A Planetary-Scale Blockchain Database for the World Computer

Editor's Notes

• #2: Today I’ll be doing a presentation in three parts: A discussion of IPDB – a planetary-scale blockchain database. A discussion of COALA IP – a protocol for representing intellectual property rights and licensing agreements on blockchains A vision for how the current generation of cryptographically-enabled tech, all available today, could allow us to build a single global content registry
• #3: Internet started off decentralized. The data on internet has been recentralized. Facebook, Google, others – the ones who used decentralization to remove the old gatekeepers - they have become the new gatekeepers. They offer great services. People love them. I use them. But they’re walled gardens. To take part, you have to move into the garden and bring all your data with you – your personal information, your contacts, your conversations, your creative works. Inside the garden, things work pretty well. But what about people on the outside? The gatekeepers have made it very hard for information to flow in and out of the gardens. Try sharing your Instagram photos with someone who doesn’t have Instagram, or your Snaps with someone who doesn’t have Snapchat. And if you want to leave the garden, it’s next to impossible to bring your data with you.
• #4: Even inside the garden, there are problems. If you have an unpopular or controversial thing to say, you may not be allowed to say it. And that’s a pretty low bar. Example: Copenhagen’s famous Little Mermaid. Facebook removed photos of the Mermaid for violating their no bare breasts policy. They said: “some audiences within our global community may be sensitive to this type of content”. More recently – Facebook has come under fire for removing the napalm girl photo. And there have even been concerns that it influenced the US presidential election. Sources: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/denmark/12081589/Copenhagen-Little-Mermaid-statue-Facebook-accused-of-censoring-photo.html [Image: News Oresund https://www.flickr.com/photos/newsoresund/9568217715 CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ ]
• #5: Even your identity is subject to the rules of the garden. Facebook strictly enforces its real name policy, and will suspend your account if it thinks your name doesn’t look right. They sometimes demand government identification, and sometimes change profile names to match that ID. That’s a huge problem for people who don’t use their legal name in day-to-day life, or who are vulnerable if their real name is exposed. Sources: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/07/07/facebook-blames-technical-glitch-for-removal-of-live-video-after/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/nov/14/salman-rushdie-facebook-identity https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/case-pseudonyms
• #6: What it comes down to is this: If you want to play on the centralized internet, you have to play by their rules. And if you don’t, you lose everything – your identity, your contacts, your conversations, your creative works.
• #7: But what if we could build a better internet? What would it look like? On a better internet, you would own your own data. You would choose who to share it with, and it would follow you where you go. Services would access it through you, instead of you accessing it through them.
• #8: Rather than using Facebook or Twitter as a trusted source of identity, your identity and reputation would stay with you. You choose who gets to see what and for how long, and the people you share information with know they can trust it.
• #9: Neutrality would be built in. Open standards for data would allow services to talk to each other, and for data to flow freely between them. No more silos. This is true across all kinds of applications – intellectual property, finance, energy, logistics and supply chain management, internet of things – so all of our data and devices can finally talk to one another.
• #10: So how do we get there? We are already on the way. We can re-decentralize the internet by building a shared, decentralized world computer. So what criteria should we have for our new decentralized internet?
• #11: It has to be decentralized. At the most basic level, that means that no single entity owns or controls the network infrastructure or the data on it.
• #12: It’s shared. Anyone can use it, and heavy users contribute to its upkeep.
• #13: This allows it to set its own priorities and policies, without interference.
• #14: This is critical – has to be able to handle the volume that will be going through it.
• #15: And it turns out that this internet is already being built. It’s taking the shape of the world computer. So what is the “world computer”?
• #16: Over the past 50 years, we have gone from the age of the mainframe, and one computer per organization.
• #17: To the desktop and one computer per person… (or even two computers per person) But now we are linking together all of those computers.
• #18: To one computer to planet. What does one computer per planet mean? It means that all of our world’s computing resources are shared. Every bit of computing resource is accessible to everyone as they need it. But let’s break it down into an actual technical stack, based on the elements of computing.
• #19: At the very bottom, we have the internet itself – the physical infrastructure and the protocols that make it work. Up a level, we have decentralized storage and processing. On top of that, we see platforms for various things that people want to do with their data. And finally, on the very top, we have applications that end users will use. Those middle layers of processing and storage are what we talk about when we talk about the world computer. It builds on the ubiquity of TCP/IP, and provides the plumbing to power the platforms and applications. There are lots of exciting projects in this space. IPFS for example in the data storage space. And Ethereum is the processor. But we are going to focus on one thing today – the database.
• #20: IPDB is a piece of the world computer infrastructure. It’s the database for the world computer. It’s a platform for anyone to build their ideas on. It works at planetary scale. And it’s ready for people to build on today.
• #21: It’s two things: A network of nodes operating a public blockchain database. A not-for-profit organization with the nodes as its members and providing governance.
• #22: So what would you do with this planetary scale database? Maybe you’d start a decentralized content registry, for all of the world’s content. Attribution information stored in IPDB, linked with IPFS to store the actual media files. Smart contracts to handle licensing royalty payments could be programmed in Ethereum.
