'Baselining Baseline Protocol' - John Wolpert

i'd like to take this opportunity to introduce our next speaker um john walpert will be speaking today he's the founder of baseline he'll be sharing an overview of baseline protocol which enables enterprise use of mainnet ethereum uh john welcome take it away [Music] okay hi everybody can you hear me can you hear and see me no you can't see me yet you're all good john hey uh it's great to see everybody um it's uh it's been a quite a year uh for the baseline protocol team i'm going to tell you about that and uh set it in some context would love to have some questions um no slides today i'll just be talking to you uh baseline protocol is not i'm going to start with what i always say to everybody baseline protocol is not a coin a token a scheme a a platform a product uh it is simply a uh technique that is under standards development that is under the oasis uh body for standards development uh which is a venerable uh standards organization going back 40 50 years i guess behind sgml and amqp and mqtt and all sorts of uh standards uh the the baseline protocol is a standard for using a public mainnet like ethereum as a common frame of reference for integrating and effectively enforcing the consistency between records held in different traditional systems of record like sap microsoft dynamics or or or anything like that and the problem that solves is right now 30 percent of any large companies even the largest of companies like a boeing 30 percent as many as 30 percent of the companies that work with them suppliers and others are don't do enough volume or are big enough or have systems that uh warrant setting up a siloed dedicated integration hub or bus in order to maintain consistency between company a's system of record and company b's um so what that what's involved in that any distributed systems 101 is the need to have a common frame of reference either you're going to primary one system to the other and most security officers don't love that option um it also gives a lot of control to the uh the primary company or you can set up an integration bus and have this common frame of reference between you but now we have silos upon silos upon silos and what does a cons integration bus do well one of the things it does the simplest thing is effectively ordering and hash management that is um i need a way for my record in my database to be verifiably identical to your record in your database say uh my purchase order is um i i'm going to send you a purchase order i'm going to message you that by a peer-to-peer messenger and now we need a way of breaking the two generals problem of you know knowing that we've completed the circuit without continuing sleeping and acting and then we need to uh we need to be able to uh say yep that that proof over there is proof not of existence but of consistency we consistently we we are certain to have this and neither of us can say that we got that we didn't get the memo or that we fat fingered the entry or something like that that proof proves that we at one point in time were on the same page without having to resort to what you would see in a uh traditional or uh you know what we've been doing in on the in enterprise blockchain and i for some some of you may know i i helped build uh this thing called hyperledger fabric and um then i kind of saw the light and said you know public blockchain is kind of where i want to go and uh the reason is i think blockchains all kinds of blockchains are more or less terrible databases and that was sort of the thought we had when we started doing enterprise database or enterprise blockchain was hey let's have a single source of truth let's put our data collectively on a shared um system and uh when you think about that for more than ten minutes uh it should have been obvious to us and five years ago okay now i have my internal sensitive data on a shared threat surface that is now as bigger has a higher risk of exposing that information for every company that has a note so even a private blockchain is kind of a you know all blockchains are sort of digital nudist colonies a private blockchain is just a digital nudist colony on a private beach and that's not a terribly good pattern blockchains aren't good at compartmentalization and companies need compartmentalization they need tackles and they need to be able to say i'm going to share this record with you and not with you even though we're all in the same supply chain but then you need to know that the output of what we're doing here has integrity and that you can do your step later on without worrying about um shenanigans baselining is a way to do that you say okay we've got these this record in common we also have shared we using zero knowledge circuits we're able to say that that proof is also effectively a key and a key value lookup and it can enforce workflow integrity and say the this purchase order follows from this master service agreement and it had to have followed the rules of the pastor service agreement or it could not have deposited its proof on the mainland if all this sounds incredibly boring it is we like to say that with baseline uh boring is the new exciting after five years of enterprise blockchain hyperbole part of i have to uh admit to uh perpetrating some of it along the way um now we have something where a ciso a security officer or cio can say oh that makes sense that's not scary and that's