 Okay I think I'm now going to kick it off. So good morning and good afternoon everyone in Asia Pacific and good afternoon to all those in the US and good evening to those and to those I think I know a few attending from Europe so that's a ridiculously early in the morning so welcome to you as well. I'm Julian Gordon I'm the VP for Asia Pacific for Hyperledger and I'm delighted to be here today introducing this really special Hyperledger and BSN webinar. We have an amazing panel with us today a truly expert lineup of leaders and legends in blockchain open source cryptography and cyber security and I'm excited to say they will be discussing the hot button issue of how blockchain can protect consumer rights in this digital era. So sit back and get ready to listen to this discussion of issues facing business, tech and consumers from providence to privacy, self sovereign identity, cyber security, changing consumer expectations and how you can get involved. If you have any questions during the webinar please use the Q&A function you can see at the bottom of the screen here in the zoom chat please submit them there. We're going to gather those questions and maybe answer some as we go along and then we're going to have a Q&A at the end and with that I'd like to ask each panelist to briefly introduce yourselves and your role in this area. So we're going to go in alphabetical order so I think we're going to start with you Brian. Hi, I'm Brian Bellendorf. I'm general manager for Blockchain Healthcare and Identity Initiatives at the Linux Foundation. Is that too brief? That works and so next we'll go with Joshua. My name is Joshua Satin. I lead Blockchain for Wipro here in North America. We work with our clients to utilize different distributed ledger platforms like Hyperledger Fabric to create consumer privacy and data privacy platforms for our clients. And Leanne please. Hi everyone, Leanne Kemp, the founder and CEO of Everledger, a Blockchain company providing traceability systems and also on the working groups and advisor to the OECD for Blockchain as well as the Australian government for the National Blockchain Roadmap. Thank you and Whitfield. I'm an old cryptographer. I've been working at this field now for just I guess it's actually 49 years this summer and I have been all of that time involved with the issue of how high tech and how cryptography, security, etc affect individual rights and individual privacy. And so I have by the nature of things migrated into a concern with Blockchain as one of the latest critical elements of this issue. Thank you. Thank you, Whitfield. And I don't know if you don't remember, I was at Sun Microsystems when you were there. You have a definitely we all know about Whitfield's great career right and look forward to your insight. And what a great panel. So I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to set the scene or we're going to set the scene. Where are we today? What are the key issues facing consumers and consumers rights in the digital era? So why has this evolved and how did this kind of differ to like plus 10 years ago? So I'm going to start Brian. Do you want to start us off? Well, I think the meta theme here is around trust and really the collapse of trust in brands, the collapse of trust in institutions, the collapse of trust in the systems of the world. Maybe it's not all dire like that, but if you ask people today how much do you trust major product brand names to never mistakenly put shrimp parts into your breakfast cereal to touch on a topic du jour, that trust has probably taken a beating quite a bit. Or how much do you trust the government to be able to adequately inspect the products that are crossing the borders or to inspect that restaurant that you're eating at that sort of thing. That's probably also suffered quite a hit. And so one element of that trust is certainly in the area of Providence and we'll hear a lot about that tonight. I don't want to steal anyone's thunder. I think another aspect of that in a digital space though is knowing who you're dealing with online or whether they actually are who they say they are or if there's fraud inherent in that. But secondly, this kind of erosion in trust when it comes to the management of your personal information and GDPR didn't seem to quite fix that yet. All the other privacy regs seem to just add a click here to accept cookies kind of thing. And I have to give a mea culpa as one of the co inventors of the cookie. We called it the state header back in 94 when I proposed it. And then it was implemented by Lou Montouli as the cookie header and Netscape and Netscape navigator a version of that. We didn't think it would be used for third party tracking. It came up. We were like, nobody would do this, right? That'd be kind of creepy. Well, it got normalized and we ended up where we are. And so we have to think about how to fundamentally reinvent how consumer privacy works online. And that is ironically very tied to the Providence question very closely tied to being able to prove when you need to that you have title to a thing or that a thing has followed a certain trace or when you do want to share data that you can share it selectively and with a full consent. So these are some big issues and I'm really looking forward to diving into them in over the next hour. Yeah, thanks for that, Brian. So, so Joshua, do you want to go to that? I was about to go grab my pitchfork in my lantern and knock down Brian's door. You know, that's the main issue is exactly what he said. It originates with this cookie problem. But in everything that we do and using our smartphones and our computers and utilizing e-commerce, we leave a digital signature everywhere we go. And although we have rules like GDPR, which are meant to at least in the European Union, allow you to be forgotten and allow you to be removed from company systems where you don't want to be kept there forever, i.e., a Google or a H&M or a major store or any kind of online search provider. What we see with blockchain is, A, a way to cryptographically protect your digital signature and B, a way to proactively manage your identity online across platforms and across different vendors that you might work with. That's on the personal side. I think on the flip side, as we get into more and more of a digital age, we expect us to apply chains behind our products to be more and more digital. And we see also with the usage of interoperable ledgers and systems that we can prove that when we buy a product that it's authentic or that it's verifiable. And I think that's becoming more and more important. And we'll hear from Leanne and others about different indications and use cases where we're seeing this use the most. So Leanne, do you want to add to that? Yeah, look, there's so much to be said about knowing your customer. And, you know, in the forefront of thinking, we also have consumer consciousness, these really big questions that people are asking, and that's driving, of course, the change in supply chains. Parts of the work in Everledger is being able to link our digital identity to a physical object. And one could say you could do that in various different ways. Diamonds have a puff, physical, unclonable features that reside in on the object itself and within the object. So how do you capture through various methods of scanning or machine vision, resonant ultrasound, different types of identifying technologies and then link those together, financial services at the forefront of identifying customers, the KYC. But of course, we think about it from an object level. So KYO, and we believe that might be actually the knockout punch that might help to drive these changes. So I'm going to ask your KYOs and a little bit later. But that's an interesting and Whitfield. So what do you think are the key issues that are facing consumers and consumer rights today? Well, I take things from a very broad standpoint. And I see humanity as doing something it hasn't done in the last 7,000 years. 