Hyperledger Foundation Hyperledger Global Forum 2021, 21 Jun 2021

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From YouTube: Hosted Discussion: Decentralized Fabric: Moving Hyperledger Fabric from Consortiums to... Jesus Ruiz

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Hosted Discussion: Decentralized Fabric: Moving Hyperledger Fabric from Consortiums to Public-Permissioned Blockchain Networks - Jesus Ruiz, ALASTRIA

A new kind of blockchain network is appearing, combining permissioning with a decentralized governance model. Public-Permissioned blockchain networks fill the gap between the Public-Permissionless blockchain networks and the Private Consortium networks. Notable examples of such emerging networks are Alastria, LACChain and the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) initiative, a pan-European blockchain network from the European Commission and the Member States. The objective of this presentation is to identify and describe the specific features in the current version of the Hyperledger Fabric project that could be showstoppers for implementing a general, multi-purpose, Public-Permissioned blockchain network of a national or regional scale with a Decentralized Governance model.

To learn more about Hyperledger, the open source community focused on developing a suite of stable frameworks, tools and libraries for enterprise-grade blockchain deployments. Which serves as a neutral home for various distributed ledger frameworks including Hyperledger Fabric, Sawtooth, Indy, as well as tools like Hyperledger Caliper and libraries like Hyperledger Ursa click here: https://www.hyperledger.org/

Session Details & Slides (if available)- https://sched.co/j3f7
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Hyperledger – Open Source Blockchain Technologies

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Good evening from spain, and thanks for letting me being here uh in this presentation, I will talk about some requirements, that public permission, blockchain networks, and I will explain what it what it is impose to the underlying infrastructure, most notably related to scalability and resiliency.

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So, as we all know, 12 years ago, in the middle of the financial crisis and as a reaction to the centralized systems, bitcoin appears as a peer-to-peer version of electronic cash, providing the ability to transact among anonymous parties without requiring a central authority.

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As stated in the bitcoin paper, the objective was to implement non-reversible payments for non-reversible services, because if there is a central entity with a known identity, it is not possible to avoid mediating disputes and the corresponding need for trust.

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The problem is that in the real economy and the real society, most transactions are not irreversible, and this is not a technical limitation.

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It's a core property embedded in the values of a modern society and despite some benefits, one major drawback of public permissionless networks is that there is no recourse to any legal system when things go wrong and this is totally incompatible with consumer protection rules in advanced economies, especially when business to consumer transactions are involved, and this is even more apparent when we consider that businesses can never be anonymous in the real economy of a welfare state like, for example, the european union.

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Later businesses willing to reap some benefits of decentralization but keeping normal citizens protected, started using the blockchain technology in closed networks to be able to transact among a reduced number of companies without requiring a central entity.

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Those networks are called private permissions or more frequently private consortiums, and they are typically banks with banks, energy companies with energy companies, or they are dedicated to a single use case like logistics or full traceability.

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By the way, the theoretical, decentralization aspects of public permissionless networks are lost over the years, as has been already proven, and they are in practice almost as centralized as private consortiums.

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The idea of a public permission network is to combine the best of both worlds, to create a blockchain network which is permissioned, but where the network is not controlled by any single company, a cartel of companies or even a single government.

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The model resembles a common pool resource which is not controlled either by the state or by the hand of the market.

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In essence, the blockchain technology and the associated governance model position this in the sweet spot of the spectrum from fully centralized versus radical decentralization options.

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Now some notable examples of public pressing networks are this alastria, where I participate fc the european blockchain services infrastructure, which is promoted by the european commission and member states lat chain in latin america and the caribbean, which is promoted by the inter-american development bank and very recently, ipsy, the national italian blockchain services infrastructure, and there are more national and regional networks appearing with this model now in order to explain the properties of this type of networks. Okay, let me use this diagram because blockchain is a difficult technology to analyze, because it is multi-faceted.

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If we look at the blockchain as an interconnection technology, we would like some properties from the internet backbone. Most notably it is permissioned, but in an inclusive and decentralized way.

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It is considered as a common good and in many cases as a fundamental right and everybody has the right to join and use the infrastructure according to the access rules which are fair, transparent and inclusive, it is even regulated and, for example, the european union regulation says end users sold, have the right to access and distribute information and content use and provide applications and services and use terminal equipment of their choice, irrespective of the end users or providers, location or the location, origin or destination of the information, content, application or service via their internet access service.

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So this is a multi-purpose infrastructure available everywhere to everybody.