• #23: Or maybe you want to build an identity and reputation system, where you can trust the credentials shown to you by someone else because the cryptography lets you trust them.
• #24: We’ve heard potential use cases ranging from tickets to property registries to energy exchanges. We’re really excited about the number of potential uses for IPDB.
• #25: So how does it work? Without getting too deep into the technological weeds: IPDB is a public instance of BigchainDB. BigchainDB is built on top of a big data database – MongoDB. It then adds the features you’d expect in a traditional blockchain. “Assets”, “Immutability”, and “Decentralized Control” BigchainDB works on a federated consensus model – so a pre-set group of nodes validate transactions and store the data. IPDB stores metadata about assets and transactions, and link to the actual files on the outside web or on IPFS. We are adopting emerging standards like IPLD – Interplanetary Linked Data for cross-platform linking, and Interledger for cross-platform payments. Come back to that soon.
• #26: We started thinking about how to build IPDB in the fall of 2015. We didn’t know what it would look like at the time, but we knew that governance had to be the first priority. It was the height of the Bitcoin scaling debate, and we knew we needed to build a system that could address conflicts between the members. Existing blockchains have very little in the way of governance. Technocratic “proof of work” systems for deciding how things will be done. Great for technical security, bad for making decisions.
• #27: We knew that selecting the right nodes would be a big piece of the puzzle – more on this shortly. We also knew that we wanted to rely on existing legal frameworks when possible, instead of reinventing the wheel. We knew we wanted to be collaborative – working with the decentralization community as closely as possible.
• #28: Our approach to many of those issues was in the nodes we selected. We call those nodes Caretakers. They’re the heart of IPDB – They are its members and carry out its mission. The Caretakers are the members of the not-for-profit organization that operates the database, and they also are the organizations that operate the database nodes to validate transactions and store data. We hope the fact that the Caretakers are organizations and not people will help solve one of the big problems we see in other projects – people who work together want to help one another. Cliques develop. This leads to bad decisions. We hope the people will stay closer with those in their own organizations than they are with other Caretakers. This will make sure the interests of the network are protected, rather than the interests of the participant. It’s the model of the internet itself – a “network of networks” creating resilience.
• #29: Caretakers also have a core role in governance as members of the organization. They get to elect the board of directors that makes the day to day decisions about the organization. And if they don’t like the decisions the board makes, they can recall the board. This means that we have an approach to governance that isn’t fully top down or fully bottom up.
• #30: So how do we choose the Caretakers? As a baseline, Caretakers have to have demonstrated an ongoing commitment to the decentralized internet. But that isn’t enough. There are other forces at play here.
• #31: Like money. You can never dodge money completely. But we’re doing our best. We have registered in Germany as a not-for-profit, meaning that beyond covering expenses, money can’t flow to any Caretaker. We are still considering charity status. But what about indirect financial incentives? That’s what happened to ICANN – domain registrars saw an opportunity to sell new domains like .sucks, so they made sure ICANN approved the new domains. There was no direct payment but lots of indirect profit. To guard against this, we are making sure that more than half of the Caretakers at any given time are not-for-profits as well, reducing their incentive to vote with their wallets.
• #32: The Caretakers themselves are not the only potential problem. Even the best of intentions can be foiled by an overreaching government. To make sure bad laws can’t interfere with the operation of the network, we are keeping fewer than half of the Caretaker nodes in any given country. And we are working toward even greater geographical and jurisdictional diversity soon.
• #33: This is really just the beginning. We are moving toward full decentralization – with no organization behind it, and no servers to power it. Toward that end, we will be adding new Caretakers aggressively – 20 in the first year, and 20 more every year after that for five years.
• #34: Whenwe first announced our plans to register as an actual membership-based organization, one of the first questions was why we didn’t just build a DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization. We held off. We thought the governance models weren’t tested, and we were already trying to do something new. We decided moving to decentralization in the future was the best approach. We will move slowly toward decentralization when tested tools are available. But there is a risk in this approach – organizations seem to naturally move toward centralization, and resist efforts to decentralize. What if we got comfortable with how things are? To fight that urge, we made dissolving the association part of the association’s goal. We have a legal obligation to work toward the organization not being required.
• #35: Ultimately, our plan is to move away from the federated model and into full decentralization technologically as well – no servers, just clients. We have a few different plans for this, including using Ethereum once it’s able to handle the necessary scale. Casper look promising, for example. But we aren’t technically capable of doing that yet. Not just us – not anyone. Bitcoin can’t handle it, CASPER is still a long time off. We are also moving toward “serverless decentralization” on whatever technology works best. CASPER? STELLAR? Synereo?
• #36: Here are our current Caretakers. We are always looking for more – please apply.
• #37: We currently have a test network up and running with a few invited users running on it, and we will be adding more users over the coming weeks. Eventually we might open it to the general public to do scale testing, or we might move right on to internal or invited testing of the final production network. Please apply for that as well.
• #38: IPDB is the database for the world computer.