7,000 years ago, we moved into cities. And prior to that, you really lived in the natural world. And once you moved into cities, you could live all the time basically, I know you can still see the sky and so forth. But basically you lived in a human built environment. And humans got to decide things that had previously just been so to speak dictated by nature. And now we're taking that step again, in a way whose dimensions are constantly unfolding, we are moving our society into the digital world. And we don't, not everything we do yet fits there. But this world, just about everything we think about privacy, reality of products, all of these things changes as this develops. And we are one, developing the tools for dealing with these things in this world. And two, or closely related, developing the policies. And this will determine nobody is going to either to play fair or to take no for an answer in these matters. Because the decisions we make in this century are going to affect what life is for the indefinite future. I'd echo Dr. Diffie's thoughts. And I would only add that whereas typically in the past, we've had to make very binary decisions around whether or not we want to see ourselves as transparent or have our identity revealed. A lot of what we see in the contrast between Dr. Diffie's work right now and Mrs. Kemp's work is on the one hand, the right to proactively manage your digital ID. And on the other hand, the right to proactively manage your digital anonymity, which are two completely different things. And that's kind of building up the complexity that we're seeing in the digital age as well. Yeah, so I think I love what Bill's saying there. There's a lot on our shoulders, right? For the future, right? So we are going to, and there's lots of unintended consequences, I'm sure of our actions, right? So you have to think this through. So I think from the kind of study and what we're looking at this kind of two, if we're going to try and, you know, model the things we're doing, there's two kind of areas. There's one around provenance. And then there is around privacy and how we manage our privacy within the digital era. So I think if we start with the provenance, and I think I'm going to hand this to Leanne, because this is really Leanne's kind of area, if you could talk a little bit about what your thoughts are about provenance, how we're going to manage that in the digital world and how you see things at this present moment. It's a noisy space and a busy time right now. And there's a lot to be said about the work that was started in the last decade that's now starting to of course permeate across many different supply chains. There's no secrets about the work that Everledger started in 2015 in the traceability of diamonds and coloured gemstones. But some of the greatest challenges for us were less about the application of technology and more to corral wet cats within an industry. And how do you bring together the right set of people within an industry that emulates a human system that can then be transformed into a digital system? And I would guess the diamond industry has that with the United Nations coming together 15 odd years ago creating the Kimberley process, 81 countries, two times a year, every year for the past 15 years decided in a pre-competitive space that blood diamonds was no longer the way upon which anyone should trade. And so that human system has now evolved without the elements of technology to help accelerate them or escalate them. But at the very core of the diamond industry also resides upon the fact that diamonds are unique. They're a snowflake, they have a puff, a physical unclonable feature. So we're not reliant upon taking additional markers to the diamond. We're looking at the elements of its forensic identity. I guess we've done that well in terms of understanding the identity of humans because we're able to call upon forensic science to know who we are. I can change my name. I can change my driver's license. I can do that by ways of nefarious means or legal means. But it's really the identity of who I am at the DNA level of the diamond that enables us to be able to do this without trusting and intermediary technology in the enablement of that identity. And I guess that's another piece to understand RFID, NFC, near field communications. These are great next level technologies that would be attached to or embedded within. But the forensic science level is critically important to be able to actually weave or understand from an object perspective. And that's really the work we've been doing in the space. Of course, the human system is broken. We aren't always aligned in value and value creation. And that's the biggest challenge that we have to get provenance to become an alive and reality. How do we take an industry that needs to understand the alignment of value, what is important to them at a human system level, as well as value creation, competing for margins, reducing costs, faster time to market, etc. And it's the elements of that that technologies like blockchain. And I've always said blockchain alone will not solve for provenance and supply chains. It has to come together in a symphony of technologies and an orchestrated set of events to enable that to be seen to be true. And so it's hyper complicated, but it's so desperately needed now. And I think there are many companies that are doing far greater work than Everledger in this space. We just happen to be humbly focused in an area that we know needs it. We also know the human system can involve it and that we can hopefully become a guiding star on how to go about the implementation of these technologies in an industry that's 500 years in the making. They still rely on a gentleman's handshake, a chip of paper, and a promise to pay. And that works in a closed system, but it doesn't also work from a global system. So let me make some inquiries about this. Let me suggest that a skeptic might