Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Brian Behlendorf: How Hyperledger is Developing Foundational Blockchain Technology

Episode Date: December 5, 2016

As a lead developer of the Apache webserver and founder of the Apache Software Foundation, Brian Behlendorf has played a central role in building internet architecture. Recently, he became Executive Director of the Hyperledger Project that aims to build foundational blockchain technology in an open-source, collaborative way. Topics covered in this episode: Brian’s role in the development of the Apache server and Apache Software Foundation The flaws in how blockchain software is currently being developed Why blockchain needs a foundation to steer the development of its foundational technology The key lessons from the Apache Software Foundation that inform Hyperledger’s approach Hyperledger’s membership and organizational structure The role of software licenses and why he favors Apache Episode links: Hyperledger Website Brian Behlendorf's Wikipedia page Brian Behlendorf's Website Blockchain Meetup Berlin Hyperledger Talk This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/160

This is Epicenter Episode 160 with guest Brian Bellendorf. This episode of Epicenter is brought 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-A-W-X.I-O and embrace the future of cryptocurrency wallets. And by the Ledger NanoS, the hardware wallet which sets the new standard in security and usability. Get it today at ledgerWallet.com and use the offer code Epicenter to get 10% off your order. Welcome to Episanna, the show which talks about the technologies, projects and startups driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution. My name is Brian Fabian Crane.

And I'm Meher Roy. Today we have a very distinguished guest on our show. He's Brian Belandoff. 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. So I'm going to 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 Hyperledger project. So Brian 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, EFF.

He's also on the board of directors for Mozilla and Bene Tech. And his major occupation right now is as executive director of Hyperfonte. Leisure at the Linux Foundation. So we're going to talk mostly. We are going to focus this show mostly on what Hyperledger is and what it does. But perhaps before we start talking about HyperLager, we could have like a small intro 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 winding road that I've taken to get here from starting, being a co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation and very early days of 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 done the last couple of years. I always, 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 websites, starting Apache, started a company called CalabNet. 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 policy objectives, particularly in health care. 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 also well beyond. And then left there, came back, I started to get homesick because I was living in D.C. and then Geneva came home to San Francisco. I 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 Mithril. And so it 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. 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, 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 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 mined, 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 for my time in D.C. I started to really pay attention to use cases involving things like tracking. the diamond trade and 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 selling a house from one person to another, but also keeping corrupt bureaucrats from being able to steal land from people, right? Simply because once it's digital, it's very easy to corrupt the, you know, 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 listen 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 planned to spend that money on. And while they talked about all these amazing, you know, high-level use cases and ideas, they were going to spend the money on plumbing, right? They were going to spend the money on whether it was a fork of Bitcoin or a fork of Ethereum or something way down here with the idea

that they would be, even in a decentralized ledger, they could be the gateway. where they could be the, you know, everyone would say Red Hat, but I think in their mind they really wanted to be the Google of this space. Or the Amazon Web Services of this space, right? 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 distributed ledgers and also how Internet technologies really succeed. which is companies working together, startups and large companies on common plumbing, on common infrastructure, and then building on top and going into truly differentiated areas. Like I would rather have invested while I was still at this firm in a company using 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, 10th of the total needed in order to build that plumbing rather than building all their own plumbing.

So I got frustrated at this and looked around at 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 Ethereum community was really focused on building the decentralized Airbnb and the decentralized Uber. And I have a lot of resonance for that model. I mean, I like the payments idea, too. 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's, and we had, you know, 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, 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 hyperledger launched, I certainly paid attention. I first heard about it December 17th of last year was when the first announcement went out. And I started tracking it, learning more about it, listening in on the technical steering committee calls and following the mailing lists. And then I went to the consensus conference, and at that point said, okay, there's something, I could tell by the lack of something like the Linux Foundation on Hyperledger, that there

was a need for it. I mean, and I had been talking at that point with Jim Zemlin, 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 at some point anyways. So he said we could use some help here, and I said, okay, sign me up. I figured out a way to make it work. And so I joined HyperLedger 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 since the very beginning. And there was a lot of idealism, I think you're right? that, right? I mean, also with the EFF that you're part of, there has always been this idea of the Internet being in place of freedom of open expression. What is your view about the state of the Internet today and what do you think is the relevance for blockchain for the state of the Internet in the longer term? I find myself going back and rereading John Perry Barlow's

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 this sovereign independent space where governments were not even welcome. And 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 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, we're farther apart than ever, right? And that's been a rude awakening in a way. And I've always believed that progress has been made by a combination of revolutionaries and evolutionaries. And so I find myself resonating quite a bit with people who want to find a way to re-decentralize 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 organizations in the whole ecosystem. It also is not 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 fragile. And so I'm really worked up about figuring out how do we focus on anti-fragility? And for me, blockchains are a big part of that.

