Beyond the Bubble – Blockchain Applications and the Drupal Ethereum Module

#DrupalEthereum @digitaldonkey09

Drupal NYC Meetup 

About me

• 20 years ​​web development  
• 10+ years with Drupal
• 2+ years in Ethereum 
• Developer at ConsenSys 

Overview

• What is a Blockchain
• Ethereum Blockchain
• Drupal Ethereum Module
• Launching Daap's 
• Discuss Blockchain applications

• Law - investigating the legal side of "smart contracts" and tokens
• NGOs - transparency in international aid & outcomes
• Banks trying to improve their interbank settlement
• Governments exploring digital IDs and e-government
• Healthcare - sharing evidence, verified prescriptions
• Energy - incentivizing energy efficiency and trading
• IoT - Internet of things, sensors, appliances

Who cares about Blockchain?

What's a Blockchain?

Imagine the Blockchain as a
"Decentralized & Distributed Consensus Database"

"0xd62e7da1d30af2abed70f0ec677fefe0a0db5774  owns 5 Bitcoin"

agree

agree

agree

agree

Blockchain's promises

"Sharing Economy" of
Uber, Airbnb

Centralized User Data,
Facebook, Google

Reduce costs of
middlemen

Self-sovereign
user identity

Internet of
Information

Don Tapscott: "How the Blockchain is changing money and business"

Internet of
Trust and Value

Digital Identity Today

Is proprietary / Isn't self owned

• Facebook / Google 
• Visa, Master, Bank account
• Equifax -> Random hackers
• State IDs / Passports

You pay for your "free" online identity by exposing your privacy

You can be excluded ("You may leave if you don't like the new Terms & conditions")

Self Sovereign Identity

The Idea of decentralized identifier (DID)

• You create a claim:
  "My address is 949 Metropolitan Av, Brooklyn"
• Others attest your claim:
  "New York State verifies that this person is registered at this address with the offical NYS signature"
• As a developer you would chose which attestation entities you consider trustworthy

Many people work on this

• uPort (ConsenSys)
• Blockstack
• http://www.weboftrust.info
• http://identity.foundation
• https://sovrin.org
• https://www.civic.com

Blockchain Applications

The decentralized long term perspective

• Peer-to-peer Music / [add our digital good here] markets
• Decentralizing Energy infrastructure
• Asset Management: Trade Processing and Settlement
• Supply chain records
• Self governed organizations
• Tokenized ownership
• Peer-to-peer standards for Airbnb, Über ...
• Fix Journalism
• Self sovereign identity
  • Digital IDs (uPort piloted at "Zug ID" in Swiss)

Blockchain Applications

Lower hanging fruits

• Payments, Money transfers
• Paywall, Micropayment
• Donations, tipping
• Signature Systems - everything requiring a signature
• Bounties
• Subscriptions Services (EIP-948)
• Voting
  ⇒ Investigate "good" contracts and implement in Drupal.

Ethereum

Ethereum is an open-source, public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring smart contract functionality

Ethereum Blockchain

Decentralized
P2P consensus

No central authority
 

Any state change requires a cryptographically signed Transaction

Global ledger with immutable records

Programmable money:
Smart Contracts

Smart Contracts in Ethereum

• Can run automatically when certain conditions are met
• Addressable, can handle money / escrow, Turing-complete
• Crowd founding as a Smart Contract:

Contract crowdFound
 if (account_balance) > $10,000
   move account_balance to founded_account
 else
   move donation_account to original_donor

(pseudocode)

Smart contracts are programs with a state stored on the blockchain

Ethereum - Global or Private

Private Consortium
Blockchain
(permissions, privacy)
 

Global Public
Blockchain

"Writing to Blockchain" requires:

• the private key of the from address to sign the transaction
• some gas fee for computation/data storage in Ether (public chain)
   

Blocks

• contains a hash of the last block
• are created about every 17 seconds

time

Ethereum

• Ether is the currency in Ethereum
• Computations  cost "gas" (payed in ether) to run
  -> anti-spam and incentivize to run the network
• Data changes to a blockchain create immutable audit trails
• Blockchain data is public! (on public chains, if not encrypted)
• Smart Contracts: Code deployed to the blockchain that can control funds
• Private-/public key cryptography like in PGP 

• Asymmetrical/public key cryptography
• Signing requires user interaction (if you don't host the keys        )
• Ethereum Address is derived from the private key
• Signing Transactions (writing anything to the blockchain is a transaction, also sending money, deploying code)
• Signing text (Signatures)
• You may use the key for Encryption (Similar to PGP)
• Any account is independent from the network

Transaction Signers

• Mist browser   (Full Blockchain / Ethereum foundation)
• Metamask   (Browser extension)
• MetaMascara (Metamask in Browser)
• uPort   (Identity provider)
• MyEthereumWallet   (Online or Offline Browser)
• Jaxx (Mobile App & Browser extension)
• Hardware based signing (Ledger wallet)

Ethereum wallets, Identity providers ... 

Literally the key for the user 

Drupal Ethereum Module

• Founded and abandoned in 2014
• New approach started 2016
• PHP Library (Ethereum-PHP)
• POC for signup with registry (8.1.x)
• Currently finalizing infrastructure
  • ​Manage Networks and Contracts
  • Ethereum Signup
  • Ethereum User connector

Current web

Ideal decentralization

How to connect Drupal and Ethereum?

Semi-decentralization

Client side signing using Transaction-signers

Server just pulls data

(no private key on Server)

Architecture challenges

Ethereum-PHP Library

Two signup modules?

Ethereum Signup

• Challenge/response authentication
• No Blockchain interaction - no fee
  Just Elliptic Curve cryptography
• Uses externalauth module

Ethereum user connector

• Smart contract with registry
• May be changed to a paywall
• Transaction require little payment in Ether
• Example module for contract interaction

Mascara & Dapp launcher

Visualize TX signer state 

Initialize dapplet when requirements are met

State and Roadmap

POC (done)

• "User connector" connects Ethereum accounts and user profiles via registry contract ("paywall"). Refactoring to new infrastructure.
  See Video https://youtu.be/Y5Sa7QtpXSE 
• Identity: "Signup" (currently in github feature-ethereum_signup)

Finalizing infrastructure modules (MVP)

• Refactor above to match the new Infrastructure
  (Mostly done. Results in much less code compared to POC)
• Finalize Ethereum-PHP library
• Add more Transaction-signers. Explore and improve UX
• Contract deployment from Drupal backend (Maybe implement Remix)

Drupal Ethereum module

Why should Drupal care about Blockchain?

• Blockchain adds a new trust layer to the internet (we call it web3)
• Drupal can provide Identity in context of limited user groups
• Implement enterprise level workflows, required for Document signing, Peer-to-peer platforms, Asset tracking ...
• Explore new ways of NGO founding, budgeting, voting.
• Investigate future payment methods.
• Pioneer new blockchain based business models 

Lots of Thanks to early
contributors & testers

and all others I talked to

(Commit stats refer to the various involved projects)

Questions & Thank You

• Evaluate use cases, join discussion
  https://gitter.im/drupal_ethereum
  https://groups.drupal.org/ethereum
• Tweet about #DrupalEthereum

thorsten.krug@consensys.net
       @digitaldonkey09

The development of Drupal Ethereum Module
Has been sponsored by ConsenSys
       @ConsenSys

https://consensys.net

slides.com/digitaldonkey/drupal-ethereum-nyc