look at this and say, what are blood diamonds? Well, some diamond producing countries managed to condemn others as having, you know, crummy governments, crummy economy, they fight wars or whatever it is that the blood comes from. And I heard about blood diamonds. I wonder why shouldn't I wear blood diamonds? I mean, I run blood software. I drive blood cars. I mean, the countries I'm associated with do all sorts of crummy things. So how did it get, you know, I think the critical point is all the diamonds are about equally pretty or lots of diamonds are equally pretty. And so how do you market against somebody else who produces equally pretty diamonds and offers them at a lower price? And you find a way of persuading somebody not to buy those diamonds because they have bad provenance. You're exactly right. So therefore, the system goes beyond the object itself. And it resides into not just talking about consumer rights, but people on the supply chain as well. And so the identity of those workers in those environmental conditions are also captured as a part of telling the wholeness of the story, not just the object itself. No, but it's a good point because it actually has, as we'll talk about unintended consequences, right? All the different, you know, we think it's a simple subject, but there's a lot of layers to this onion. So yeah, I think Dr. Diffie brings up a good point that there's an implied value to people wanting to be moral in the process and that somebody on an average basis wouldn't take a stolen product at a cheaper price, that they actually care about the product not being stolen and paying the full retail value. And that does bring down the issues. It's much more complex than that. And it's not just, you know, yes, stolen is a simple concept, but a moment ago, we heard something, a critical issue is the working conditions of the people who mine the diamonds. Yeah. And, you know, people look at the working conditions of people who produce coffee, you know, and every other product, shirts, Nike's criticism of Nike, et cetera. So I think we're going to come to the point, let me step way aside for an instant and say, you know, when back at Sun Microsystems, we used, of course, digitally to sign the operating system. But that's the easy part of guaranteeing that the customer got a good operating system. What is behind the signature that makes it valuable is the internal mechanisms for verifying the quality of the product before it goes out. And so the point here is we are trying to open up to the view of consumers many details of not only how the product functions, but details of how the product was produced that might make one version preferable to another. 100%. I think there's there's two things that are accomplished by using a distributed ledger or blockchain to track provenance. One is a clear history of signed testimony as to the path that that took, right? You know that at least you're told that there's an inspector who signed off on this diamond factory or this supplier is not having received stolen product, right? Or not having deployed slave labor on the ground, right? And that's a testimony that could have been fraudulent, that could have been bought off, whatever. But what you don't have is proof that what that slave labor wasn't used, what you have is proof of testimony from somebody. And there's a lot more work to do to make sure that that testimony is worth the bits it's written on. But there is that second fundamental property of blockchains, which is prevention of double spend, right? It is materially difficult to, you know, and to impossible in, you know, cryptographic terms, right? To turn that one, the title to that one diamond into two different titles. Because you have that world state maintained there of everything going on and you can see, you know, I'm not going to accept this diamond from you because you've already sold this diamond to somebody else, right? And that that is a property that I think helps bring greater integrity into what is otherwise a simple task of just park all this data with the central registry and, you know, have the UN blessed or have, you know, some international org blessed as like the system of record. Instead, now we can as an industry in the diamond industry or these other industries hold each other accountable to the integrity of that Providence history. Yeah, I would very much agree. On a real life basis, we've worked with a few companies in very tangible ways around Providence that are more day to day, one being in relation to Wonder Bread in terms of a client being able to scan the barcode on a package of bread and being able to certify that the bakery was a good bakery, that all the ingredients from the flour being milled to the milk being used or the eggs were all organically produced. So then when the company does label it organic, they can say, yes, I can see a full track and trace of all the ingredients that were used here and that they were organic upstream as well. Similarly, we worked with a large printer company around in cartridges, where they were finding there was an issue that their in cartridge boxes were being stolen. The in cartridges were being taken out and sell separately and then duplicate or counterfeit cartridges would be being put in the real boxes. So you needed a way to track and trace to the end level that when the client was receiving the printer cartridge, it wasn't just a good box, but also a good cartridge. And also we see the example with a Walmart from a track and trace perspective that if there's been a food recall, you want to be able to notify your customers or clients immediately, let them know whether or not they are safe or need to take concern or action. In some sense, privacy is the antagonist or the providence of people is the antagonist of privacy. Yes, very much so. So I think we're definitely, providence is something that needs to be, I think we've kind of determined that. I like the fact that you're asking, I think you're asking the question as whether you want to use a blood diamond or not, that's something you decide, but the great thing is the issue today is you can't decide. If I have an ethical decision, I don't want to have a blood diamond, I should be able to make that decision today. I don't know whether I'm buying organic or not organic. So I think that's part of what you're saying. Supposedly do we just rely on a label, whether it's soccer balls or rugs or bananas, we rely on a label and we want a way to digitally verify that label. And a halfway point between those two is being able to have parties that you trust able to independently verify. So I subscribe to Consumer Reports and Consumers International and they do a lot of third-party auditing and validation of the sources and materials into things. I read the Wire Cutter, The New York Times and kind of review site where they do breakdowns constantly and kind of look at how pieces come together. And as long as these ledgers