Whether that's happening at a global scale, like the Ethereum and Bitcoin networks, or whether that happens at a very local scale, getting a small group of nonprofits or banks or political organizations to be able to have a shared ledger, public or private, but governed by its own sense of governance in 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 hyperledger that was missing. So what exactly did you see there, what kind of unmet needs that you felt hyperledger would fill?

So there wasn't really 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 ASF was, And certainly there are a lot of people who helped refine this and build it. It wasn't just me. But certainly at the beginning, there was the sense that the community is what comes first. And you have to get the dynamics right. You have to make the project, a multi-vender 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 public and also some effective governance around the open source project itself. And the ASF, I think, has served very well for this. There's now 300 different projects under Apache. The focus there is on community overcode.

If you have a healthy community, good software is practically a natural byproduct. And so 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 something we may touch on later in this conversation, but there was really a need to separate out the governance and the process of writing software and the governance and process of managing standards. And then thirdly, 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 deciding on HTP standards, and ICAN, let's say, or the CA browser form, let's use a more direct example, managing the global certificate hierarchy for the top level certificate authorities that we all preload into our browsers and servers. 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 bootstrap, but that was causing tensions, and that was causing tensions between the interests of the miners, the interests of the people writing smart contracts, and the interest of people holding tokens, and the interest 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,

and with Hyperledger starting, it made sense to take advantage of the companies now interested in moving the ball forward with this as a focus. Let's take a short break to talk about Jacks. Jacks is a multi-coin wallet created by the people at DeCentral. 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 Jacks, those 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 cryptocurrencies you can do with Jax, but you can also exchange them directly from within inside the wallet thanks to their shape-shift integration. And since there's only one seed, Jax makes it super easy to back up and sync to the other devices. Jax works with Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and has browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome. So go to jax.io, that's J-A-W-X-I-I-O, to download the wallet and get started today. We'd like to thank Jax for those supportive episodes. So before we go on, so like many of our listeners, and including me, we are very well-versed

with the governance problem 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 individual holders and sometimes they are at odds with each other. And this has repeated across all of the projects. that we have followed. But can you give an example of what kind of divergent interests exist for a body like Linux Foundation or the Apache Software Foundation? Like 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 or what kinds of divergent interests exist in the world that you are

familiar with and that your background is from? Well, so a diversion interest at the Linux Foundation include everything from, you know, Microsoft starting out its experience with Linux, calling it a cancer upon the software world in 2001, 2002, I think, when they were starting to actually acknowledge the existence of open source, to now in 2016, joining the Linux Foundation as a platinum member. that's a perhaps a long-term C-change on Microsoft's 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 and innovation come from in Linux? It probably comes from the people who are working on it 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 supercomputing cluster, you know, and they need to make it work there. It runs on 496, I think, of the 500 largest computers in the world, right? And so much of that is corporate funded. 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 measure and quantify and put our egos aside, right,

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's a culture that we're adopting at HyperLedger, 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 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 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 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 a balancing act. That's an art form. And that's something that we're hoping to do at Hyperlodger.

So if you think about the longer term, and if you look at the blockchain space, what kind of, you know, let's assume hyperletcher turns out to be a great success. It really kind of accomplishes any of the things you would like it to accomplish. What kind of impact will I have on the community? And what do you think could happen on the negative side if nobody does this work, right? If neither hyperletcher succeed, nobody else steps up. Right. Well, certainly the scenario that I saw emerging at the beginning of this year, 2016,

that caused NATO wake up and. go, can I help with this, is the sense that there is this constant churn at the lower levels of 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 one's technical opinions unavoidably, right? And that kind of poisonous atmosphere, I felt, 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, 20% transactions per second? I mean, those are interesting questions. Those are useful questions. I get up thinking about 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, 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 single chain, right? That's what drives me. Today's magic word is Apache. That's APA-C-H-E. Head over to Let's Talkbittcoin.com to sign in, enter the magic word and claim your part of the listener's reward. So one of the interesting stories from my own life is, so in Switzerland, I'm based out of Switzerland. And I, along with a few folk, we give workshops on, on.

blockchain technologies. So if somebody wants, you know, some form of education on it, we go and deliver it to them. And we were at the Cybor's 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 hyperledger. And I was like, okay, fine. I had heard of Hyperleger. I had not studied what Hyperleger was. And I was like, okay, this will be like a technology like, you know, Ethereum, 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 HyperLiger isn't a blockchain, or it isn't a blockchain design. And I was like, 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 your stuff and like, like HyperA is doing something that is totally unique, right?

