Adledger states they are “a nonprofit research and development consortium charged with implementing global technical standards and solutions for the digital media and blockchain industries.”
“The goal of AdLedger is to further trust and transparency within the digital media space.”
Blockchain is key to that ambition.
In the above video, Christiana Cacciapuoti of AdLedger; Chad Andrews & Babs Rangaiah of IBM; Ryan Nathanson of Salon Media Group Inc.; and Adam Helfgott of MAD Network, discuss issues plaguing ad tech and how AdLedger can address these issues.
The goal is for brands to get more media for their working dollar, publishers will get a fair price for their inventory and consumers will get messages that are better targeted and more relevant.
Kevin Werbach, professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, joined Mozilla’s Director of Public Policy, Chris Riley, in a discussion of decentralization and trust online, to explore Kevin’s recent work on the blockchain as a trust architecture.
Werbach notes that blockchain is represented as an ultimate form of decentralized trust. In other words, you can trust the system without trusting specific actors. That concept is underscored by the fact that no one has the power to change a distributed ledger once transactions are recorded. And interested parties can see the same information, which provides a standard of transparency.
Werbach notes that too much trust in the system is unwarrented. He notes that for a given blockchain to succeed, all parties need to trust the system, so some amount trust is inherently required. Yet, he notes examples of the system failing, in terms of fraud and illegal activity, which have exposed flaws in the system. Hence, Werbach advocates for proper governance and regulation.
The discussion touches upon the realities of scalability re blockchain, citing that current technologies are adequate for many real-world scenarios, but not in others.
Werback is also the author of, The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust.
Blockchain technology promised a compelling vision: decentralized networks allowing open innovation and peer-to-peer transactions without intermediaries or fees.
Entities are working to fulfill much of that promise.
As blockchain adoption has increased over the last decade, early adopters have struggled with sluggish transaction times and rising fees.
As financial rewards for validating certain blockchain transactions became increasingly competitive, their networks strayed from a pure decentralized network to becoming dominated by powerful players.
IOTA, based on its distributed ledger technology it calls “The Tangle,” considers itself to be the missing link for the Internet of Everything and Web 3.0.
“Powering a secure, scalable and feeless transaction settlement layer, IOTA will empower machines and humans to participate in flourishing new permissionless economies – the most important one being the Machine Economy which we are building.”
Meet ‘The Tangle’
IOTA’s does not consist of transactions grouped into blocks and stored in sequential chains, but as a stream of individual transactions entangled together.
In order to participate in the IOTA Tangle network, a participant performs a small amount of computational work that verifies two previous transactions. Rather than creating a hierarchy of roles and responsibilities in the network, every actor has the same incentives and rewards.
In order to make a transaction in the Tangle, two previous transactions must be validated with the reward for doing so being the validation of your own transaction by some subsequent transaction. With this ‘pay-it-forward‘ system of validations, there is no need to offer financial rewards. Transacting with IOTA is and will always be completely fee-free.
Moreover, without the
need for monetary rewards, IOTA is not limited to transactional value
settlements. It is possible to securely store information within Tangle
transactions, or even spread larger amounts of information across
multiple bundled or linked transactions.
This structure also
enables high scalability of transactions. The more activity in ‘the
Tangle’, the faster transactions can be confirmed.
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, delivers his AWS re:Invent 2018 keynote, featuring the latest AWS news and announcements.
In this segment, he announces Amazon Managed Blockchain as a fully managed service that makes it easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using the popular open source frameworks Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum.
The idea is to make it much easier to use the two most popular blockchains.
For private network capabilities, with a specific number of members, Hyperledger Fabric is available now.
Ethereum will be available in a couple of months and is often selected for a public decentralized ledger with an unknown amount of members.
ETHEREUM
Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform and operating system featuring smart contract functionality.
Ether is a cryptocurrency whose blockchain is generated by the Ethereum platform. Ether can be transferred between accounts and used to compensate participant mining nodes for computations performed.
“Gas”, an internal transaction pricing mechanism, is used to mitigate spam and allocate resources on the network.