do allow for that independent verification, I don't have to do that work. I can trust that there's others doing that work on my behalf. That feels like a more resilient system than just trusting that the word organic meant something to somebody one day, right? Definitely. So I think that's provenance. I think that's definitely something that we're going to look a little bit more on that. But now let's look at what he mentioned is privacy. So that's the other big consumer rights issue. I think whether you call it rights issue or whatever, that is the issue. So do you want to take that on Brian? Maybe initially and then Witte or vice versa? I kind of threw the gauntlet down. So I'm interested in what others do say. But the thing that gets me excited is the prospect of self-sovereign identity or user-centric identity, if you want to call it that, which in some ways harkens back to more of a PGP, web of trust kind of model for how to build trust online. And it looks a little bit like how browser certificates work, but radically decentralizes that. And the basic idea is this, instead of everything that's interesting about you sitting on the other end of a name and password that you have connecting you into your profile linked in, for example, rather than maintaining a profile there and having to update all that information, what if you had certificates that attested to your employment status at your history of employers, your educational accomplishments, your perhaps other fundamental information about you that represents signed documents from others, but things that you hold innately rather than hoping that somebody at the other end of that name and password didn't delete or ignore that they don't go out of business, that sort of thing. And so this idea of kind of a very wallet-centric point of view, I've got these documents there. They say things about me. They might even be passports and driver's licenses or proof of vaccination, which is a very hot topic right now. So how do we share those with others in a way that allows that to be validated without the issuer of those documents being notified when I use it? That is important to try to avoid a surveillance economy type of situation, right? How do I even perhaps share it with Julianne and Whitfield and Joshua and Leanne in ways that if they're independent businesses don't allow them to collude to build a profile of me, right? All these are really sensitive and important things that we see being dealt with in the self-sovereign identity community. We at Hyperledger have built a number of technologies to help with this. They're built on the standards like DIDs, as someone mentioned in the comments, which is a W3C standard, actually the decentralized identity foundation, a bunch of others helped build out DID methods. There's the verifiable credential standard at the W3C. These are the building blocks, the URLs and HTML of kind of reinventing how the digital identity ecosystem can work. The biggest question is, will consumers want this? Will they understand it? Can we use skeuomorphic metaphors like wallet to help them understand how to manage this? They hate complexity. They love the idea of all my stuff as a Google and Apple, and this requires a little bit more, puts a lot more agency in their hands, but requires a little bit more responsibility, I think, in managing that data and managing one's keys. But if we get this right, this is the key to inverting the power relationship out there between consumers and big websites and getting to a much more decentralized internet. Okay, so what do you do on the broader? Or you can go into specifics of what Brian said. What are your thoughts around privacy and consumer rights? One of the first thoughts that these things brings up in my mind is, what do you have the right to have by way of agents serving your interests as a so-to-speak private individual? And I think, roughly speaking, we have accepted, and I have great doubts about it, the notion, well, you don't necessarily have the right to have a computer represent you. That the people you're talking to have a right, so to speak, to know that it was your hand on the mouse or something like that. And at the moment, that's something that's moderately testable. But I would, I think it's very plausible to say, well, wait a moment, this is outrageous, the notion that something that runs programs to deal with you can come and say, oh, no, you can't deal with me through programs, you have to deal with me directly. On the other hand, of course, we have a whole bunch of culture that we're particularly trying to apply at the moment in the pandemic world of things like taking exams and sort of implicit in the notion of you're taking an exam that you're, they're really dealing nakedly with you rather than with a really smart program that knows all the answers. And so I believe we're moving into a world where it's going to creep up on us that all sorts of things are going to appear that have to be accepted as I'll call them entities, because I think intelligence is a catchall word for abilities. And there are many different types of abilities. So loosely speaking, Google is a thing that has, it may in some sense not be as inventive as I am talking about the computers, not the staff, but the other hand knows a lot more. So I think many kinds of creatures are going to appear and interact in this world. And this question of provenance has many edges that are going to be very sharp and are going to cut people where they least expect it. So I think in the end, you're saying it's about the provenance of the individual, right, as well as the. Well, there's a lot. If this is the individuals versus the versus the corporate and governmental world, the corporate and governmental worlds are going to immense effort to determine the provenance of the individuals. And a great deal of effort in many cases to prevent the individuals from seeing much about the provenance of what they're dealing with. And I think in fine cases, all of us would agree a good and lots of us agree a bad. I mean, if you're dealing with Google, you know, should you be able to figure out what's what actual physical server where is dealing with you? I don't know. I mean, normal good software product, proper practice, a program shouldn't be able to figure out what resources it's drawing on only if they meet a set of specs. Because if you can figure out something else about them, somebody else will write that into a program. And the minute something wasn't spec changes, all the programs crash. So there are lots of good reasons to guaranteeing that aunties playing in a game only know what they're allowed to know. On the other hand, if you get to make up, if you get to make that decision about what that is, then you have a lot of influence over the freedoms and powers of individuals. If I think that's the key, the creatures that you're making reference to or have been in existence for some years now, it's just that