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Blockchain has also some properties of the cloud which confuse many people. For example, many people, especially in big companies, expect the blockchain network to be managed and operated by a single company, so they can sign a contract and service level agreement and sla with one entity that they can make accountable for anything happening in the network.

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They fear or do not understand at all, a blockchain network which is operated collaboratively by a group of entities and where none of them has really control of the network, and this is clearly not compatible with the public permission model. As an example, in the decentralized governance model of fc, the european blockchain service infrastructure, it says, consensus, nodes, orders in fabric should be evenly distributed among member states, and non-member state should be responsible for more than a given number of nodes.

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No technical provider should operate more than a given number of nodes, especially consensus nodes, and member states should coordinate to reduce the amount of shared technical providers.

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Finally, blockchain is much more difficult to scale than internet connectivity or cloud services. Do you need more internet bandwidth across continents? Put another submarine cable in parallel with the old ones. Existing applications and services are not affected and the companies using the internet may get even reduced latency if the cable goes near their destination. Like is happening right now, with the recent llynx subsea cable between latin america and europe.

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However, blockchain capacity, essentially, the throughput looks more like a scarce natural resource like irrigation, water, fisheries, forest or even the whole earth, where over exploitation of the resource brings complete disaster for the internet of value, with pervasive networks, multi-purpose, open and inclusive that can be used for essential services in the real economy.

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We need a proactive governance model which cannot be left to the invisible hand of the market to avoid extreme speculation, coming from consensus, algorithms being used in public permissionless networks, and all of this can be summarized in the manifesto for public provincial blockchain networks, where I will not enter. But you can see here the main points.

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Now, what is required for this type of blockchain networks- and I will address only two things of the many that are needed. Okay, one is the consensus algorithm.

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uh We need a bison team, fall, tolerant, consensus alone, because cft grass fault tolerance or raft, for example, as it is right now in fabric- is not enough in such open and heterogeneous networks, because in cft one compromise, node compromises the whole network, and that means that normally one technical operator has to operate all consensus nodes, and this is a typical approach.

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uh But we need bft consensus, algorithms by something fault, tolerant consultants, not just for technical reasons, but also for government reasons and by the way.

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This is one of the reasons why, in fc, the european blockchain network, even though there are two technologies- one which is ethereum based with bft and another, which is fabric with raft, the widely deployed one is going to be just the bft based mechanics, because with raft, the european commission is going to operate the nose, and this does not fit with the decentralized governance model that the european commission and the governments of the european union want.

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For the moment now, in most implementations of bft, the criteria is to maximize resiliency for a given cost, measured in number of nodes normally or the opposite, minimize the cost for a given level of resiliency measure as a maximum number of byzantine nodes, supported now that makes sense, but in a private public permission network, uh what we really need is to maximize participation for a given level of resiliency.

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We would like to set f the maximum number of failures, for example, six byzantine nodes for any number of machines, because we need to maximize participation for a given level of resilience data set because, because of consensus nodes, the cost is not a limitation in public permission networks.

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So we would like again that resiliency can be fixed. It's a should be a parameter of the network, uh and this should be independent of the actual number of nodes that can participate in the executing execution of consensus and one possible way to maximize participation. Is this? Basically, let me put the laser pointer okay.

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This is just one possible approach: okay, actually, the one that we are trying to use right now in our networks. Okay, uh first, there may be many machines willing to participate in consensus execution- and I don't have time here to talk about incentives, but it is not complex to achieve in the real economy. Okay, the incentive is to participate, and this is what I call the basketball dft consensus allowance, a generalization of castro and liscoff's practical byzantine fault, tolerance and proactive recovery.

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Basically, there is a small team playing on the court at a given time to keep the right level of performance in consensus execution. The players are rotated. This is dark. The green arrows are rotated proactively between the active and standby sets. Eventually, all players have a chance to participate. Okay, so this is rotation.

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The notes are reboot. Safe, refresh is exactly what it means: okay, they are reboot and refreshed in a safe way and if the rotation period is small enough, the system supports an arbitrary number of byzantine failures in the long term.

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If a crash fault is detected, for example, a timeout of the leader or a given node, not voting in several consecutive rounds, then the node is taken out from the active set. This is the yellow arrow okay, so the note is taken out from the active set and put in suspicious state a manual diagnostic process, and public declaration of conformity is needed to continue playing the game.

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Okay, so like in a basketball when you are given a fault: okay in a bison, if a byzantine fault is detected, which is the red arrow, okay, but, for example, two blocks with the same block number. The note is taken out from the active set and putting quarantine the red state.