Ethereum was proposed in late 2013 by Vitalik Buterin, a cryptocurrency researcher and programmer. Development was funded by an online crowdsale that took place between July and August 2014.
The system went live on 30 July 2015, with 72 million coins “premined”. This accounts for about 70 percent of the total circulating supply in 2018.
In 2016, as a result of the exploitation of a flaw in The DAO project’s smart contract software, and subsequent theft of $50 million worth of Ether, Ethereum was split into two separate blockchains – the new separate version became Ethereum (ETH) with the theft reversed, and the original continued as Ethereum Classic (ETC).
HYPERLEDGER FABRIC
Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned blockchain infrastructure, originally contributed by IBM and Digital Asset, providing a modular architecture with a delineation of roles between the nodes in the infrastructure, execution of Smart Contracts (called “chaincode” in Fabric) and configurable consensus and membership services.
A Fabric Network comprises “Peer nodes”, which execute chaincode, access ledger data, endorse transactions and interface with applications as well as “Orderer nodes” which ensure the consistency of the blockchain and deliver the endorsed transactions to the peers of the network.
Fabric supports chaincode in Go and JavaScript (via Hyperledger Composer, or natively since v1.1) out-of-the-box, and other languages such as Java by installing appropriate modules. It is therefore potentially more flexible than competitors that only support a closed Smart Contract language.
Kathleen Breitman and Christine Moy speak with Jen Wieczner (Fortune Magazine) about how blockchain is changing business. Moy is the Blockchain Program Lead at J.P. Morgan Chase and Breitman is the Co-Founder of Tezos.
Their discussion includes blockchain application in terms of finance and banking and also touches upon women in technology.
According to their website, Tezos offers a formal process through which stakeholders can efficiently govern the protocol and implement future innovations. Further, the platform was designed to facilitate formal verification, which helps secure smart contracts and avoid buggy code. Tezos uses their own version or a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, with the intention of giving every stakeholder the opportunity to participate in the validation of transactions on the network and be rewarded by the protocol for doing so.
Tezos is a smart contract platform similar to Ethereum. As opposed to more well known cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Tezos sees the future of cryptocurrency as an upgradable path to success.
Tezos has evolved via some controversy and like most cryptocurrencies and specific blockchains, long-term success is unproven.
Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative public manner and is a prominent example of open collaboration.
In this video, Rusty Russell uses his 20 years of experience writing community-produced software to discuss his open source programming experience with Linux and Bitcoin and what can be done by a group of volunteers releasing world-class software for all to use freely.
Open-source software is a widely used in the blockchain community and contributes to the currency of network “trust.”
Establishing a high level of trust is only possible when the software that powers the network is free and open source. Even a correctly distributed proprietary blockchain is essentially a collection of independent agents running the same third party’s code. Open source also facilitates innovation as different perspectives contribute to the ecosystem and keep it growing.
It’s worth mentioning that while the open nature of blockchains has been a source of innovation and variation, it has also been seen as a form of governance. By virtue of the code itself, where users are expected to run whichever specific version of the code contains a function or approach they think the whole network should embrace, the code represents a type of governance.
Hyperledger Fabric is an enterprise grade, permissioned, distributed ledger platform that offers modularity and versatility for a broad set of industry use cases.
The modularity is represented by plug-and-play components, such as consensus, privacy and membership services.
One of its features is the enablement of a network of networks. This allows businesses to work together while maintaining privacy of pertinent information.
Hyperledger Fabric allows confidential information to be managed and transacted between parties without all information passing through a central authority. That way, personal data isn’t available to the entire network. In other words, if a network member is not a part of an agreed-upon transaction, the information would not appear on their ledger.
This allows solutions developed with Hyperledger Fabric to be adapted to any industry.
Hyperledger is an open source global collaboration, hosted by The Linux Foundation, including leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and Technology.
A Byzantine fault is any fault presenting different symptoms to different observers. A Byzantine failure is the loss of a system service due to a Byzantine fault in systems that require consensus.