when we get a warning for cookies on our website now, we're aware of them. And those are just the ones that we are aware of. There's no knowns and there's no unknowns. And those are the ones that really should scare us, but the ones that we're still trying to figure out ways to take control of. It shouldn't be just a question of, should you be able to care about or interact with what server at Google is taking in your information? But it should be a question of, what information do Google's various servers hold on you? And should it be allowed to hold on you, whether it's encrypted or not, knowing that it's not encrypted should scare the crap out of you that much more? I can add more, but I would like to leave it before I go. We definitely have two, two, definitely great issues in terms, and I think they are obviously not, we're modeling to keep everything's attached, right? So in terms of privacy and in terms of, uh, uh, in provenance. So we keep getting down to these two issues with blockchain that we try to solve, one being inherently encrypting the data that we store across servers or within a server, and the second being the encryption layers that we lay on top of those networks when getting access into and out of those networks. Two different things. So, you know, we're talking about how we can use proofs to better provide security as well. I've been working with an outfit called Fondora whose whole center of its concern is the desire for the transparency that characterizes blockchain and yet for building in with that transparency the ability to support such traditional financial phenomena as, uh, as confidential transactions. So, so, so let's, let's, let's turn around a bit. So I think we've got the two, two main issues. So how, how, how explicitly is blockchain, uh, going to support or a natural fix? I don't think anyone can fix these are ongoing issues, right? ongoing opportunities as well, right? So, so Josh, what, what do you think, how does blockchain just simplify? How do you think? I mean, at least in very practical ways, not, not to get too high in the sky. Um, we have used blockchain and hyperledger fabric and, and, and DLT to specifically work with large Fortune 500 companies to create decentralized networks within their company to meet the GDPR requirement. You know, we've worked with big companies to provide complete provenance and complete transparency to supply chain to their customers. We've, uh, there's companies out there like many to who are using blockchain based DLT and hash technology to allow companies to meet GDPR and other consumer rights protections within their companies and within their websites. And then you have other companies like alter ALTR who are using blockchain based cybersecurity to encrypt databases and how you can get into and out of databases and how databases store data inherently in one central store or partially across multiple stores. So there's a lot of utilization of DLT and decentralization and different applications that at different layers. So blockchain has some of the answers, we hope. And I'm sure many unintended consequences. It's a tool that provides unique, unique ways of approaching your solutions. That's for sure. And it is. And in some sense, it's a set, a broad set of techniques for dealing with something that's inherent in what we have, which is the issue of distributed ledger technology. Yes. This is a world in which by no means every, all people appears, but there are many peers and sense of nations, sense of corporations, et cetera. And therefore distributed ledgers are necessary because, you know, the peers wish to trust, but verify. Yeah. 100%. Yep. So Scott McGee's, the network is the computer. Right. We have this new thing out there, right? And, you know, it's, it's, so in terms of what we're doing with blockchain, I think a lot already has been done. And maybe, Leanne, you can talk a little bit about that, right? In terms of what you've done at Everledger. And I think you're, and I think we talk about the unintended consequences, right? It's not just about the individual, right? About how we manage people's, you know, privacy and other things. Yeah. Look, there's so much to be said around the evolution of cryptography and the use of that in the hands of real world actors. I think there's still a very large education piece that is required for, you know, the diamond manufacturer or even the sheep grower here in Australia that we work with to enable the understanding of the power of these technologies and what that means. There's not enough that's been invested in terms of that education piece. I think that we have a huge separation between the why we need to do what we're doing and then the how we need to go about it. So I think that the big question for me, but I was quite interested in Dr. Whitfield's comments previously. Are we seeing, right, what we once knew was the worldwide web to the worldwide ledger, but are we seeing the movement from the Dow to the DAC? Like, can I become a decentralized, autonomous person? Is that really going to become the next generation of work? You think about how I can enable a true, decentralized, autonomous identity on the web. And that is kind of let that run free and see how that plays out across many industries. Well, I don't know if you can become one, but I think some such entities are coming up among us. Arguably once history of once, sorry, arguably once history of once transactions on like the Ethereum blockchain, for example, are independent and sovereign from from, you know, their kind of identity and relationship to individual companies, right? It's in countries. Sorry, it's an international kind of thing. And now it is a whole lot of transparency. If you're associated with an address, you see every transaction associated with that address. And we know everyone's working on bringing is your knowledge proofs to their to their ledgers and there are a few that have it in production like Zcash, which is really cool to see. But I do think we'll see more both on the public blockchain side and permission blockchain side, these kind of transnational networks that where, you know, your information will be associated with a private key that you hold again in this wallet, right, or something close to you. And you're the public side of that key. Thank you, Dr. The public side of that key is then, you know, kind of the key to unlocking so much or or the root of a chain of keys so that you can maintain some degree of pseudonymity across different contexts, right? But that will exist outside of the system of how a nation recognizes it who its citizens are, right? Because you want that to be something that can't be taken away by a nation. We all live in nations where that might not be a worry, but if you're fleeing a country that is collapsing, that'll be taken away, you know, you're worried, you shouldn't have to worry that your educational credentials would be taken away from you and disappeared