 Hi there, my name is Tammy Rogier and on today's segment of MIT.Law We're going to talk about crypto kitties and how their features can be used to track provenance to get us started Here's our resident crypto kitty expert Brian Wilson Hi everybody, my name is Brian. I have been a fan of crypto kitties for quite a while now What I love most about these adorable little critters is that not only do they look great But they also have really cool properties that you can trace throughout Their entire lineage to show you a little bit more of what I'm talking about. I'm going to go to the crypto kitties marketplace So here you can see that on the crypto kitties marketplace There are lots of different cats that are being sold for a wide variety of prices They're sold on the ethereum blockchain and they're sold for a certain amount of ether You can see different features for each cat like what generation it is what feature it is And if you click them you can even see what their name is. So here's third cerulean cloud white And she's got all these great cat tributes. She's cerulean. She's a Sphinx She has a sandalwood aura about her And what's so unique about these crypto critters is that you can Is that their features are specifically unique to them and they're generated based on a hash value that's recorded on blockchain and so if I were to click One of third cerulean cloud whites parents it would have similar features to third cerulean cloud white And and this is kind of a larger metaphor that can be used to apply to a bunch of different concepts And to kind of talk you through some of those concepts is dad's a greenwood Okay, great. Thanks, brian So getting ready for the first mit computational law course of which brian and tma and actually also with me here on campus is david paupers With the world teachers assistants We were How could we solve the provenance issue For for example supply chains or for legal instruments, basically this chain of custody conundrum and the crypto kids Seemed to have some what what makes sense. It's cryptographically verifiable and an image that you could look at and that people could tell, you know, just Visually without inspecting, you know log files, whether it's the same or different But then the the issue was is there's some simpler way and maybe something it was Perhaps more in sync with the format of a of a legal and a business contact Then a kitty cute though. They are That would allow this to happen. And one thing we brainstormed was how about the Get um kind of metaphor of this um what what they call identicons So I don't know if you can see this up here next to the repository. There's this little kind of block 8-bit Image and the and they're automatically generated for every github repository As soon as you create one and it kind of creates a visually distinctive um almost like a qr bar code Code for every uh repository. So we we got to thinking. Hey, could this be a kind of a stamp that you could possibly Is this something that we could do ourselves we investigate it and sure enough there was some code and uh, Brian did a legal backup. Can you can you show us what you did and talk us through it? Sure, I'm gonna pull my screen back up and show you this great site called identicon.net and what identicon.net does is it generates uh utf 8 encoded images and takes them from uh from just like a string of text and actually generates that 8-bit image that does it was talking about So we could type in computational law here And you'll know You'll notice that for each time that you type something it generates something unique. So if I take away something as Minimal as a space it will completely change the image if if I go back and I just change the capitalization It will also completely change the image So one of the things that we start to do for this supply chain use case And and and to ensure that we could track the provenance of a good from its origins to its ultimate destination was we wanted to go go to the ethereum transactional tracking website ethers scan and we wanted to copy Some of the hash values that existed on that website And we wanted to see if we could paste them into the identicon generator and see if this still held up Once we pasted this hash value in and what we noticed was yes, it did if we Even do something as minimal as changing The capitalization like that lowercase b to this now uppercase b It'll generate this upside down frowny face Which is different from the smiley face that we were able to generate earlier with the computational law space and and so what We then decided was well, what if we made a table And incorporated this table into some sort of registry where we had not only the hash values, but also the identicons And so that's something that we were able to throw together in relatively short order We took the hash values from the ethereum transactional website did ethers scan we pasted them into this table we then put those hash values into the Identicon generator we copy and pasted those and put them in We would also put them into the stable and what we were able to come up with was some something that could help us track the provenance pictographically and cryptographically from one location to the next location to the next location to ensure compliance with the with any set of rules that we could figure out and Some of the sets of rules can actually be actually be really useful and really helpful to real life scenarios And so dad's us going to bring us home and talk a little bit more about that Okay, great. Thanks, brian. So part of the way we explored this technology in the context of this computational law course was some scenarios and legal scenario that we worked with some of the students that came up from dc From the defense logistics agency general counsel's office was a um a very live case called buy american act Thus, um, let me see if I can pull That up here we go. Um, and that this requires Among other things Here we go that the um You know that that the source of the goods in fact come from the united states of america There's the berry amendment that more specifically applies some of these types of rules to the department of defense, which of course is uh, you know very Very much in the chop description of what the defense logistics agency folks are responsible for and we postulated a set of common facts That that we helped talk through with those attorneys they told us that some of the Situations where the buy american act um compliance comes up or where you have suppliers that may have you know pulled the labels made in china off of Clothing or they may have um changed the boxes Uh from you know goods um so so as to obscure or you know hide the um, you know the labeling Uh that that you'd find on a box And sometimes they have a whistleblower inside of a supplier that will Clue in the authorities or maybe an on-the-ball Customs officer in a port something like that Oh, could we could we postulate uh a um a new kind of workflow where maybe on the the Labels or the the packaging and the on the stamps something like these identicons could be added So that uh upon a quick visual inspection you could see whether they're the same or different from what would be expected Based on you know say some standard packing material or transaction code kind of material that you'd get at those um critical junctures in a supply chain When you know chipping receiving or somewhere something stamped and uh and and they and accepted and then hand it off to the next person You know it was a very high level Legal hack, but it was one that let us make real progress um in the classroom It as a great example of um how these sorts of technical capabilities um Using cryptographic methods to uh have verifiable evidence in this case of Of data such as provenance could be visually displayed in a way that anybody could quickly Look at and tell whether something's the same or different and applied to solve a legal use case. So successful legal hack and a really um creative use of technology um that uh that brian came up with so thank you for sharing that brian and um, you know for more Uncomputational law keep watching these segments and at mit.law