Alexandra Giannopoulou was recently interviewed for the Frankfurter Allgemeine, on the topic of blockchain research in academia.
She discussed the European Union’s interest in blockchain research highlighting the example of decentralized identity, all within the broader challenge of trust in and through digital technologies.
Find the article online here (in German).
The Dutch Blockchain Coalition organized an Online conference, where one panel discussed research priorities in the blockchain domain.
Balazs took part in the discussions. Please watch the debate here:
OnlineSeminar | Webinar: Online DBC Conferentie 2020 | Webin
On 11 June, Dr Balázs Bodó will be speaking at the Asser Institute. During this research seminar, he will be presenting his paper: ‘Mediated trust: a theoretical framework to address the trustworthiness of technological trust mediators’.
Trust is what enables the cooperation of strangers in face of risks, contingencies, and potential harm. We are going through a global crisis of trust due to globalization and digitization. On the one hand, digital technologies contribute to this crisis through their destabilizing and disruptive effects. On the other hand, they offer new ways to produce trust. In either case, digital technologies permeate and transform almost every space where trust may emerge, is produced, and used. This creates new, often unknown types of risks and contingencies, which also require trust to be overcome.
We are entering an era where trust is technologically mediated, yet what little we know about the trustworthiness of trust mediating technologies gives us no reason to trust them.
We need trust technologies we can have confidence in. To achieve that goal, we need to understand the limitations of using purely technological ways of producing trust, and upgrade or change our existing institutional logics of trust production and distrust mitigation to incorporate technological trust mediators.
This talk outlines the current crisis of trust, the challenges technological modes of trust production generate, the nature of the institutional change, and the policies which can produce trustworthy technological trust mediators.
Source: T.M.C. Asser Instituut – Events
The EU Blockchain Observatory has organized a workshop on the research priorities around blockchain technologies. Balazs was part of the academic panel. Please read the report, and watch the panel below:
One of the new research threads of the Lab is technology mediated trust. It concerns the following simple questions:
These questions are laid out in more details in a paper currently under review at New Media and Society. The draft version is available here: Mediated Trust – A Theoretical Framework to Address the Trustworthiness of Technological Trust Mediators
There is also a talk version. See and download the slides below.
full call here: https://www.uva.nl/en/content/vacancies/2020/02/20-080-postdoctoral-socio-legal-research-scientist-at-ivir.html?origin=dxuSI3bDRY2CW7N9J3yPlw
As a research scientist, you’ll be working on the social and institutional aspects of trust in and by technological systems. Multiple technologies emerged to produce trust (such as global reputation systems, (self-sovereign) identity systems), or minimize the need for trust (DLTs). Trust, as produced by technical systems has many possible sources: strong cryptography, censorship resistance through decentralization, good governance, or legal legibility, certainty and compliance. Some of these trust sources, like technology governance and regulation, can complement each other. Others, such as compliance and decentralization, seem to be in contradiction. As a social scientist, you will be working with legal scholars on answering the following two questions at the intersection of trust and technology:
You will answer these questions by studying various aspects of trust and trustworthiness in technological contexts.
In particular you will:
We are proud to announce that we have won a large Dutch Science Council (NWO) grant to study the legal conditions of trust in decentralized technology systems. Together with the Blockchain Lab of TU Delft, and the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and the material support of the Dutch Ministry of Interior, and the Dutch Pension Administration, we will study how law can contribute to various form of decentralized, DLT based trust technologies, such as self-sovereign identities, or decentralized marketplaces.
See the full press release below.
Researchers at the IViR Sovereignty4Europe project are exploring the principles of an ‘Internet-of-Trust’. The aim is to design a system that securely stores varied transactions in a blockchain. IViR is conducting the project in collaboration with researchers from TU Delft, Erasmus University Rotterdam and other partners. The 3.3-million euro project was funded through contributions from NWO, RvIG, Holland High Tech, Topsector HTSM, and Delft Blockchain Lab TU Delft.
