Subject: [Din] Bringing blockchain people to the table. Was Re: Draft Minutes of DINRG interim meeting at NDSS-2018

From: Bob Summerwill <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 12:33:10 -0800

Thank you very much for these notes, Dirk!

Dirk: there is competition for attention, what communities should we talk
to, are there people we should try and get to these meetings?

This is a problem which I am working to attack from the other end
(blockchain community).

https://bobsummerwill.com/about/

I have been working to bridge the Hyperledger and Ethereum communities
since 2016 and was foundational to the creation of the Enterprise Ethereum
Alliance.  Those two consortia together cover pretty much the whole of
enterprise.   I am now actively working to try to bring these consortia
closer together and ultimately hope to merge them into a single Enterprise
blockchain consortium under the LF with Brian Behlendorf as the ED of the
new group.  Chris Ferris is the Chair of the Technical Steering Committee
at Hyperledger.  I have been in contact with Chris and Brian since May 2016
when I set up a FOSS Blockchain meetup outside of OSCON in Austin.

http://hyperledger.org/members
https://entethalliance.org/members/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianbehlendorf
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisfer

https://bobsummerwill.com/2016/06/12/cats-and-dogs-can-be-friends/

We are obviously reaching the stage of awareness where "What do blockchain
standards look like?" is being asked.  Together with "If Ethereum claims to
be Web 3.0, well you guys need to be talking to ICANN, IETF, W3C, IEEE, etc"

I met Walid Al-Safaq of the Internet Society in Vancouver a year ago.  It
was early then, but we had some green shoots starting to show.  Now I think
the time is absolutely ripe.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/wsaqaf

So I will be working to try to gather everyone at common tables
(starting with DIN at IETF and Blockchain Community Group at W3C) so those
dialogs can begin.

https://www.w3.org/community/blockchain/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/martapiekarska

Marta is Director of Ecosystem at Hyperledger, and is a key person at the
Blockchain CG at W3C and was also formerly at Blockstream so has insight
into Bitcoin.   I am essentially an Ethereum person with interests in other
smart contract projects but missed out on most of the early Bitcoin work.

I have also been searching for a way to get Mats Wichmann involved to help
us plot a standards path for Ethereum (which would extend rapidly to
related smart contract platforms).  For most of us, standards bodies are
just an additional commitment which we are interested in, but do not have
to do as a full-time role.  That dynamic could be different for Mats.  Just
need to find a good spot and funding and hope he is still available :-).
He has been working in standards bodies for decades.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mwichmann

Another very recent development is the following, which can be seen as the
Ethereum technical community taking control of the protocol, which is
larger than any legal entity.  Very much IETF inspired:

https://medium.com/@gregcolvin/an-open-invitation-to-participate-in-a-
fellowship-of-ethereum-magicians-44ee1af97af5

https://medium.com/@jpitts/an-open-invitation-to-
participate-in-a-fellowship-of-ethereum-magicians-982e6143db4f

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregcolvin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiepitts
https://www.linkedin.com/in/virgilgr
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicksdjohnson

This Ethereum Community Conference in Paris on Mar 8-10 is a pretty crucial
one for flipping to a very IETF-inspired model, which should give us a good
hope of strong collaboration moving forward.

https://ethcc.io

What does it look like the next DIN event would be?  An appropriate place
for us to aim to gather some Ethereum and Hyperledger people to attend F2F
meetings with IETF?   And with W3C, Marta?

Walid had asked me whether WSIS, held at ITU in Geneva on Mar 19-23 might
be useful?

https://www.itu.int/net4/wsis/forum/2018/

Best wishes,
Bob Summerwill
https://bobsummerwill.com/contact/

On Feb 19, 2018 11:44 AM, "Dirk Kutscher" <[email-masked]> wrote:

Hello,

We have uploaded the draft minutes of our interim meeting on Saturday to
the datatracker: https://datatracker.ietf.org/m
eeting/interim-2018-dinrg-01/materials/minutes-interim-2018-
dinrg-01-201802170900

You will also find links to the presentations and other referenced material
in the minutes.

Our sincere thanks are due to Mat Ford who did an excellent job in taking
the notes for the whole meeting — this is really helpful for the community.

Please let us know in case you want to suggest additions or corrections.

Best regards,
Melinda and Dirk

_______________________________________________
Din mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/din

---

From: Virgil Griffith <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 22:37:25 +0000

For ICANN, this is currently being dealt with by Ethereum Name Service.
If you want to do something with ICANN please ping Nick Johnson beforehand.

If someone wants to do something with IETF right now, I suggest publishing
a RFC on RLP encoding (there is already one for JSON:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7159).