because you became persona non grata from the country that you were fleeing, right? So this context is urgent in refugee and situations in other unstable parts of the world. So it's certainly something groups like ID 2020 have been focusing on groups like Kiva have also operated in low resource environments, bringing some of these technologies in to try to solve some systemic issues that I think do accrue power to the individuals and the citizens in ways they might not even have realized yet. Dr. Diffie, I think you have something to say. I did have something to say. I just barreled through. I'll think a stab at it and you can feel free to cut me off. I mean, at least in answer to the question, is it possible to get to a decentralized autonomous person? I'm not sure and not in this digital age, not unless you live in a closed loop economy or country. I think what we're seeing at least in China and their five year plan is a decentralized non autonomous person by utilizing blockchain to bring together different government networks. I think what we're seeing in places like India where we worked with the telecom authority using zero knowledge proofs to stop spam is the concept of a decentralized autonomous process where people could independently elect. But to get to that decentralized autonomous person, it's really that web 4.0 concept. It could get there, but I don't think we're seeing it right now. That's at least my two cents. I think we're definitely on the journey, right? So maybe we can add a little bit. I know that Diane, we talked a little bit about this. You mentioned the word KYO. So we're talking about people, but is it just about people, right? And what are the consequences to that? Well, arguably, you'd say people have rights. And this is what we're talking about consumer rights or people's rights. But diamonds are dumb and they don't have rights. So KYO, know your object. And when I say diamonds are dumb, so much that they're not inherently connected by way of connectivity to the backbone of the internet. So there is very little chance of having an embedded IoT device within the object, particularly if it's a precious stone because you have to enable the purest of the quality of the stone to remain persistent. So KYO, know your object. When we start thinking about financial services, as looked at KYC to identify the actors within a supply chain or supply or supply chain finance, but it's the object that's actually moving across the planet that's involved in the money laundering, right? It's the object itself that is a part of the transaction. And it's the marrying of those two pieces together that we've not necessarily seen what the power of that can do. But we can certainly identify being on the right side of history, hopefully enabling far better transparency and trade and understanding as well the impact that these objects at their extractive levels are having on the planet. But arguably, how far do we go? Do we keep going even deeper beyond the object level? There's a question that we don't have answers for today, but the work is beginning. Yeah. And I liked when we talked before about the unintended consequences of that, right? So if a sheep is suddenly, you can do suddenly know what's on your sweater, right? And it's a sheep. You suddenly start caring about how that sheep is looked after, right? Yeah, the work we've been doing with Australian wool, of course, is critically important in traceability. But the large brands, Australian wool is a major national brand here. And arguably, Australia broke the prosperity on the back of the sheep before we became a major exporting commodities market player with our natural resources. But the major brands are also interested in understanding the techniques, the husbandry of the animal. So we work in a space that we've found ourselves that we also have to understand not just only people rights, but animal rights. And how do we enable that from an identity perspective? And also the techniques that have been used are highly contentious. You know, we use a formation here called musing, which is critically important in the Australian climate, particularly with the blow flies. And then arguably a lot of our sheep growers are saying it's critical. In fact, that it is for the health of the sheep that we do this technique, but the luxury brands, the very large brands in market are questioning whether that is the right way. And so there's a fast rising element of concern around not just consumer rights, but animal rights and identifying that too. Of course, we're not going to have animals open bank accounts and provide KYA, know your animal. But there is sort of a marrying of that that is critically important, particularly. It doesn't lie, knowing your animal in meat farming, right? I mean, apparently in France, you get you can, when you buy meat, you can get the number of the animal it came from as an anti anti brain diseases measure. So I think there's a lot of knowing animals. Yeah, I'm a vegetarian. I've been working way too closely to the livestock industry more recently. So know your potato. And I think really is how how has your technology done that, right? So I think we're on the journey, right? Before it was aspirational. But I think you're on that journey and things you said aspirational five years ago are happening today. Look, I've been working in mid 90s in RFID technology and I'm 50 this year. So for me, this has been a long, long road to get to this point, certainly not as long as Dr. Whitfield. But you know, we have the layering of technologies that have well been positioned. But the reality is it hasn't been affordable for industry to create the enablement of that because most upon which they've been looking at it from a perspective of closed loop. Once you're starting to, as I said before, align the value and the value creation of these technologies where you have tier three, tier four suppliers, then the markets move. And so I think there is nothing new and novel in traceability today, other than the combination of these technologies coming together. What we need to crack is definitely interoperability. And I'm not just even suggesting interoperability from a perspective of different technology disciplines within one industry, but the circular economy is a critical reformation of value that we're seeing across the world. E-waste that is coming out of Dell computing that can be remanufactured as an input of material supply chain into the jewelry industry is a very real proposition. And I think that that's the piece. The supply chain industry cross threading is really where the power of this is starting to start to be tested, seen and implemented. So the example of Dell is actually an implementation that was completed three or four years ago. But it's getting this at scale with true interoperability across industry threaded that one person's waste stream is another person's important value. So we're already working on this. I mean, does