The objective of Byzantine fault tolerance is to be able to defend against failures of system components with or without symptoms that prevent other components of the system from reaching an agreement among themselves, where such an agreement is needed for the correct operation of the system.
Byzantine refers to the Byzantine Generals’ Problem, in which a group of generals, each commanding a portion of the Byzantine army, encircle a city. These generals wish to formulate a plan for attacking the city. In its simplest form, the generals must decide only whether to attack or retreat. Some generals may prefer to attack, while others prefer to retreat. The important thing is that every general agree on a common decision, for a halfhearted attack by a few generals would become a rout, and would be worse than either a coordinated attack or a coordinated retreat.
The problem is complicated by the presence of treacherous generals who may not only cast a vote for a suboptimal strategy, they may do so selectively. For instance, if nine generals are voting, four of whom support attacking while four others are in favor of retreat, the ninth general may send a vote of retreat to those generals in favor of retreat, and a vote of attack to the rest. Those who received a retreat vote from the ninth general will retreat, while the rest will attack (which may not go well for the attackers). The problem is complicated further by the generals being physically separated and having to send their votes via messengers who may fail to deliver votes or may forge false votes.
The typical mapping of this story onto computer systems is that the computers are the generals and their digital communication system links are the messengers.
Byzantine fault tolerance can be achieved if the loyal (non-faulty) generals have a majority agreement on their strategy. There can be a default vote value given to missing messages. For example, missing messages can be given the value . Further, if the agreement is that the votes are in the majority, a pre-assigned default strategy can be used (e.g., retreat).
Byzantine fault tolerance is the dependability of a fault-tolerant computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. In a “Byzantine failure”, a component such as a server can inconsistently appear both failed and functioning to failure-detection systems, presenting different symptoms to different observers.
It is difficult for the other components to declare it failed and shut it out of the network, because they need to first reach a consensus regarding which component has failed in the first place. The term is derived from the Byzantine Generals’ Problem, where actors must agree on a concerted strategy to avoid catastrophic system failure, but some of the actors are unreliable. Byzantine fault tolerance has been also referred to with the phrases interactive consistency or source congruency, error avalanche, Byzantine agreement problem, Byzantine generals problem, and Byzantine failure.
This Amazon Web Services video provides a simple example of voting on an immutably distributed ledger: blockchain. This year, the ideal of having a truly secure, transparent, auditable and yet anonymous voting system took a step closer to becoming reality.
On November 15, 2018, The Secretary of State of West Virginia, Mac Warner, reported a successful first instance of remote blockchain voting.
He stated that in the 2018 midterm elections, 144 military personnel stationed overseas from 24 counties were able to cast their ballots on a mobile, blockchain-based platform.
Warner stated that “This is a first-in-the-nation project that allowed uniformed services members and overseas citizens to use a mobile application to cast a ballot secured by blockchain technology.”
As positive as this was in terms of approaching the ideal noted above, there is still a necessity for security improvement in terms of mobile device usage.
Daniel Larimer created the cryptocurrency platform BitShares in 2014, was co-founder of the blockchain social platform Steemit in 2016, and is CTO of Block.one, a private company that was the original developer of EOS in 2017.
In this presentation, Larimer describes EOSIO as designed to make blockchain development easier. He states it’s now one of the largest blockchain companies. Further, he states that it’s the fastest, general-purpose blockchain, with lots of users and no transaction fees.
Following are some additional notes from his talk.
When people think of blockchain they think of tokens, proof of work and wasting energy. That’s not necessary.
If you have a database, it should be on a blockchain. It can be a private blockchain.
Blockchain will give you security, auditability and accountability of the system compared to a non-blockchain database.
With blockchain you can manage your own security and as a company you can mitigate legal issues since every action can be audited. A blockchain is not modified; it’s append only. The data is not on one server. It’s only one of many on a network that all verify the data. No one can change it.
Blockchain helps businesses automate compliance with regulators.
Blockchain is faster. It eliminates human points of contact that have been implemented to reduce fraud.
Blockchain is a better infrastructure for designing software.
Blockchain will become required as a best practice. It will be ubiquitous and invisible.