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The process to have this node again in the game is more involved than with crash falls, because this is probably infected and it was controlled by a bad actor. Okay and very critical, all the information related to the consensus execution. All of this should be available to all participants in the network, not just the consensus nodes in a way which is which cannot be censored by anybody, and any participant should have transparent access to how well consensus nodes perform their roles.

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So we also need a decentralized monitoring tool, at least for the execution of the protocol by the consensus nodes to increase trust on the network from the regular or peer nodes. We need radical transparency in the most important steps in the protocol, normal bst, consensus, implementations are designed to mask failures and continue working, but we. What we want is that those failures, even if the network continues working those failures of the consensus nodes, have to be visible to any participant in another world and to avoid possible censorship of that information.

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Probably some trace information will have to be piggybacked into the cells.

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This allows the implementation by regular nodes of watchdogs, monitoring bodies or failure detectors to collaborate in the resiliency and the uh neutrality of the network. Okay,.

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Also, something very important is that bft assumes independent node failures and this assumption may not be true if all nodes run the same software configured in the same way. Public permission networks are permissioned, but they are potentially much more vulnerable than private consortiums to common mode failures, especially the ones that can be exploited by malicious actors, because the network is generally very low and is wide area.

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It would be ideal to have one technical specification and several implementations from different vendors in different programming languages, and if this is not possible because it's difficult to achieve it would be good to have automatic diversity generation mechanisms, as the community is incentivized to follow recommendations good for them, and this the consensus algorithm is one of the critical things that up to now fabric is lacking in order to implement the type of network that we would like to implement public permission, blockchain networks.

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Now we know that this is coming, but this is a little late yet and now something a little bit more provocative. I would say: okay, this is a simple taxonomy of blockchain applications. Certification is basically about the proof of existence.

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In the past of an object external to the blockchain, like a diploma or most of the credentials or certifications that are needed in real life, the centralized workflow is in reality a generalization of centralization of sorry of certification, in the sense that it registers what each entity says about something done outside of the blockchain and all such certifications are tied together in a walk in a flow.

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For example, traceability of food and exchange of digital value is the most difficult problem to solve by the blockchain and involves the change of ownership of a good, a digital good, where the good and register only exist in the blockchain, and this is in reality, the initial problem that bitcoin tried to solve.

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Something which is not obvious at first sight is that if the object is real, that is, belongs to the real economy and has an existence outside of the blockchain. Its change of ownership can typically, in most of the cases, be implemented as a decentralized workflow, and we do not require the complexity of the exchange of digital value type. Actually, if we look at the real economy or government services, we see that most problems where blockchain can help are related to the types marked in green.

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This is over helping the number of use cases that we find in the real economy. For example, the european commission announced last week the future availability of the european digital identity wallet for all citizens, together with regulation for electronic ledgers. This is the the official name they they gave as trusted services.

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uh This is based on the european self-serving identity framework and the fc blockchain network that I mentioned before. Okay, so this is the end result of the work that we have been doing there, because I I have the pleasure to to participate there, and this is a good example of the certification pattern, taking dearly directly from the regulation. Literally, an electronic ledger combines time, stamping of data and their sequencing with certainty about the data originator, similar to electronic signing, with the additional benefit of enabling a more decentralized governance, which is suitable for multi-party cooperation.

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Data integrity is very important for the pulling of data from the centralized sources for self-sovereign identity solutions. For attributing ownership of digital assets, for recording business processes, to audit compliance with sustainability criteria and for various use cases in capital markets, those two sentences are in regulation. So you see what the european union is trying to achieve.

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Okay, and if you haven't look at this, I I recommend that you look at the regulation, because this is a proposal and this is exactly what the european union is doing, and this is a huge advance in blockchain technology in the european union.

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Now, to summarize, the main requirements for certification and decentralized workflows are data integrity or in blockchain parlance immutability, even though immutability does not exist in the real world. Okay, but hype is the king here, the uncensorability, which is the availability of the information, with a possibility for censorship by anybody. Even the originator- and here comes the contentious issue in reality for most use cases where we can see the blockchain trying to be applied, we don't really need global total order and, for example, the diploma.

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The diploma is a trivial crdt, the conflict-free uh conflict-free replicated data type okay, so diplomas issued by different universities to different people commute, which means that in germany, one university can issue a diploma and in spain another university, they can issue a diploma and we don't need a total order. For those two facts.

