Past Events:

• Aid and International Development Forum 2019. Ronald Reagan Building in Washington D.C. on the 4 & 5 September 2019 http://www.aidforum.org/
• OECD Global Blockchain Policy Forum, Paris, Sept 12-13

>> Jim Cupplesattended and shared Day 2 was focused on using cryptocurrency for disaster management and there was a lot of blockchain talk, but less so non-crypto examples. Reach out to him for more notes!

Upcoming Events:

• ID2020 NYC September 19th–Alissa, Ric, Lindsay attending
• Scaling Impact for the SDGs Hackathon, New York City Blockchain Center, September 21-22
• SDG Action Zone Program, Rose Garden of the United Nations HQ in New York, September 23-27
• Ukiyo Conference in Osaka, Japan, October 7
• San Francisco Blockchain Week, B4SJ has partnered with Techstars to do a startup weekend for Blockchain for Good. Interested in being a judge, coach, or sponsor for the event? It's Oct 25-27 in San Francisco. 
• Any others?

Understanding Hyperledger Fabric

The presentation is also available in PDF.

• 1.4 release, long term support, Raft consensus differs from Kafka, which is complex and event based, fairly easy to migrate from Kafka to Raft
• What distinguishes Fabric from other frameworks?
  • It's permissioned, as in everyone in the network is identified, unlike public where you don't know who you're transacting with. 
  • Pluggable consensus, currently using elliptic curve libraries, if you want to deploy fabric in china or russia they have different standards and so you need to be able to plug in different libraries
  • Supports smart contracts, write in general purpose language, don't need to know solidity or viper, can be java, go, javascript
  • Support privacy, public networks have anonymity but not privacy. dont want to put all your data for a tx on blockchain itself anyways
  • no mining, no native cryptocurrency, there is active work to introduce it "FabToken"–leads to less risk and less cost to running technology and nodes
  • Key advantage is scalability because you don't have to execute every tx on every node
  • Public network have to treat every entity as adversarial because there is no trust, hence need order-execute model
  • Permissioned system, create a consortium or some closed network of participants, can vet identities, typically have a certificate of authority to identify who they are. There's a shared governance model. Certain degree of trust is established, entities care about their reputation.
  • Public: no governance, it's just the software, no dispute resolution authority
  • optional peer to peer gossip service, BFT
  • Supports LevelDB, CouchDB, BerklyDB (done by oracle but no open source yet), SAP's Hana–bring your own database to the party
  • Because it's not order-execute but execute-order, allows for endorsement policy
  • Smart contracts: don't have to be deterministic, in public they do, they have to all come up with the same results, otherwise it's chaos, can lead to fork etc. which is why you need the specific smart contract languages, limits what you can do in your SC and have to learn new language. With Fabric, bc of endorsement policy and do ordering before publishing, don't have to actually have deterministic answers, can wait until you get enough answers that are the same from your endorsers. You can establish that you need 3 endorsers, and wait for ones that match what you're looking for.
  • execute-order-validate model allows for pluggable consensus
  • Channel architecture facilitates privacy, also private data collections–exchange private info w/in subset of nodes and data only shared by select nodes, can hide data from certain parties–useful for securities trading etc obscure volume and price of security and just share that "Chris and Nancy traded IBM stock"
  • Do have support for zero knowledge proofs using identity mixer
  • See slides for Burrow integration, Fabric EVM chaincode, can publish ethereum smart contracts processed in Fabric and scale to 1000s of tx per sec
  • V2 coming out later this year, keep an eye out for blog posts!
  • See https://lf-hyperledger.atlassian.net/wiki/display/fabric/ for more info!