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**Anna Derbakova:** Essentially, if you wanna tamper with some of the data that was previously stored in the blockchain without being noticed, it's gonna be pretty hard to do, because... In an easy way to explain, the hash of the data in a given block is included as part of the next block. So if you modify a part of a ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And they don't agree. |
**Anna Derbakova:** And they don't agree. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Anna Derbakova:** So that's in a nutshell what blockchain is. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You explained it so well. |
**Anna Derbakova:** Thanks, well I appreciate that; hopefully it's clear for you, too. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I mean ... I'm getting it, so it's definitely making a dent for sure. |
**Anna Derbakova:** Glad to hear it. So the point is you can't change the data that you store; if you have an account and you have X dollars in your account, it doesn't mean you can't change the value of that X dollars - you certainly can, but the point is it's another transaction that you append. You append it, you do... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha, okay. |
**Anna Derbakova:** It's becoming a really hot technology in the finance field, also in supply chains - an example I discussed yesterday - because there are so many middlemen in transaction and exchanges in a supply chain network... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** UPS, FedEx... |
**Anna Derbakova:** \[07:46\] Yeah, so many... I gave the example of supply chain of pork, in China, farm to table - how many people change hands between actually growing something and actually going through storage facilities, or some kind of processing facilities, and people who deliver the goods... Who actually has ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. It's very secure. |
**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah, so if somebody messes up your product, you can go and trace where exactly that happened, and then there's no questions. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. What does this technology replace? That's what I think of when I think about blockchain. Obviously, we're evolving in the way we use technology; it's gotta be replacing something... What's currently in place now, in these areas, to do something similar? |
**Anna Derbakova:** I think there's different ways in which... Like supply chain, right? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Or is there no framework at all, and blockchain is the new framework that will...? |
**Anna Derbakova:** Well, blockchain is almost a composition of some existing technologies. Blockchain obviously has a storage layer, like a database - you have to store your state for your transaction, or your asset or whatever. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is the database your choice, or is it chosen by...? |
**Anna Derbakova:** It depends on your implementation. Hyperledger uses a specific type of database, but it's pluggable and you can use something else. A database essentially stores the data, but it stores it in a very unique way - it stores it in blocks, but also the hash of the block is stored in the next block. That... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, right. |
**Anna Derbakova:** So that essentially allows you to store that data in a way that you're explicitly pointing to the previous block. So if any of the previous blocks have been modified, that link in the chain is now broken because you're pointing to a block who's hash has changed, so it no longer exists, essentially. ... |
That's a cool, new idea that came from the way Bitcoin was implemented, because that's the idea that they used. Then other parts of the blockchain also involve existing technologies like peer-to-peer communication, consensus for the nodes to basically agree how to commit the transactions, the ordering of the transactio... |
What does it replace? It depends on the specific field. For example, supply chains work today. If you wanna argue "Are they effective?" Well, yeah, you get your meat at the store, you get your goods on the shelves... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Has someone tampered with it though? |
**Anna Derbakova:** ...but you don't really know how many irrelevant steps are happening, you don't really know how much fat you have in the process, so to speak. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Good choice of words, nice pun. |
**Anna Derbakova:** \[laughs\] You know what I mean? Like, how many steps are really necessary in solving this problem, or is it really as effective as we want it to be? The paperwork - there's gobs and gobs of paperwork every time you ship something or receive something, or deal with customs. A lot of that is just pro... |
\[11:47\] Also, I think it has a lot of applications going forward to integrate with other technologies, like IoT, for example. That's like a huge use case they're exploring also at IBM - let's say for supply chain, to equip your supply chain with devices. Let's say you're shipping a container across the Atlantic, you ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And those all append to the... |
**Anna Derbakova:** Those essentially communicate to some gateway, and they report. You can use that as a part of your contract on the blockchain, to essentially determine if you're being treated fairly by your supplier, let's say. And if they're not upholding their end of the deal - let's say the meat's spoiled becaus... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. |
**Anna Derbakova:** So in a way you can remove a lot of those question marks, and you can really record that and be sure that that's what's happening. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm sure that a lot of people who listen to this will have heard of Bitcoin before, I know that for sure. Listeners of this show, a hundred percent they know about Bitcoins. |
**Anna Derbakova:** Bitcoin is pretty popular. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm sure they do. They watch Mr. Robot, they know what Bitcoin is, they know about E Corp... That's the kind of audience we're talking to here for sure. But for those who may be coming to this subject from a different angle, what's the state of blockchain? Is it a spec? Who owns where it's at? Is it... |
**Anna Derbakova:** So if you just say "What is blockchain?", blockchain is an architectural concept almost; it's something that you build on top of, but there's different types of blockchains. The blockchain that supports Bitcoin is the first one that was out there, but then we got other types of blockchains, like the... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** The same transfer of one record point to the next is the basic concept that they all share. |
**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah, that's the basic concept; that's still there, because in Bitcoin you're exchanging essentially value, right? You would be exchanging value of Bitcoin, but in Ethereum you could be exchanging some kind of coin, but you could also be exchanging an asset, because they have the idea of a smart con... |
So I think that's a question that's definitely gonna need to be explored fairly soon. If you have two different blockchains with different consensus algorithms, how do you deal with that? These questions... I'm not sure if IBM, for example, is researching anything into that - at least I'm not directly involved in it - ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. So at IBM, what role do you play in regards to IBM? Is it IBM Blockchain, is that...? |
**Anna Derbakova:** IBM Blockchain is the name of our organization. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay, so it's like a department, basically. |
**Anna Derbakova:** Yeah, that's like a department in the Cloud Organization, and I'm part of that, as an employee at IBM. But we do contribute to the project, we're officially committers on the project... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And it's Hyperledger. |
**Anna Derbakova:** \[15:48\] Hyperledger. Hyperledger has a couple of projects under it. If you go to hyperledger.org, and there's a tab at the top called Community and you click on that, and you click on Projects, you will see that there is a handful of projects in there. One of them is Blockchain Explore, for easier... |
Sawtooth Lake is a contribution that was made by Intel, so I honestly don't know a whole lot about that. I'm looking forward to learning more about it, but at this point I can't say a whole lot about it. But a lot of us contribute to Fabric, and also projects that are directly related to Fabric, like SDKs - in order to... |
Actually, on the team, I work on the Node.js SDK team, so we contribute a lot to the Node SDK repository underneath Hyperledger. People contribute to different parts of that code, but it's all underneath the same umbrella organization of Hyperledger. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It says here on the homepage the Hyperledger Project is a collaborative effort... |
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