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, HyperLager is kind of, it defies all of the other categories, and is its own unique thing, right?

So perhaps, like, you could just tell us about the internal structure of HyperLager, right? Like, what does it consist of? Who are the people? What are the projects, etc.? Sure, and I'm sure it's tough, partly because, you know, Hyperledger is an aim 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 some of the specific projects like training on fabric or training on Sawtooth Lake, that sort of thing. But to give a broader picture of it, so there are multiple projects. underneath the Hyperledger banner, right? Underneath the umbrella is kind of 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 named set of developers who are called the maintainers, right? And those developers should be looking to bring in new maintainers over time so that there's a healthy kind of growth in that responsible group. They set their own agenda, their own roadmap, their own priorities. They decide when they want to make a release. 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 get what my, my perspective's, and why that's, that's the appropriate thing. Everyone has to use roughly the same naming

convention for their packages. If you call it zero.9 or one dot oh, or a beta, that sort of thing. We actually have a nomenclature for how that works. We, you know, every project needs this own individual name and it needs to be fairly distinct. So hyperledger 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. So this is perhaps where we're different from Apache. Apache doesn't really care what the code bases do 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 to a certain degree, I agree with that. And there may be room inside of Hyperledger for a five-user project at some point. But what we're, 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 your unique, you know, consensus mechanism actually makes sense as a plugable option in fabric or, you know, the three of you are working on a

smart contract engine that really could be condensed into one, that they're encouraged to do that, not as a top-down in position, 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, right? So there may be, in the long term, multiple DLT engines, distributed ledger engines inside of hyperledger, right? I don't believe in the kind of 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 MySQL and we have Cassandra, right? Because they're very different architectures. They make very different promises to the layer above them.

and that means, you know, down to their core, they are very different kinds of databases. So I'm completely open to the idea that diversity is something that is something we need in order to move fast, 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, 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 know, how it wins or how you put together, that if you're combining hyperledger 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 kind of the deal and the offer there, And, you know, what, why do companies and organizations join Hyper Ledger, you know, what are their incentives and in what ways do they contribute to the 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 501C3 nonprofit, which is a public charity, it's membership-based.

It's kind of like the Sierra Club 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 the Linux Foundation has actually gone beyond the Linux operating system 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 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 ways 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 for PR resources as well, and a few other things, some legal advice, that sort of thing. But they don't pay in a full-time executive director. They have a full-time executive assistant, actually, a 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, you know, who've 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 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 has nothing to do with writing code. So we don't actually pay anyone, except Linus Torvalds 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 providence of the code. Where did it come from? and was somebody sitting there and watching as submissions were made to make sure that everything followed 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 on 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 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 always is asking 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 letting any one business dominate the conversation, that's, that's, that's, that. That's critical, and that's part of the Linux Foundation's DNA, right?

So, and then finally, you know, when you do have these funders, they kind of need to be, you know, managed, expectation set, but also very clearly, you know, told the fact that you're writing a check 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 get a 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 community in a conversation about whether feature X is the right thing, and if this is the right way to build it, and does this meet quality, all of those kinds of criteria.

So long story short, you know, the model is bring these companies together And we have now about 100, in fact, we just crossed 100 sponsors of the Hyper Ledger Project. And they are companies like IBM and Intel banks like J.P. Morgan. A lot of international organizations, too. In fact, of that 100, about 25 are based in mainland China. So I'm going to be spending a lot of time in China the next year. big companies like Huawei, even Chinese startups doing energy blockchain projects, right? This is really exciting and it's a really global effort.

And 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 is this idea that tokens and using tokens is an entirely new way of funding exactly that. that sort of plumbing infrastructure. And of course, that's become very popular with crowd sales starting with Ethereum, but now many others. And the idea here is very much that we can this way also monetize something that previously wasn't monetizable

and this fund these projects. Now, it seems to me that what you are proposing, right, or what hyperledger division you guys have 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 need it. The second thing is it introduces speculation, right? And, you know, it would be nice to work on a protocol. So, for example, DNS. Would DNS have worked better 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 would have been great. It would have potentially, if we ran it on email, stopped 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 was even more commercial, potentially less free. And when you bring the speculators into it, the speculators themselves are driven to take advantage of where there's information gaps in a project, right, in an environment. And that taking advantage is something that, you know, people who don't think that way like me, you know, it ends up costing us real money. Their gain is at 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 and Ethereum with mining is all about, right? How do you reward participation in global

