanese partners it implements a new consensus mechanism that I wouldn't be able to explain to you but uses broadcasts in a slightly different way as I understand it it's tightly coded C++ so if you're a kind of a performance nut it might be an interesting thing to

look at as well and yeah it's got a very active community around it we have a graphical tool called hyper ledger Explorer that basically is a way to look at all these different chains and navigate through and and look for checksums that sort of thing various SDK projects and then a couple of weeks ago r3 announced that they'll be releasing Korda open source and submitting it as a project at hyper laser and so we're working with them on the process for that so that it comes in as a as a new project and over time becomes hyper ledger Corte ideally with again r3 starting out but hopefully a much larger community over time continuing to

improve it enhance it add features to it that sort of thing and then I'm talking to a bunch of other projects and nothing to announce yet but I'm really optimistic that it'll show not just you know other places on that spectrum that I mentioned but other parts further up a stack if you want to think of it that way that could be really interesting excellent well thanks so much Brian for for coming on I think we've covered a lot here and it was a great overview of hyper ledger and I'm sure this is also something we can come back to in the future both to talk about hyper ledger as a sort of an umbrella organization but then also to do episodes on some of these specific projects because we haven't actually done that in any of

them yet except or three which we did an episode on just a few weeks ago so yeah thanks so much and it's extremely exciting what you guys are building there and let's hope there is going to be a lots of success for Hyper ledger in building out the foundation for blockchain technology well thank you Brian and thank you about her for a lot of me the beer and thanks so much for listeners for joining once again to be a part of the LTV networks you can find this show and other shows as well mr. Bitcoin comm and if you'd like to show them please leave us an iTunes review if you do that in any of their iTunes applications and of course you can subscribe to the podcast using your podcast application or watch the

video on youtube.com slash episode because thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week [Music]