Category: General

Creating a Self-Sustaining School Ecosystem with Blockchain

Abstract

The current school system is too structured, rigid, and inhibits creativity. The current school curriculum inadequately prepares the students to survive the fast-changing world of the 21st century. While schools need to comply with the national education policy to teach designated subjects, schools should include other programs that could help to resolve the aforementioned issue. Therefore, our school proposes building an ecosystem using blockchain technology where students can freely create and share their contents. We believe that the blockchain ecosystem will nurture young children in developing creative minds and entrepreneurial skills.

I have written this white paper for a hypothetical blockchain project. This blockchain project is to build a private blockchain ecosystem for an international school. 

First, we need to conduct a feasibility study before we start planning any blockchain project. Here, I am using a methodology called the CATWOE analysis. It can be applied to any new project.

CATWOE Analysis of  Building a Blockchain School

CATWOE is an acronym that stands for Customers – Actors – Transformation process – Worldview – Owners – Environmental constraints. It’s a simple analytical approach to find solutions to problems. The CATWOE Analysis makes it possible to identify problem areas, look at what an organization wants to achieve, and which solutions can influence the stakeholders. The analysis uses thought methodology from multiple perspectives. It is especially useful for an organization that wants to implement a new project that involves a drastic transformation process. The implementation of the blockchain technologies in a school curriculum qualifies for such transformation. Therefore, there is a need to understand the problems and try to find solutions before we proceed with the project implementation

C – Clients

They are the users and stakeholders of a system. In this case, they are the students, teachers, parents, the management staff, the education department, and others. They will benefit if the change is positive and the problems are solved. However, they may stand to lose or suffer if the change is negative and new problems are created. Therefore, we need to find out whether the blockchain technologies can solve current problems and bring positive changes in the school system. If the outcome could be negative or even damaging, we need to abort the project.

A-Actors

They are usually the employees within an organization, in this case, teachers and support staff. They are responsible for carrying out work and involved with the implementation of the blockchain system. Therefore, we need to conduct an inventory analysis to know their qualities, capabilities, and interests to get a clear picture of their impact on the organization. We may need to hire new employees or retrain the current ones to ensure competency with respect to blockchain implementation. We also need to conduct training for the employees.

T – Transformation Process

Transformation is the change that a system or process leads to. It’s the process in which input (including raw materials, man-hours, knowledge) is transformed by an organization into output (such as a final product or solution to a problem).

To implement the blockchain system, we need to know in advance what kinds of input requires and forecast what the end result (output) will be. Besides that,  we have to carefully consider the intermediate steps. In this case, the input is the blockchain technologies and the output could be a system that churns out an intelligent pool of young entrepreneurs that thrive on co-creating and co-sharing.

W – Worldview

Stakeholders often have different ideas and approaches to the same issue, with other conflicting interests. The goal of the CATWOE analysis is to make their different viewpoint explicit and try to achieve a methodology stand. In this project, we need to achieve consensus among the stakeholders that involve the students themselves, we don’t want to force the ideas on them. Besides that, some teachers might have fear in carrying out the transformation as they have to learn new technologies. Parents would be very concern about the implementation of the blockchain technologies because it will bring profound impacts on their children, either positively or negatively.

In addition, the government might want to regulate the project to ensure it complies with the national education policies and philosophies. On the other hand, business leaders may want to look for financial gains by sponsoring the project or they may refuse to support the project at all. Therefore, there is an urgent need to conduct surveys and research to figure out how to secure agreement from most stakeholders to implement the project.

O – Owners

This usually refers to the owner, entrepreneur or investor of an organisation, who wants to make changes and who decides whether a project should start or stop. As decision makers, they have the highest authorities.  Commitment and support from the aforementioned parties are important to ensure successful implementation of the blockchain project and also long term sustainability of the project.

E – Environmental Constraints

This is the actual environmental elements that may influence the organization and can limit or restrict the implementation of the blockchain technologies in the school system. Examples include political influence, ethical boundaries, regulations from the government, financial constraints and social factors. There is a need to work closely to overcome the constraints via negotiations and other means with the regulators and other parties

After conducted the CATWOE analysis, I have identified the following problems where most schools are facing.