consensus? And I don't think there's a better way to do it than proof of work, maybe proof of stake, Hopefully, Ethereum will figure that out. And tokenizing that if your goal is millions or hundreds of millions of nodes, right, that all share a common ledger, right? But for a whole lot of the consortium chain applications, you just don't need a token to incentivize participation in consensus, right? If you have 20 banks implementing a shared ledger to record their transactions, there's inherent incentive 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 then finally, so much of the Internet was built by people whose motives was to interconnect and enhance the lives of people and, you know, making the Internet. money, not that it was a secondary thing, because we all have to have lives, we all 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 quality journalism rather than, you know, advertising, I think.

We're at the end of that cycle. As the person who put the first ad banner online, I've started to feel really guilty about that really recently, right? So there's some things, look, I think currencies have the role. I think I'd like to see more of them, more competing currencies, actually. 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 blockchain space because it's been so currency-focused. I think if we can help people understand that that's one of a set of applications, they'll warm up to it very quickly.

And then we can bring the mainstream of the computer science field to us and the mainstream of the application development field. Let's take a break to talk about the Ledger NanoS, the new flagship hardware wallet by Ledger. I'll let Ledger's CEO, Eric Larchavec, tell you all about how simple the NanoS makes it to securely store all your private keys.

The Ledger NanoS 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 a seed, or set up your pin on the device. Your seed will never be exposed to the host computer. On the nano-s, you have different apps. You have the Bitcoin app, you have the Ethereum app, and you have the Fido U2F app for strong authentication, for instance with Google, Dropbox or GitHub.

You can manage your cryptocurrencies with the ledger wallet Bitcoin Chrome app or the ledger wallet Ethereum Chrome app. With the nanoS, all your Bitcoin and Ethereum addresses are derived from one unique seed. With one seed you can have in the same time Bitcoin, Ethereum, ECUM classic balances. And also if you restore your seed, you will also recover all the keys associated to other apps such as FidoU2F, SSH, GPG. So it's very simple, just one seed and multiple applications. The NanoS sets the new standard in hardware wallet security and usability. You can get yours today at ledgerWallot.com. 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 corporations interact with HyperLedger, one of the things that you pointed out was licensing, right? Like that Hyperledger and Linux Foundation broadly, it focuses on sort of legal process around software and how software is licensed. So could you explain to us hyperledger's approach to licensing

and what it requires of its participating projects and why that was chosen? Right. So the inbound license for contributions to a Hyperledger project, 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 a third-party library into a check-in, you know, and when it turns out that the license on that third-party library was L-GPL 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, right? So all of that, you know, is, A, it's a reminder to developers to check the licensing. and B, it's a reassurance to users downstream not to worry about 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 designed very carefully to be a license that was as permissive as the original BSD license, right, you know, that Apache started with. the first Apache license was inspired by this, right? But we started to realize, you know,

especially as companies were using this code, that there were a number of things that started to matter just as much as granting all these freedoms, that you 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 just as free as MIT or BSD, but it has that extra reassurance around patents that we don't have, for example, with Satoshi Nakamoto's code. And that's one reason why 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 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 Satoshi's patents, even those that had not yet been granted. And this is really important because if you're going to build an industry on top of a foundation like proof of work, you want to know if somebody has a magic golden ticket to not now, but five years from now or 10 years from now,

be able to seek 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 would 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 bare MIT or BSD license as potentially having this risk that any of the contributors could one day wake up and say, a patent right. And there's never been a court case that's demonstrated that the BSD or MIT licenses have an implicit patent grant as well. They only talk about copyright. So 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, 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, 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 GPL, letting alone the fact that GPL V3 and the AGPL get even stronger, right? So Linus Torvalds 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 physical objects and 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 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 than I am about almost any other issue. And people understand that once you walk them through it.