not an inappropriate use of blockchain i'm still using my sap and now we don't have to sell against an sap we can say you know more blockchain more baselining means more sap more means more mainnet um and you'll you'll hear me i always talk about the main net i think we're defining the job of the main net and ethereum is my my vote for the most likely candidate to perform the job a main net is a common uh always-on state machine that resists tampering and resists any group from locking you out of valid transactions or tampering with history that's what a main net must do and ethereum does a pretty good job of that and if all you're asking it to do is manage proofs and uh use those proofs in a clever way that allows you to do ordering in in workflows that you know even eth1 is pretty it has enough scale to handle a lot of that and eth2 will get us all the way there so that's that's the nutshell of block of baseline started uh between uh microsoft ernst young and consensus back in june of last year and launched uh officially as an open standard in uh oasis you can go to baselinehyphenprotocol.org and get involved it's an openly governed open source body contribution is the only power you can you can [Music] uh be a you know you can be a sponsor and you're not going to buy yourself any votes the only thing that gets you a vote for anything is is contribution um and so please get involved uh we have now 700 last week i had to say a few weeks ago i had to say 600 now it's 700 active participants and it just keeps growing company after company after company big companies small companies and it's a really great opportunity for a small company to jump in make a mark and become pretty well known pretty quick and that's been happening a lot any questions sorry for all that i was muted for a second uh hey john um i just have to comment your uh video setup is very impressive everybody's gotta have a hobby i got a little spendy during covid i mean it's beautiful um let's see uh let me check the chat real quick see if we have any comments coming in still waiting on that for a second let's see if you guys have any questions or comments for john please head up uh live.ethonline.org all right a question for you um what can non-enterprise devs do with this meaning like if you don't work at a big corporation like how does this serve you how does this help you okay well in fact what's most exciting to even the big companies right now is is is being able to have this common always on uh an integration bus called the pain that called ethereum in this case um and small tiny companies so imagine like say you're a radish farmer and this is actually a story um and you get a a you know purchase agreement from your wholesaler big company they're using sap or some monstrous system right old school and you don't even know what that is you know but you have an iphone you can mash a button in a yeah so a lot of people are saying now if you can't if you if you can't at least do an electronic signature maybe i shouldn't be working with you right i mean that's the days of needing to do paper are back very quickly ending um and so now you but you know you don't really know about anything about it you got your iphone you get this docusign you mash the button and then what if it right after that it said you know your your wholesaler will give you points or benefits spiffs if you click here and for 9.95 a month you have a system of record that is baseline so that now that wholesaler's a lot more confident that you have some kind of record keeping that they can be confident in right just that alone can make a big difference to even a rash farmer and that by the way free idea go ahead and build that and let me know if you do because i'll promote the heck out of it awesome you hear that everybody that was a free idea um i got another question for you john um coming in from the chat uh in your experience what's the biggest hesitation enterprise users have when thinking about baseline and thinking about ethereum so say that again i didn't i didn't press the first mark it's what's your biggest hesitation enterprise users when thinking about baseline like what are their what are their um hesitations sorry i can't think of a sentence for that so i used to work for this uh innovation company 20 years ago and there was a great line in there it was called butt the butt never always bring two butts to an argument or a discussion and what that means is you know as scientists when you try to do brainstorming you know and you say well um you can't just do a brainstorming and say no killer phrases you know all the ideas are good no scientists know that's not true i used to work at ibm research and a lot of scientists and so what we used to say is you can always say but that won't work but then you have to say but it would if even if your butt your second butt is crazy like one time this is true sorry i was uh working on something and we were doing that and somebody said but that won't work but it would if gravity was different and and and one of us went wait a minute and obviously we didn't fix we didn't change gravity but it it led to a pretty good idea do that hit do that five times you'll have a uh you know an important idea like most often um changed my life that that way of thinking in a way that is what we that was the process we followed with to get to baseline we said well here are 10 reasons if you go to