Problems

  • The Current school system is too structured and too rigid, inhibiting creativity
  • The Curriculum methodology too centered on academics and examinations
  • Teacher-centered, lack of peer learning
  • The Administration is centralized and autocratic
  • Does not prepare children for the future
  • Lack of participation from stakeholders

The proposed solution

  • Create a self-perpetuating and self-sustaining ecosystem where students can create and share digital content. It can also include tangible things like arts and craft, scientific inventions, or intangible things like music, song, new ideas, games, and so on. These tangible assets can be digitized and shared among the students.
  • Not only they can share digital content, but they can also buy and sell them. It is akin to an autonomous economic system where students can self-fund their projects by trading their digital assets.
  • The latest technology that can power this system is blockchain, a subset of decentralized ledger technologies.
  • The ecosystem should be enlarged to include the actors of the system – the teachers, coaches, supporting staff and the administrators.
  • The ecosystem must also be connected to stakeholders, including the business owners (who can provide financial support and sponsorship), the government (who may want to regulate the activities in the system), parents (who are concerned with their children development), etc.
  • The ecosystem can be extended to include students from around the world in the future.

† The Architecture

  • Create a permissioned private blockchain platform for the students. The students can interact freely in their own close-loop decentralized and distributed ecosystem.
  • Content or assets can be created and tokenized and shared among the students. They can trade their assets using the tokens, creating a token economic system.
  • Develop APIs so that the stakeholders can interact with the blockchain. Administrators and teachers should be allowed to monitor and delete certain contents that are inappropriate like pornographic materials etc via the API. On the other hand, parents can monitor their children progress but may not be allowed to delete the contents or add comments. In addition, business owners and investors can monitor the progress of the project and provide support and advice if necessary (for example if the system crashed or stalled). In addition, regulators might want to monitor the blockchain for compliance.
  • Proposed using Ethereum Proof of Authority(PoA) protocol known as Clique. The benefits of using PoA are as follows:
    • Saves electricity power
    • Eliminates the need to invest into large numbers of ‘Miners’ servers
    • Increase the transaction speed tremendous compared to Proof-of-Work(PoW)
    • Better security since only members can access the network
  • The ecosystem can be hosted on a cloud server like AWS and Microsoft Azure but you can set up your own servers.  The conceptual model is illustrated in the figure below:

The Legal Framework

Obviously transforming a school into a blockchain school needs to obtain approval from the Ministry of Education. It has to comply with national education policies. Therefore, we need to design the blockchain platform as a new approach in teaching and learning, keeping content within the requirements of the curriculum imposed by the MOE.

**You may use my ideas to write a paper if you are embarking on a similar project, but prior consent from me is necessary.

Gas, Gas Price and Gas Limit

What is Gas?

By definition, gas is a unit that measures the amount of computational effort that it will take to execute certain operations on the Ethereum blockchain. The operations include sending tokens, deploying a smart contract, interacting with a contract, sending some ETH, launching an ICO, or anything else on the blockchain. Gas is needed to power the Ethereum Ecosystem, just like fuel is needed to power a car.

What is Gas Price?

As I have mentioned earlier, we need to use gas for every operation made on ethereum, regardless of whether your transaction succeeds or fails. Gas does not come free, we need to pay for it, just like paying for the gasoline in order to drive our cars. How much transaction fee we need to pay depends on the gas price and the gas limit.

Gas price is the amount of Ether you need to pay per unit of gas. It is measured in Gwei (1Gwei=0.0000000001 ETH).  Its value is determined by the miners, who can refuse to process the transaction with less than a certain gas price. The transaction fee is paid to the successful miner as a form of incentive that motivates the miners to maintain the nodes. Therefore, they have the controlling power over the gas price. We must have enough ether in our wallet to pay for the gas fees.

The transaction fee is calculated using the following formula

Transaction fee= Gas unit used x Gas price

For example, for a certain transaction,

gas unit used=103631

Gas price= 1Gwei or 0.000000001 Eth

So transaction fee= 103631×0.000000001 Eth=0.000103631 Eth  

You can see the actual output in a smart contract deployment on Etherescan, as shown in the figure below:

In addition, you can “bribe” the miners to do your work first by paying more gas fees. In this way, you can jump to the front of the queue so that your transaction can be processed first.  Even if the transaction fails, you still need to pay for the transaction fee because the miners must validate and execute your transaction.