anyone else want to comment on where we are today? What everything is embedded in today in blockchain? Dr. Whitfield, you could probably come back as a diamond, as they say. So I'm looking to forward to seeing you live on on Everledger forever. Yes. Well, I think I need, I imagine that I will live long in various ways like that, which may or may not come to involve my consciousness at some point. But yes, I imagine there's a Whitfield that lives in Google's memory, and it knows about my likes and dislikes and so forth, and maybe runs experiments on it, and other things of its kind. And I think, you know, in the in the long run, we are fundamentally more concerned with the pedigrees of purely digital objects than of things like gold and diamonds and even chips that exist physically, because we are doing our best to have everything possible be done in a decentralized, replicated, redundant, failure resistant, distributed manner. Well, I think Sotheby's and Beeple would agree with you with that now, right, $69 million for NFT for an object that exists only digitally. Now that might be an outlier, that might be, you know, an attribute of some other phenomenon going on underneath the covers, but I think there is there is something to this NFT space, but not just for artwork. NFTs as title to other types of assets, not just diamonds, but think about cars or land or rights, mineral rights to certain things or other types of agreements between parties, being able to deal with those in non-fungible, but still portable and assignable ways is, I think, the basis for so many of the blockchain initiatives that are out there. And, you know, I kind of, I have a hope actually that anything we think of today that involves a registry somewhere, having to, whether it's registering your warranty when you buy something or it's, you know, your house or a car purchase or otherwise, that in a privacy preserving way, we're able to move that to decentralized databases. So those don't become kind of the property of just one company, but becomes a shared, a shared bit of data between myself and the person or the company I bought something from, but also now something that portably I can take and use to prove to others. And I think that that's ultimately where this stuff heads. And that's why I think we see blockchain driven supply chains and everything from diamonds to rice to airplane parts. Now there's now one of the largest used airplane part marketplaces runs on top of distributed ledger technology with Honeywell has described this. We have a case study actually on the Hyperledger website about this and it processes something like a billion dollars a day worth of flow of goods being exchanged about, you know, to help provision airplanes and play. So I think it's dropability and instant traceability, but providing instant authenticity and verifiability of that to good part as well. They're all multi-dimensional in terms of value ads that you're getting into the supply chain value. Yeah. So I'm going to ask you, I'm just going to ask a few questions, right? So I think first for the people who are watching this now and in the future, right? As this becomes an object, how would you suggest that they get involved? So if you want to get involved in provenance, you're an SME in China, you're a farmer, I think you get involved in association or if you're a tech company, just in terms of provenance, maybe I'll ask Leanne that and maybe Brian. And then in terms of security, how do you get involved in that? So you can be part of this kind of helping the consumer because in the end it's up to the consumer probably to work on consumer rights as well, right? I always like a blockchain as a people's technology. And so for the very reason of that, it's open source. And so literally anyone can get involved. I mean, Everledger broke the back on our ideation because we were able to effectively pick up open source. There's large scale communities now that are building incredible protocols and elements and API endpoints. There is an ocean of possibility out there, particularly around some of the grandfathering of incredible knowledge coming into the next generation of what we're building. From a provenance perspective, I would say it does take the orchestration of many actors in a supply chain. And the work to be done is that alignment into value creation and understanding the values of what you're wanting to build. And peak bodies have a very clear role to play in this because how do you bring together that orchestration event, the coalition of the willing as they say. But sort of a farmer can start at the very beginning to say, I want to start recording the understanding of what we're doing and then build it with the inside of the value proposition of the network. Those that have procurement contracts can begin to wave the pen over this being a critical part of the purchasing cycle. And once we start to have that become a part of embedded within trade, then we won't be talking about blockchain. We won't be talking about provenance. It will just be, as it should always be, labels with inside of jackets or shirts will not just only show, you know, the type of materials used, but the footprint of the amount of water that's being used. And consumers are having a very large voice around that. So if you're presented in a retail outlet with Uniqlo and H&M, and it looks the same, but there's a very different material use, certainly those questions are starting to be asked by consumers. So I would say we are all consumers. So why don't we start there? Why don't we start by asking ourselves the questions when we presented with a purchasing opportunity or in a retail environment, as well as if you're a technologist, then welcome to the community because it's big and embracing. Brian. And I'm going to start somewhere different than just the consumers. I'm going to start with if you're a developer interested in this or a business owner or otherwise involved in business development in any sector, frankly, first get educated, understand where these technologies have been deployed successfully. Actually, I'd say first understand that when we say the word blockchain, we kind of are meaning two things. We're wrapping in the cryptocurrency side of the world, which does have an issue with the energy burn, energy consumption, and some of the other activities that go on there. I'm going to be neutral on that. But the other end, which is about permissioned networks that don't have the energy consumption issues that are more designed for enterprise networks. And there's a lot of information out there about how to understand that. The second thing to understand is there's been a lot of proofs of concept that haven't quite crossed the chasm into running into production and creating value. We have quite a few user studies on the Hyperledger website, that case studies that talk about different projects that have crossed over to becoming deployed and in production