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Objects registered in the blockchain are unique and read-only once created like the diploma, the right ones you read many times for all your life. Copies can be created with a problem even in different networks, which means that in general, double spending is not a problem, because you don't sell your identity, basically okay or a diploma, but typical crdt and eventual consistency because they are related. Okay- and this is eventual consistency. Implementation are not bisent intolerant, so we don't have any solution right now for solving those problems.

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So we end up killing flies with cannons and using total global order or strong, consistent solutions like bfc, for example, or raft for something that does not really need it, and this affects scalability.

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So the question is: do we need something in the blockchain like database, isolation, levels and different consistency models?

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But we would need this in the same infrastructure in runtime, because we would like something like the internet of value, a blockchain infrastructure by the internet, but we would like to be able to tune consensus and consistency depending on the use case, because some use cases may need eventually consistence systems, others strongly consistent systems or even be able to specify per concurrent object type, which means, for example, for a smart contract.

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We even may need a virtual machine with optional commutative operations and associated smart contract, language or or domain specific language, okay, which in most cases in my personal experience, we don't really need to incomplete. But of course that doesn't mean that for some use cases we need to incomplete systems. Okay, so in the ideal world normal programmers can choose simple model with a strong consistency, because it is very easy to reason about those systems and applications, but experienced ones can choose consistency, model appropriate for use case. So basically the same thing that happens with databases.

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You can have relational databases with strong consistency or nosql databases, with eventual consistency and, depending on the use case, you choose because, for example, if we have eventually consistent systems- and this is some properties of the credential flow with with this type of blockchain systems- okay, we have incredible scalability, because the main credential does not require blockchain transactions- incredible performance, because it's independent from the network incredible resiliency, because it doesn't depend on the blockchain once they have been issued, because verification can be done in any node, an incredible robustness- and this is something that can be achieved for most of the use cases that we really need in the real economy.

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So- and this is the last one- okay in conclusion, public permission network. This is a common good or should be a community like the internet, and it has to be permissioned with decentralized governance and both things. Permission and decentralized governance are very difficult to put together, but we really need that, like in the internet, it should be non-discriminatory multi-purpose.

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So once you access the network like in the internet, you can use the network for whatever you want. Without asking permission to, anybody has to be multi-purpose and focus on the real economy, so that means no extreme speculation because it has to be an infrastructure, it has to smell and behave like infrastructure, and we need a regulatory environment because this with the size of the network and the heterogeneity of the network plus bft, it means that we can implement efficient peer-to-peer among companies not just about people.

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Okay, because the network is going to be built by companies. We need peer-to-peer among companies which is impossible with centralized technology, but it requires some homogeneity in the regulatory environment, for example, recognition of identities and dispute resolution, and this is exactly what the european union has announced last week.

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But we are going to have an interoperable system of identities across all of the european union states, and it may be this type of networks. May they may be restricted to regions. They may not solve the global problems, okay, but it may be restricted to europe, which is one third of the gdp of the world to trade corridors like, for example, europe and canada or combinations.

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But of course there are many. Many challenges ahead right now. There is no solution complying with all the requirements and I have just scratched the surface, and this is the end. So I will finish the presentation and then we have, I hope, enough time for questions, because probably this is contentious.

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Okay, I I saw one question uh the slice yeah yeah. I will. I will upload the the slides. Let me go to the question. Q, a.

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And the question I have only one question: okay, so do you mention monitoring the network for bison team ferrous? Do you have plans for implementing something like that for your network? Well, actually, we are implementing that yeah.

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But of course, if it is a byzantine failure, by definition, a byzantine fellow or byzantine, behavior uh is completely arbitrary, so we can only detect some byzantine pharaohs like, for example, the one that I mentioned. Two blocks with the same block number is clearly not a technical error.

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Okay, because you have had to sign digitalization the two blocks, so this is a byzantine failure, uh but yes, not just byzantine fellows, but anything which is also across grassfall torrent and again, not just monitoring for the technical resiliency, but monitoring to provide trust to the all the participants. So, for example, in onenet we have 180 nodes, okay, all of the nodes, whether they participate in consensus or not, they can see what the validators or orders or the consensus nodes, as I want to call them, are doing.

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uh However, we still don't have a fully decentralized uh monitoring system. Okay, this is a challenge. uh What I mention okay is not in my presentation: it's not something that we already have it's something that we need. Okay, and I really know that it's very difficult to achieve.

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I don't know if there is going to be any more questions.

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Okay, I see uh the first question from benedict uh in the in the chat. Okay, that near bft is production ready soon. I really hope. I really hope, because this is going to be a breakthrough for us, okay, because, for example, in alaska and the european commission, and then let me let me just use the time uh in the in the european blockchain service infrastructure, where we have 28 governments plus the european commission. We have basically at this moment two technologies.