Gas Limit

The Gas Limit is an estimation of the total amount of work to perform a transaction. It is not easy to compute the gas limit. Fortunately, there are many apps that set the limit for us. Typically, 21,000 Gas will satisfy most transactions. However, for more complex transactions such as sending ETH to an ICO smart contract, the gas limit will be much higher. The reason is such a transaction requires much more computational power.

If you set the limit is too low, your transaction may take too long to process and even fail. As a result, you will lose ETH for nothing. On the other hand, if your transaction was completed before reaching the gas limit, you get back the balance ETH. The Gas Limit protects you from spending unlimited ETH, just like what banks set your credit card limit so that you will not overspend.

Hyperledger- A Brief Introduction

Background

In previous articles, we have learned about the bitcoin blockchain, the flagship of cryptocurrency.  Subsequently, we learned about Ethereum that features smart contracts on top of its cryptocurrency Ether. Smart contracts allow developers to create decentralized applications (dapps) on the Ethereum ecosystem.

Both bitcoin and Ethereum are amazing blockchain platforms. However,  both are facing some very challenging issues, one of them is scalability.  According to Wikipedia,  the transaction processing capacity of the bitcoin network is limited by the average block creation time of 10 minutes and the block size limit.  The transaction rate for bitcoin is between 3.3 and 7 transactions per second.

Ethereum does not fare better, its transaction rate is 15 transactions per second. Comparatively, VISA’s transaction rate is 45,000 transactions per second. Therefore, both platforms fall short in developing practical enterprise applications at the moment.

To overcome the limitations of the blockchain technologies for enterprise usage, Hyperledger was created with the vision to provide viable blockchain solutions for industries and businesses. Hyperledger is an open source effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies hosted by The Linux Foundation.

The Mission of Hyperledger

The philosophy of Hyperledger is

“Only an Open Source, collaborative software development approach can ensure the transparency, longevity, interoperability, and support required to bring blockchain technologies forward to mainstream commercial adoption.” –hyperledger.org


Indeed, the Hyperledger project has been a collaboration of players from various industries and organizations in technology, finance, banking, supply chain management, manufacturing, IoT and more. Since its inception in December 2015, it has managed to enlist many prominent members that include IBM, Intel, NEC, Cisco, J.P Morgan, AMN AMRO, ANZ Bank, Wells Fargo, Accenture, SAP and more. For the complete list, please refer to Wikipedia.

The mission of Hyperledger comprises some ambitious goals, as  illustrated in the following figure,

Adapted from Linux foundation

The Hyperledger Greenhouse

Hyperledger itself is not a platform, but it is an umbrella body that incubates and promotes a range of business blockchain technologies. The technologies include distributed ledger frameworks, smart contract engines, client libraries, graphical interfaces, utility libraries, and sample applications. The umbrella strategy was able to accelerate innovation of DLT components by encouraging the re-use of common building blocks and components(hyperledger.org, 2018).

The Hyperlegder projects known as The Hyperledger Greenhouse consists of five projects and five tools, as shown in the figure below:

Adapted from hyperledger.org

Each of the frameworks operates differently but they also allow certain interoperability among themselves. Hyperledger frameworks are generally permissioned (private)blockchains. It means that the parties need authentication and authorization to participate on the blockchain networks.

I will try to explain some of the frameworks and tools in simple language in a series of future articles. I am not an expert on Hyperledger but I have a decent understanding of the technologies via theories and practice. Recently I have enrolled in a Hyperledger course hosted by the Linux Foundation and managed to obtain a certificate of achievement. I am willing to share my knowledge with you.

Certificate  Link:  https://courses.edx.org/certificates/893fe1d735404398b56460873940ca5d

Open Source and Open Governance

The success of Hyperledger is based on the concepts of open source and open governance.  The concept of open source means that an open source software is a software that is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. In other words, anyone has the ability to view the code, use the code, copy the code, modify the code, and, depending on the open source license, contribute back changes. (hyperledger.org, 2018)

On the other hand, open governance means that technical decisions for an open source project are made by a group of community-elected developers voted in from a pool of active participants. These decisions include things such as which features to add, how, and when to add them.  (hyperledger.org, 2018).  Hyperledger has formed a  Technical Steering Committee(TSC) to implement open governance pertaining to the Hyperledger projects. You can read about Hyperledger’s open governance by following this link

https://www.hyperledger.org/blog/2017/09/06/abcs-of-open-governance

That’s all for now. I will discuss why Hyperledger blockchain frameworks are better designed for enterprises than the public permissionless blockchains in coming articles.