that are worth reading. But there's other reports from groups like the Blockchain Research Institute or Mary Lassidy's group at the University of Arkansas has done a lot of studies on how Walmart and other major and FedEx and other major companies have deployed this stuff. So lots of good material out there. And even as a developer, it's really important to understand the why and get the incentives alignment right, so that if you take the next step and start scratching into the technologies there and learning how they work, that's the best thing. Every bit of these technologies have kind of a hello world equivalent, have tutorials, especially the ones that are at Hyperledger. We have what I like to think are kind of a nice set of tutorials and ways to immerse yourself gradually. And the technologies are still young enough that they work. They work pretty well. If you find a bug, let us know. We try to be humble about it. But we really hope as well that people consider joining those projects and becoming a part of pushing those technologies forward. So that's the journey for anybody whose business or developer, but then that extra little bit for the developers that we think anybody can follow. So, Witty or Josh, do you advise how people, but Witty, to get involved in cryptography or get involved in this? Well, if I were giving advice to quote young people for real advice, I like to say cryptography hasn't been very good to me as some comic on Saturday Night Live parallels what you said about baseball. But I don't think it's any of this is necessarily the most important thing in the world. And I would think the most critical thing is probably bioengineering at the moment, because that's what's going to most immediately going to replace all of us. But a general piece of advice of what you want to do as research is to work on boundaries. So if you work at the center of a field that's been investigated for a while, if you're smart enough, you may solve problems and you'll be very very much recognized because you'll solve problems that have been hanging around for a long time and become very well known. On the other hand, the easier way to find problems that will have a big impact on the world and you'll likely be able to solve is to work at the boundaries of fields. And so those are two kinds of advice. That's great. I think our next one is going to be blockchain and bioengineering. I can see that. I think that's definitely a very interesting space. I'm going to quickly do a quick round, Robin. We've got a few minutes left. So that's two questions ready. Out from scores from one to 10, 10 being we're managing it. Today, how good are we at managing consumer rights? And what would be your score in 10 years' time between one and 10? I'm going to start with Joshua. We're at a negative five right now. I think we might get to a two or three in the next 10 years, assuming we don't take the whole damn network down. I think folks need to understand network encryption and data encryption separately. And I think people need to put a lot more understanding into cryptography and different types of public key and asymmetric cryptography and how they're being used. I think in the coming years, it's not just going to be about the utilization of blockchain, but how we see companies and bad actors employ AI and machine learning and quantum computing over time. And I think that's the real fear in the next 10 years. We can create all these great security layers. What will we create computing that can crack them faster than we can actually secure them? For right now, I don't think we have any idea how unsecured our data is on a day-to-day basis. Most people, they should really understand. Yeah, so you're going from minus five to two, so that's a jump of seven. Yeah, that's a solid jump. I'm an optimist, not like Brian, but it's partially. It's an expectation that you raise it. So Brian, what are your two numbers today? Right now, I think we are actually at a two. I do think blockchain technology is hardening and providing greater resiliency to supply chains in ways that aren't obvious at all to consumers. It might be even hard to measure, but seeing it deployed in so many different domains, it is having an impact. It was effective during the earlier phases of the pandemic in helping provide greater flexibility to the PPE supply chains coming out of China. And what's going to actually make a big difference over the next year in taking this directly to consumers will be the vaccination credentials, vaccination passport kinds of stuff happening out there that will be, if they're digital, and if they're done right, and if groups like Linux Foundation Public Health and the COVID CREDS Initiative and the Good Health Pass Initiative and others that are all working on this together are successful, we'll see wallets in people's hands that they present every time they cross the border, every time they want to go to a protected concert, that shows your vaccination status. And that will be using verifiable credentials that ultimately wind up to a public key infrastructure running on top of a distributed ledger. Again, they might not know that it says blockchain in headline quotes around that, but it will be making material difference in effecting positively their consumer rights. And so I'm definitely the optimist on this. Maybe that brings it up to a six out of 10, who knows. So you're two to six, more positive to a six, that's a four, that's good, that's above the five. And Leanne. I think we've got the know why, we're sitting at probably a seven or an eight, and the know how is sitting at a sort of a two, but more pressingly is the know when, and that probably needs to be amped up as to now. So that's my numbers. Okay, so we've got a seven, a two, and a three. So it's now. I think you're saying we can't wait five years to sort some of these issues out, right? And where do you think we are in consumer rights now? I'm going to say it minus three, but then I'll listen to Joshua and I figured if he figures a minus five, I'll say minus five. Where will we be in five years? I think minus 10. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I am afraid we've come to the end of the hour. And just at that point, I think we need another discussion. I'd like to thank Brian, Dr. Whitfield, Leanne, and Joshua for being an amazing panel. You know, definitely legends. We really enjoyed that. For all you though listening there, thank you very much for listening and in the future. Take care. I think we have a lot to discuss and a lot to do. So please do get involved or do some stuff down below on YouTube, on the YouTube link below and also on Tencent QQ, Tencent Video on how to get involved and help. I think what is this very, very important issue around consumer rights and how blockchain can help. Thank you very much, everybody. Take care. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. I'm glad you're Dr. Dithy. Yeah. Thank you. Good night.