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One I mentioned is uh well: both are hyperledger by the way one is hypothe bezu and another one is hypological fabric now with fabric. We have a problem, and the problem is that, given that the consensus- because otherwise it's fantastic technology- okay, but given that this is roughed, uh I already explained why uh we cannot implement a system where all the orders are- let's say decentralized.

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The operation of the orders ideally has to be fully decentralized and in such a way that nobody has control of anything of anything in the network. Okay, once the network is set up. uh Of course, if all the governments agree on something, they can stop the level okay, they can censor. But uh if you give, if you live in the european union, such as life, okay, uh actually uh it's going to be much more difficult for the governments to collude in the blockchain network than uh in the real life, okay and another property.

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One single government is not going to be able to censor anything or to modify anything or to do anything uh in the blockchain, so the blockchain network being operated by the member states by the way the blockchain network fc is not going to be limited to governments, it's going to be open to any public administration initially and also to the private sector. Okay.

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So this is going to be in my, in my words, the backbone of the blockchain uh networks in europe, because uh there's not going to be a single network, it's going to be the future, it's going to be a network of networks and they have to be interoperable okay, and this is going to happen in europe and in the rest of the world.

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So I don't see any questions. I don't know if I explain.

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The whole thing very clearly.

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Okay, so for the question is but there's one question here which says from benedict, which bft algorithm are you using for the ethereum blockchain network? This is ibft 2.0, okay, this is this is uh basically bezel and we also have qualm and we hope that they are going to be joined together. Okay, because we need, as I said, the diversity, but this is ibft.

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This is a variant of bft. Okay,.

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But the the actual bft implementation, uh I would say, does not really matter. The most important thing is, that is byzantine, and of course, that has the properties of uh this bison team fault, tolerance, which is finality and so on. Okay,.

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And- and I will okay thanks for the presentation- would love to see their slides yeah. I will. I will upload the the slides uh in any case as as I mentioned before. Let me let me just serve the screen again because, as we have to have more time right yeah, let me serve the screen again and.

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One one of the of the criticism for bft okay is that they are not scalable, because you can only run the consensus algorithm with a limited number of nodes. Actually, we don't see this a problem if you implement this scheme, okay, what we call the the the the basketball uh basketball team bft consensus. Okay, this is not the official name, okay, basketball. Why? Because in reality, what all the nodes want is to participate and eventually they are going to participate? It's like in basketball.

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Okay, only five people can play at the given time, but for winning the championship. You need the collaboration for everybody, so everybody has to put their part and by the way we can do something better than in basketball, because in basketball teams normally have uh uh something like the preferred team. The first team here you don't have the preferred team.

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So everybody you can have here hundreds no problem, but assuming that you are limiting this to, for example, 22 nodes, even even 50 we have tried and- and it works perfect, okay, uh but it's approaching the limit with the current with the current technology. But imagine that you have here 21. here you can have hundreds doesn't matter eventually, given the rotation, you rotate one every time, then they all participate.

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They are all going to be useful for supporting the network and the network. The resiliency is given not just by bft, but also by the rotation, as as is explained in the in the paper from castrol angle, scoffs. Okay, as I as I spend proactive recovery, proactive recovery. If you do this rotation uh fast enough, then the bad guys, because you do the same refresh you do reboot from from safe memory.

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Basically from the serial, for example, okay and cryptographically verified booting, you are eliminating any possible contamination or infection that a bad actor put in one note, so if the time or if the rotation period is much lower than the time required by the bad actor to control. One third of the notes: actually you are achieving two things: the bad actor will never able to control one third, and you are free from byzantine failures for the long term.

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Okay and then again, these two paths taking out the uh nodes is something that is not embedded in, for example, ibft in bezel, okay for the moment, so we have to do this manually using the apis. We would like to see this implemented in the consensus area. Okay, because this is not the typical implementation of bft, as I said, is just okay, because we are bft, then we are resilient against failures, but this is also governance. Okay, so we want bft again for two things: technically technical, resiliency and governance and transparency.

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Those two things are very important in this type of networks. Okay, and I would say that okay.

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If there are no more questions, then- and the moderator does not.

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Or is not against this? I think we can finish the presentation and I hope that it was interesting. I will upload the the the slides okay.

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Let me upload this okay, so this is going to be provided by the speaker, which is me in this link. Okay.

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Okay, so thank you very much.