The talks will focus on the pros and cons of Blockchain technology in a variety of application areas.
Blockchain, the technology behind Bitcoin, has drawn widespread attention in recent years. As a popular “secure by design” technology, Blockchain has great potential to enable a wide range of distributed applications across a broad spectrum of industries. Smart contract, due to its ability to enable various business logics, has become a newly-emerged killer application of blockchain technology.
In this talk, we will examine some fundamental properties of blockchain and smart contract. While blockchain promises decentralization, irreversible record keeping, public verifiability, transparency, and user anonymity, etc., some of these properties are not guaranteed and they come at a very high price. At the same time, excessive overhead and performance deficits may place a fundamental limit on the use of blockchain in many applications. We will also introduce “PrivacyGuard”, a blockchain-based private data usage control system that prevents unauthorized data access and usage. PrivacyGuard seamlessly integrates two technologies, smart contract and trusted execution environment (TEE), to overcome the contract execution efficiency problem with a novel trustworthy off-chain contract execution engine.
On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. That famed New Yorker comic from the early ‘90s sadly remains true today. The Internet was built without an identity layer and that missing foundational component has led to many of the challenges with today’s Internet: identity theft, data breaches, password hacks and more. Further, the risks from those challenges have largely limited digital business to selling shoes and exploiting personal data. We can do better.
The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Indy is a blockchain-based, decentralized solution that adds an identity layer to the Internet that is adaptable, trust enabling, and enhances privacy. Core to the solution are Verifiable Credentials—cryptographically protected digital versions of the same paper documents you use today to prove “you are you” and much more. Indy is built on privacy-by-design principles that give you—not Google, not Facebook—control over your personal information and how you share it. In the process, the new identity layer makes data breaches irrelevant and drastically reduces the cost and effort to mitigate the risk of conducting business online.
We’ll go over the challenges with identity on the Internet today and talk about how those problems are addressed with decentralized identity solutions such as Hyperledger Indy. The Verifiable Credential model and underlying blockchain technology will be presented, and we’ll demonstrate its capabilities using the Verifiable Organizations Network (VON)—a production deployment of Hyperledger Indy that makes it easier for companies to quickly and securely share verifiable business information online.
Today’s healthcare system faces several systemic challenges, including complex/inefficient processes, lack of interoperability, data silos, fraud and lack of transparency. Blockchain technolgoy has the potential to bring industry wide transformation to the healthcare ecosystem by reducing costs and frictions, bringing more trust and transparency to multiparty transactions, and even unlocking new sources of revenue for various constituents. We’ll discuss examples of leveraging blockchain technology to enhance the fluidity of healthcare information among key stakeholders, leveraging smart contract to reduce administrative costs for value based payment models, and the formation of an open network to drive digital transformation in the industry.
Ripple’s Craig DeWitt will discuss how digital assets are imperative to building the Internet of Value - where value can move as seamlessly and quickly across borders as data does today.
In this talk, we explore some of the problems as Blockchains seek new application domains beyond cryptocurrencies. We also take a humorous look at the difference between how software developers work compared to their colleagues in other engineering disciplines. From both of these starting points, we’re drawn to a saddening conclusion: Blockchains seem well suited to, well, perhaps nothing at all. Odd, isn’t it, given claims that a few months is all it takes to develop trustworthy, performant replacements for technologies that have taken from 60 to a few hundred years to get (almost) right.