um if you go to my twitter feed at the top of it you'll see a an article called uh um common sense statement on the main net for business i think something like that and that came out of an article that we wrote for the with uh the eea main networking group i wrote called ten reasons why i won't use the public blockchain for business and and then of course the sub subtitle and how we can make it so i will right yeah and and the 10 reasons are you know finality is an issue if you're using it as a database you've got scale finality um custodianship gdpr issues privacy issues confidentiality issues which are different eventualities about the business logic privacy is about the data both things matter right if i can decompile that that smart contract and it has identifiable attributes that i could use to to figure out who you are and what you're doing and with whom it's not okay for business sorry i don't think it's okay for tiny businesses i mean if you're dealing with grandma's pension you're and you're a three-person company you've got the same security issues as any giant company yeah right yeah we don't need a standard for enterprise ethereum versus everything else ethereum we need a standard for ethereum and it needs to work for all of us um and all you know the smallest companies or the smallest teams the most innovative or disruptive teams out there sooner or later if they're successful are going to be the ones that everybody says oh they're the bad guys and that you know you know i i still remember uh you know when google was two two or three people and and don't be evil was a thing right you know there's a life cycle to all this so you know they say build security in from the beginning don't tack it on later so all these reasons why you wouldn't use the blockchain and particularly all boil down to thinking of blockchains as databases don't put data on blockchains don't put the primary business data on blockchains right most 80 or more of that is sensitive in some way or another you don't want your competitors or other people knowing about it all the time even when people say they want to be transparent now you don't really want transparency you don't want everybody knowing where all the food is in a supply chain that's a good way of bad guys finding out ways of doing bad things you want transparency between counterparties when that's appropriate and you want to have some control over that um so but we don't want to keep on building all these silos so if we can use the main net so that's when we said but if we were using mainnet effectively as an ordering and hash management tool and a consistency machine where we're saying where it can say you're consistent i don't know what about and the thing i'm using to to tell you that you're consistent looks like noise and sounds like a metronome to anybody any casual observer of the main net um then then that's okay so it'd be but it would work if we so in a way for from a business perspective and i'm not saying this is the only use of ethereum blockchain i'm saying that it's kind of like i wrote an article recently about um how the bose noise canceling and noise canceling uh the history of noise cancelling headsets um relate to the future of the internet and um you know at the end the point is there's lots of other uses of of um compute silicon lithography than just noise canceling headsets but it was a nice satisfying specific thing you could do the math on and know at what point transistors would be able to cancel noise out of the air in a thousandth of a second you could do the math on that you say well moore's law law is going to give me i'm going to be able to do that in 1992 or actually 1998.

so and i'll be able to do it on batteries in 2006 right so uh you know what is that for blockchain um there's lots of other uses of blockchain in fact my use with with the baseline and by the way i'm not the founder i'm just a co-founder and i'm the chair of the dsc and i should say please get involved we're having a big summit go to baselinehyphenprotocol.org get on the slack it's mostly slack but we do have telegram telegram and other things integrated but a lot of work gets done on slack there's a lot of people in there very friendly crowd very kind and welcoming and engaging uh maintainers good engineers good people to know uh one of the teams just got a big deal with coca-cola coke one north america and because another team just happened to show up they got in on the deal so uh you know there's a lot of a lot of friendliness here come on in and we're planning a big summit for the 12th and 13th of november that will result in some challenges that we were going to do a big gitcoin hackathon for two weeks in december on with with nicely funded bounties all right very cool very cool um i hope everybody caught that um i have another question for you coming from the chat um so what do you think will be the first major use case of baseline and kind of along the same lines what business types are you most excited to see experiment with baseline what business types well i mean yeah things like purchasing and if you think about what what do businesses do with each other right and by the way if you're not cross business if you're not multi-party multi-entity again you don't really need block change you know you if you have a boss if you have a single admin and a ceo maintaining things you don't need blockchain for anything if you