CTO Hans Walter provided an update on his 2023 PIDX Spring talk on Topl’s ‘modular, permissionless proof-of-stake blockchain’. Blockchains promise data transparency and immutability and, if required, privacy. An oil and gas use case involved a drilling platform requesting a shipment of lifeboats. Potential suppliers must be able to bid in confidence. Once awarded, the details of the contract should be private to the two parties. It is impractical to store all the transaction data on-chain, only the digital signature of the data is needed to ‘prove’ its contents. Enter blockchain data escrow, with data on the chain ‘locked’ until a specified condition is met. Zero knowledge proofs also ran, ‘mathematical properties that allow proving information without revealing it explicitly, even to the other party’. Data quality remains an issue, field tickets may have missing or incorrect data. Validation against a data standard goes some way to assuring quality. Behrens concluded that ‘blockchains can serve as an important communication layer for oil and gas transactions’.
Zack Dikhtyar (CEO) and Alisa Konchenko (VP Business Development) presented DocStudio’s capability as a distributed ledger that provides ‘document immutability and notarization’. But note, it is not feasible to place a complete document on the blockchain. Instead, the blockchain ‘OP_RETURN*’ allows the posting of short text messages. These are relatively cheap to send but their size is too small for document exchange. They can be used however to post a document’s fingerprint, or hash value, a compact, fixed length representation of a large amount of data. Any subsequent changes in the document or data will result in a different hash value**. So the process can be seen as the digital equivalent of notarization. Publishing the hash value does not make the original document public so notarization can be achieved while keeping their content confidential. Hash values on the blockchain establishes document authenticity and integrity without revealing the document’s contents, providing a secure and flexible digital notarization solution. Once posted, a permanent ‘prooflink’ is generated, providing a verifiable record. There are some gotchas, a record can only hold a maximum of 40 bytes. Posting comes with a cost in the $10 to $50 range. There is a waiting period of approximately 10 minutes before a transaction gets published and confirmed. DocStudio offers a work around using a second-level ledger that aggregates hashes from a document collection, posting every n-th document to the chain. This ‘super-hash’ can be published to prevent deletion or alteration. A blockchain bot generates a ‘DocStudio Blockchain Certificate’ when the super hash is published. Users also need to decide which of the many blockchain services to use. Presumably their long term existence is a requirement for proof of ‘immutability’.
* OP_RETURN is an ‘invalid transaction output’ that has been used for
various non-financial transactions including curiously ‘OP_RETURN
Callouts of Russian Military Bitcoin Addresses Point to Blockchains’
Growing Role in Geopolitical Conflict’.
** Wolfram Alpha tells us that a 40 byte hash offers around 10^12 possibilities so the chances of a clash are pretty minimal.
Jamie Clark presented OASIS work on ‘XML and other serializations’ and how they can ‘shoe-horn’ business realities into code. OASIS co-hosted the original ebXML project with the UN/ECE which was ‘the start of most modern e-commerce’ (PIDX was there too!) Today the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL) aka ISO/IEC 19845) is used in the Peppol e-business exchange standard. Before discussing blockchain, Clark addressed the comparison of XML with the more recent JSON. XML is the dominant notation for documents and business transactions across diverse systems. JSON is used more for computational instructions and is ‘tighter’. Either can be used in many cases, but they have different ‘sweet spots’. OASIS UBL has both XML and JSON representations. Turning to blockchains in e-business, Clark opined that ‘it’s early days’. There are currently multiple possible notations, complex tool issues and the risk of single-vendor lock-in. On the plus side there are successes. Some like the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and Hyperledger are taking a standards-like, multi-vendor approach and avoid lock-in. Clark confessed to bias, as Ethereum works with OASIS. There is also progress on distributed ledger standardization at ISO TC 307 with a vocabulary standard (ISO 22739) and work on cross-chain interoperability (ISO/AWI TS 23516). In conclusion, ‘the data structure is more important that the serialization in code’, ‘open source is not the same thing as open standards’ and ‘every ‘free’ tool is not necessarily multi-vendor’.
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