And they understand why an Apache license project can still significantly reward people who build derivatives and add-ons to bring their contributions back upstream. right and and that forking is a risk no matter what license you're under so I 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 I have because I think it puts us whenever you has 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 a very interesting point I think it's a point where a few, in a scenario, 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 the main differentiators are from Apache to GPL. So one is right there with GPL you have this obligation that if, you know, I'm going to take this GPL project, I'm going to make some modifications to it. I'm not allowed to 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 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're not as comfortable with it. 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 building a chain together. And so part of this is really the goal of seeing, you know, these technologies become as ubiquitous

as Apache technologies have underneath the web, and I think the license has a big part to do with that. I think individuals have respectable reasons for wanting to license their own personal IP under a GPL. They may believe that that's the quid pro quo, 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, he was just perhaps 40 or 50 years ahead of his time, when there's software in every doorknob and software in every vehicle and there's software

and everything you can do in the world, having the underlying source code of 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, I'm not going to play with you unless you open source everything you do, well, release as GPL, specifically everything you do. Or is it better to say, I'm only 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 I think the people I want to work with, the people I want to collaborate with, should probably be carrot people rather than stick people. Brian, could you walk through a 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 basically say, here's the software, do whatever you want with it. you know, don't blame us when it breaks. You can't sue us for it, right? And it incorporates software from these other people, right? But caveat mTOR, right? And but here it is. And no obligation back.

And you, you know, no obligation to, there's nothing in those licenses that requires you to publish your modifications or, you know, 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 it, but no obligation. And that's nice. 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 that 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 code base will come after you about a patent in this code base, 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 it's enforced. So there's a bunch of projects part of Hyperledger at the moment, but I know there have been discussions about some of the Ethereum project, Ethereum clients, or EVM, implementations joining, HyperLedgeer. 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, how would HyperLedgeer 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 Hyperledger when they think about what they're building. And so you could easily see an Ethereum project join that has as a mission, as its statement, as its goal, as scope, implementing the Ethereum protocol and being designed to be a high production,

node on the Ethereum network. But that's not all it has to do. I mean, software can do other things, right? So there are a lot of people today exploring using Ethereum clients, Ethereum 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 you don't need a currency, then you can't use proof of work.

You have to use something else. or 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 these are still hard questions to answer. And a project that has the freedom to the software project, that has the freedom to explore other consensus mechanisms, other ways to do smart contract engines, and yet still be conformant to the Ethereum standards

and participate in the Ethereum network, that's how I would think about a project related to Ethereum hosted at Hyperledger. It's this really clear relationship. And I think somebody can be a member of both the Ethereum community and the HyperLiger community at the same time. You know, we aren't in conflict.

We're not at each other's... We're not trying for different things, right? We all, I think, want to work towards some common things. So that's how I think of it. And I think there's been a lot of resonance with that out there. And we'll see where it goes. I mean, ultimately, as well, I should say, Hyperledger isn't saying that the cryptocurrency world is a bad idea.

And while I have my personal concerns about coins and currencies, there is a spectrum, a spectrum from unpermissioned and global and one big chain and tokens, right, to, you know, consortium chains, highly permissioned. may be designed for five participants, maybe designed for 5,000, right? And there might be room in between there. Sawtooth Lake implements something called

proof of elapsed time, which has some of the anti, 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 purely about, you know, ungovernable 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 I'd like to see all those different ideas under the Hyperledger umbrella. So, like, because HyperLiger 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 the previous answer, we talked about 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 HyperLager and what these specialities of each of them are, just so that we have a rough idea? Sure. So Fabric 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 in Go using Docker as its container, kind of as its VM, if you want to think of it that way. And 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, WIWA, there are a number of companies, and that community is growing. Our long-term goal is that IBM is just one of many companies and is a minority of the contributions. And I think like any young project, sometimes it takes a while to get to a true multi-stakeholder goal like that. Sawtooth Lake has also been a part of the project since day one. It came from Intel, and it also has seen contributions from some other companies and developers. And it uses an extension inside of Intel's most recent line of chips, something called the SGX extensions, to basically implement 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 more than one node, unless you have more than one CPU. So what that gives you, like I mentioned, is potentially the ability to have larger consortium networks. And it's an interesting project that's 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 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 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 HyperLedger Explorer that basically is a way to look at all these different chains and navigate through 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 Corder open source and submitting it as a project at HyperLedger. And so we're working with them on the process for that so that it comes in as a new project.

and over time becomes hyperledger corda, 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 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 coming on. I think we've covered a lot here, and there was a great overview of hyperledger. And I'm sure this is also something we can come back to in the future, both to talk about Hyperledger as 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 R3 and quarter, 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's going to be lots of success for HyperLedger in building out the foundation for blockchain technology. Well, thank you, Brian, and thank you, Maher, for allowing me to be here. And thanks so much for listeners for joining once again. So we are part of the LTV networks. You can find this show and other shows as well on Nestorquitcoin.com. And if you'd like the show, then please leave us an iTunes review.

You can do that in any of the iTunes applications. And of course, you can subscribe to the podcast using your podcast application or watch the video on YouTube.com slash episode of Bitcoin. Thanks so much and we look forward to being back next week.