Rethink Trust 2018: Christopher Ferris, Interview
Recording: Rethink Trust 2018: Christopher Ferris, Interview
so hi Chris thanks for amazing talk and like my first question what do you think like your role in blockchain economy in general and what is a career posited bring you here to your current role in IBM so my role is I'm the chair of the hyper ledger technical steering committee I'm not necessarily a crypto expert or anything like that but what my role is is helping to build communities around open source and open technology and so I see my role as one of helping to grow the hyper ledger to become the place where we develop open source technology for blockchain for the enterprise ok cool and can you describe like K business drivers which like Drive blockchain for the enterprise now what's like a real business problems that blockchain can solve for business so I think there's an awful lot of problems that you could apply blockchain to I'm not sure that they necessarily all make the most amount of sense I think that the primary business drivers are to engineer solutions for which we have not yet been able to solve through other means so you know just to give you an example when we think about sharing information across a supply chain for instance to be able to do better tracking within that supply chain whether that be food or engineer you know manufactured parts or what-have-you in a supply chain to be able to do that across all the different players to share that information across that landscape is something we haven't been able to do so that's a use case that I think that makes a ton of sense there's you know I think that there's sort of a an expectation in some people's minds that blockchain is going to solve all kinds of problems it may over time but we shouldn't get over enthusiastic we should be looking to make sure that we're choosing use cases that are going to yield real value and not just be a substitute for something that already okay cool and now you're talking with a lot of like enterprise customers enterprise and what kind of qualities do they need from blockchain and how you can you like approach with hyper lateral technology right so I mentioned this in my talk but basically the the problem that we're trying to solve is how do you achieve consensus at scale with high throughput and low latency with privacy the the qualities that Enterprise needs are exactly those things right you need high throughput right you think about for instance visa how many credit card transactions do they process in a second and that's like 2400 Bitcoin ethereum Bitcoin is like seven to ten transactions per second ethereum is like 25 or 30 transactions per second so we can't do visa on either of those two platforms and so we're looking to font you know to solve the technical challenges of achieving consensus at scale with high throughput then we have the problem of low latency right you want to make sure that you have confirmation of a transaction within a second or so because again you don't want to be going to a retail store and having to wait in the corner while your transaction clears to buy you know a widget whatever and then we need privacy alright so for enterprise it's it's great to be able to share information but there are use cases that if you did want to share information you still want to share it within a restricted subset of the total network and so solving collectively those those various challenges is what we're trying to do in hypervisor Thanks and can you please describe like was the main technical challenge that you face it with blockchain now in your project and you proof of concepts so I think the one that people are you know so I think consensus you know there's been research on consensus for quite some time and so now it's a matter of applying that the real new sort of innovative technical challenges are coming in dealing with things like zero knowledge proof fighting other means of doing privacy of information and recording that on the blockchain without necessarily revealing the information and potentially even without sharing that information and what I mean by that is you have GD P R for instance in Europe these GD P our requirements mean we can't record personal identifiable information on the blockchain itself but with something like a zero knowledge proof we can record evidence that that information exists and some aspects of its characteristics without actually storing that information on the blockchain so that's that's that's something that I think is an active area of key innovation that we need and what do you think like Google supports is distributed system and futures what kind of skill set is needed like for the engineers who for IP guys who work with the distributed systems the work we're doing in hyper ledger really it extends to all aspects of technology right we're dealing with cloud with containers with cryptographic algorithms with consensus algorithms with management and operations with user interface there's all every every technology discipline you can think of is reflected in the work that we're doing in hyper ledger and so anybody with those skills is welcome to come and participate so it's not you know exclusive of just crypto kitties you know it's it's it's the full gamut of technology that we need help help us at hypervisor okay and and like as you see now a lot of like blockchain events conferences and so on as a community what can we do like for blockchain in enterprise do not like do not start this book chain winter well I think I think don't panic all right just like Doug Adams said don't panic you know we'll survive you know we're going through a little bit of the trough of disillusionment in the Gartner hype cycle you know people are starting to lose a little bit of faith but we will come up and then we'll plateau off on you know set of use cases it's a function of solving those technical challenges that I just I described and also building again what I talked about on my talk building that trust building these consortium getting getting companies who had been previously fierce competitors but to realize that they benefit by sharing and building trust around aspects of their business problems okay thanks and like my last question what do you think about recent trust conference so far I think it's great and I hope it's very successful okay Chris I see it too like thanks for the answers and for your amazing talk Thanks