-V

On Tue, 20 Feb 2018 at 04:33, Bob Summerwill <[email-masked]> wrote:

> https://medium.com/@gregcolvin/an-open-invitation-to-participate-in-a-fellowship-of-ethereum-magicians-44ee1af97af5
>
>
> https://medium.com/@jpitts/an-open-invitation-to-participate-in-a-fellowship-of-ethereum-magicians-982e6143db4f
>
> This Ethereum Community Conference in Paris on Mar 8-10 is a pretty
> crucial one for flipping to a very IETF-inspired model, which should give
> us a good hope of strong collaboration moving forward.
>
> https://ethcc.io
>
> the datatracker:
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/interim-2018-dinrg-01/materials/minutes-interim-2018-dinrg-01-201802170900
>
> You will also find links to the presentations and other referenced
> material in the minutes.
>

---

From: Walid AL-SAQAF <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 06:55:41 +0100

Hi Bob,

Thanks for adding me to this important thread and I am truly willing and
happy to help in any way I can.

For standardisation efforts to be successful, I think one needs to take
multiple tracks. The technology standards track (to illustrate that the
proposed standards meet the scalability/interoperability requirements) and
the policy track (to meet demands by law enforcement and governmental
entities). At the Internet Society, we found out that this is the best
sustainable approach to mitigate potential problems down the line and serve
as a bridge between the technologists/scientists and other relevant stake
holders including policy makers, the industry and end users, who we should
always keep in mind as the ultimate beneficiary of any new technology,
including blockchains. I believe the same also applies for IEEE, which has
perfected its standardisation cycle over the years. See:
http://standards.ieee.org/develop/index.html

The question is what do you all have in mind for having your own
standardisation efforts and where can I, the IEEE and others help.

Sincerely,

Walid

On Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 9:33 PM, Bob Summerwill <[email-masked]> wrote:

> https://medium.com/@gregcolvin/an-open-invitation-to-
> participate-in-a-fellowship-of-ethereum-magicians-44ee1af97af5
>
> https://medium.com/@jpitts/an-open-invitation-to-participate
> -in-a-fellowship-of-ethereum-magicians-982e6143db4f
>

---

From: "Dirk Kutscher" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2018 14:04:24 -0800

Hi Bob, Virgil, Walid,

Thanks for reaching out — would be great to establish a productive 
dialogue with more people from the Blockchain community.

Maybe it’s useful to clarify a few things about the Proposed DINRG and 
the IRTF in general (apologies in case this is obvious):

The IRTF and its different groups are really focusing on longer-term 
research activities — not on standards as the (parallel) IETF does. 
This is sometimes not obvious, as both organizations publish RFCs and 
share a lot of the tooling and infrastructure, including meeting 
facilities.

The RFCs that IRTF groups produce are generally not standards at all — 
these are typically Informational documents or Experimental 
specifications — with the objective to facilitate more experimentation 
and validation of technologies that are not quite ready for standards 
track work in the IETF. Quite often, IRTF groups try to establish 
knowledge and create advice about what should be standardized in the 
future.

Because the IRTF does not do standards, it is also not in a position to 
have liaisons to other SDOs. However, DINRG and other RGs are open and 
have many participants from people working in other SDOs and OSS 
projects.

DINRG is currently a proposed Research Group in the IRTF. “Proposed” 
means that we are currently operating under the assumption that we can 
identify a useful research agenda and build a viable community. We are 
optimistic that this will happen — but we’ll assess that later in 
the year.

We initiated the activity to explore research questions in the space of 
decentralizing infrastructure and applications, interactions such as 
trust management — which cover both Internet-scale use cases as well 
as smaller, localized deployment scenarios.

Some of the ideas and approaches that have been discussed in this 
context so far have leverage distributed ledger technology including 
Blockchain. One of DINRG’s goals is to identify the requirements of 
relevant use cases and to assess the properties (such as consensus 
algorithms, scalability, transaction times) of different DLT approaches 
regarding those requirements. Another goal is to find out whether it’s 
possible create common infrastructure for sets of use cases — and to 
experiment with that.

DINRG does not plan to develop (let alone to standarize) DLT or elements 
of that.

Having said that, we are obviously interested to work with people from 
the DLT community — this could also include discussing research work 
in advancing DLT state-of-the art. For example, IoT is one scenario that 
some DINRG people are interested in, which may have interesting 
requirements both in terms of the applications (offloading computation, 
for example) and the properties of DLT that could support that 
(constrained nodes, networks etc.). Another activity that could be of 
interest would be to analyze potential issues in different DLT systems 
(e.g., with respect to scalability, smart contract security etc.).

The current DINRG charter is available here: 
https://datatracker.ietf.org/rg/dinrg/about/

We are going to have a meeting at IETF-101 in London. This is currently 
scheduled for Monday, March 19 2018 (the IETF-101 meeting agenda is 
currently being finalized). As most IRTF/IETF groups, we are trying to 
use the mailing list for technical discussions between meetings, so 
we’d encourage you to subscribe in case you haven’t already done so: 
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/din

We hope this is helpful. Thanks again for reaching out to us, and we are 
looking forward to working with you.

Best regards,
Melinda and Dirk