Project leader Johan Pouwelse (TU Delft): ‘Internet behemoths like Amazon, eBay, Google essentially sell trust: we use Amazon and eBay as trusted intermediaries, and visit Google to find relevant websites. These giant companies then store our personal data on their own individual servers. We aim to replace these US-dominated central servers with a general, non-profit and open source alternative that can serve as the basis for a reliable blockchain economy. A scalable and reliable way of maintaining trust and reputation in an open environment, with no need for a central authority.’
The project should culminate in the design of an internet-based system capable of reliably storing a wide range of transactions in a blockchain, in line with European legislation. This will make individuals uniquely identifiable and allow researchers to ascertain levels of trust from previous transactions. The Internet-of-Trust infrastructure is currently being evaluated in an online community made up of 50,000 internet users. The legal aspects of this blockchain economy are being evaluated on the basis of national and European privacy laws.
The project is being headed by Balázs Bodó, the founder of the ERC-funded Blockchain and Society Policy Research Lab.Bodó: ‘The legal team is assessing how new, technological forms of trust building can work with rather than against the legal system’s current trust building instruments such as regulation, law enforcement and the court system.’
In addition to the three universities, the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations’ National Office for Identity Data (RvIG) is also actively participating in the project. RvIG aims to contribute to an open, universally accessible ecosystem that meets both social (privacy and security) and economic needs. Amongst other benefits, the new system should help strengthen trust in digital transactions, reduce costs and promote the development of alternative forms of service provision such as an electronic ID card.
The project should also yield insights at a European administrative level. The European Commission (EC) has asserted that blockchain technology allows for new distributed and interaction models that are based on direct peer-to-peer information exchange and do not require any central platforms or intermediaries, and is currently assessing the feasibility of an EU Blockchain Infrastructure (EuroChain). Sovereignty4Europe seamlessly reflects these European ambitions.
After a year or so being part of writing the Dutch National Blockchain Research Agenda, the Lab is now part of a winning consortium which puts parts of that research agenda in practice.
Together with TU Delft’s Blockchain Lab, Erasmus University, the Dutch Ministry of Interior, and others, we will be working on trustworthy blockchain applications in the next 4 years, due to a generous, 1.5M Eur NWO grant, and a similar amount of private contribution.
Alexandra and Valeria participated at Gikii 2019 organised at Queen Mary University of London on 9-10 September 2019.
Valeria focused on the issues raised by Libra’s promise to create a decentralized and permissionless financial ecosystem open to anyone. Alexandra addressed the dystopic future of having a decentralized and portable digital identity standard provided by Facebook.
The presentation can be found online here
Blockchain&Society Policy Research Lab Lunchtime talk
The Lab organised another iteration of the Lunchtime talks at the Institute for Information Law (IViR) on 6 September 2019.
Andres Guadamuz presented on the topic of his recently published paper entitled “All watched over by machines of loving grace: A critical look at smart contracts”.
Smart contracts are coded parameters written into an immutable distributed ledger called a blockchain. There has been increasing legal interest in the application of these self-executing programs to conduct transactions. Most of the scholarly and practical analysis so far has been taken the claims of this technology being akin to a contract at face value, with legal analysis of contract formation, performance, and enforcement at the forefront of the debate. This article discusses that while smart contracts may pose some interesting legal questions, most of these are irrelevant, and smart contracts should be understood almost strictly from a technical perspective, and that any legal response is entirely dependent on the technical capabilities of the smart contract. The article proposes that smart contracts are not contracts for all practical purposes.
Dr Andres Guadamuz is a Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Sussex and the Editor in Chief of the Journal of World Intellectual Property. His main research areas are on digital copyright, open licensing, software protection, cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and complexity. Andres has published two books, the most recent one of which is “Networks, Complexity and Internet Regulation”, and he regularly blogs at Technollama.co.uk. He has acted as an international consultant for the World Intellectual Property Organization, and since 2005, he has been involved with Creative Commons Scotland (while lecturer at University of Edinburgh and Associate Director of the SCRIPT Centre), Costa Rica and now the UK.
The presentation slides are available online.