need a shared system that different departments can say they have ownership of use get right there's a lot of things you can use but if when you get between companies that's when blockchain becomes an important integration hub potentially uh and so in those those environments um what do we do with between companies we buy stuff from each other and we move stuff between each other and we have to make manage agreements uh you know this before that what who what are the gifts and gets um what are the quids would could pro close um and we need to enshrine those in agreements some of which not all but some of which can be codified into business logic that can be executed by a computer not everything sometimes the the rule is don't be stupid and that you can't fix that with computers right but sometimes it you can you can say well this must happen and i can check that on some kind of system before some other thing happens so i've got another question following up to that um so compared to like three years ago what are the biggest things the enterprise blockchain space has learned some hard lessons some good lessons yeah well the biggest one is and many of my colleagues are still there i'm kind of preaching the crop to the crowd now don't think of blockchain as databases yep if you if you're not prepared to take your data to burning man don't put it on a blockchain and i know this sounds a little risque but i think it's an apt analogy honestly uh it's just a compartmentalization problem becomes really fraught you can try i mean that's what well half the good work that we did in the early days of fabric you know a guy like gary singh was really good um architect engineer and coder uh gary singh ought to get the touring rewards sometimes uh i think um and he he um you know he came up with this great architecture for some like a semblance of compartmentalization so that you know you could control who knows what but still have it on blockchain but it's it makes for a complex you know just factorial nightmare of complexity and complexity is the enemy of security so i say if you're trying to maintain surveillance resistance a well-managed uh potentially air-gapped uh traditional database i mean a database pretty neat invention you know in 1970 that was the blood you know that was the exciting thing i mean i i grew up you know relational databases were kind of the thing i worked on in the early 90s and uh and they're still good so we should use them not everything needs to be a blockchain right right yeah totally um think of blockchain more as middleware than as a database is i think what i'm saying yeah that's a good way to put it um [Music] let's see one more question we got here um so for companies that are onboarding to baseline are there any interoperability issues between companies you've seen thus far well i think um this comes along at a good time because the the api economy which was the next last big wave i was involved in um and before that you know the object-oriented wave but i mean api economy in particular you have companies now like mulesoft and others and dell boomi that do translation schema management you know you can so the real tricky thing is how do you verify the identicalness of a record that's on and sql right so you have to that you have to manage that but there's quite a lot of maturity around that already um and so we can just check into it and use that so it's baby steps it's always baby steps so you know you could have imagined us doing this 10 years ago 15 years ago but now you know it's it's easy enough that we can do it in production cool um yeah go ahead no don't let me stop you what no that was it okay um cool thank you so much for chatting with us um i really enjoyed this uh if we if anybody wants to like follow your writing or follow just like you on the internet at large um what's the best way to do that uh at john j wolpert on twitter is is um one and then the other is uh i'm part i'm the uh co-vice chair of the main networking group at eea with tosh deans and hudson jameson's in there and we're you know really we're in the age of convergence this is a time where all of us need to come together there's a lot of seriously cool developers that have that work in a lot of different kinds of companies and and yeah i remember in the mid 90s late 90s there's like 2500 ibmers that got behind java just because we wanted to right and nobody told us we could we want that for ethereum we had to run java one in 97 in javits center because there were 30 000 developers that had that showed up if i remember the numbers right where's our 30 000 developer blockchain conference right well it's because we're not coming together yet yeah so we need to do that and and um we need to know i mean you know companies we can you cannot like companies you cannot like enterprises and i might agree with you in some in a lot of cases but at the end of the day we're all just large groups of mostly humans and um and the developers in those companies are can be a great ally and we need to reach out to them awesome heard loud and clear yeah and uh i mean yeah twitter is probably the easiest way to find me and again baseline hyphenprotocol.org and come and join us please perfect thank you so much um this is great um i'm gonna go ahead and switch over give us a little five-minute break we're gonna listen to some lo-fi radio and i'll be back on the chat soon alright thanks guys