Meanwhile, you may want to register for the Hyperledger Global Forum in Basel, Switzerland in December. I have registered but not sure of going yet as there is an issue with the credit card payment. By the way, there are no free tickets. It is a four days workshop with hands-on practices. 

Hyperledger Global Forum 2018

Introducing IOTA

The Machine Economy


From the connected mobile devices, wearable devices to Smart homes, the Internet of Things is beginning to permeate every aspect of our lives.  The adoption of IoT technologies is fostering a new economy nurtured by these technologies. As this kind of economy is powered by the machine to machine (M2M) communication, it is also known as the machine economy.

According to IOTA foundation, the number of connected devices is estimated to reach 75 billion by 2025. Internet of Things (IoT) includes tiny sensors on roads, bridges, railway tracks, mobile phones, smart washing machines , smart drones, wearable electronics like smartwatches and more. The amount of data being produced and consumed by all these devices is becoming astronomical.

Over the next five years, it is predicted that the global IP traffic on the IoT network will increase five-fold by 2021, monthly IP traffic is expected to reach  31 Gigabytes per capita. However, for the same period, broadband speeds are expected only to double and the global data pipelines will experience congestion. By then, it will not be possible for all these devices to stay connected 24/7 to the centralized cloud silos for all the data they will generate.

Recently,  the emergence  ‘Fog’ and ‘Mist’ computing emerged might provide a solution to the aforementioned issue. However, how to distribute resources efficiently across the IoT ecosystem remains a huge challenge in this new Machine Economy. Therefore, IOTA was conceptualized with the mission to tackle the congestion issue. By implementing zero fee transactions, these devices can share the technological resources in real-time locally in a distributed network. In this way, it can avoid the centralized points of failure, eliminating the resource infrastructure bottleneck.

The Vision of IOTA

The vision of IOTA is to enable all connected devices through verification of truth and transactional settlements, which incentivize devices to make available its properties and data in real time. In addition, the IOTA cryptocurrency was developed to enable Machine-2-Machine (M2M) transaction, thus creates the machine economy powered by IoT.

The main objective of IOTA is to serve the machine economy by enabling zero fee M2M payments. IOTA has established itself as the leader in  IoT fintech landscape by providing efficient, secure, lightweight, real-time microtransactions without fees. It is open-source and engineered specifically for the Internet of Things. Its real-time microtransactions using the IOTA cryptocurrency has created an ecosystem that is ready and flexible for scale.

The Tangle

IOTA technology is similar to the blockchain technology but it is not blockchain-based. In fact, it utilizes a kind of distributed ledger technology minus the blocks. IOTA is a permissionless distributed ledger that utilizes a cutting-edge technology, known as Tangle. The Tangle is a new data structure based on a Directed Acyclic Graph(DAG). As opposed to the blockchain, it has no blocks, no chain and also no Miners. This unique new architecture enables IOTA works differently compared to Blockchains and other Distributed Ledger Technologies.

The Core Principles

IOTA uses a DAG instead of a blockchain to store its ledger. The main objective is to solve the scalability issue. As we all know, a blockchain has an inherent transaction rate limit, due to the conflict between block sizes and block issuances rates. If blocks are issued too frequently, or are too large, forks will occur often. When a fork happens, several new blocks are added to the chain simultaneously, and the network needs to decide between them, thus slow down the validation process.

In a DAG, forks can still occur but unlike in a blockchain, a fork is not final. In the DAG system, diverging branches can still be merged back together, as long as they are consistent with each other. The transaction rate is therefore bounded only by the latency between the nodes. A DAG favors availability over consistency.

The Tangle Structure

The Tangle is a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). In computer science, a directed graph is a collection of vertices (squares), which are connected to each other by edges (arrows).  In the IOTA Tangle data structure, the vertices represent transactions, and the edges represent approvals. It retains the blockchain features that include distributed ledger,  immutability, and secure transactions, but it does not utilize the blocks.

The Tangle structure is shown in the following figure.

With reference to the figure below,  If there is an edge(arrow)
directed node (vertex) 100  to node 99, it means that node 100 approves the transaction at node 99. When a node issues a new transaction, it must choose 2 previous ones to approve, thereby adding 2 new edges(arrows) to the graph. Notice that each node must be connected to two previous nodes.

The first transaction in the Tangle is referred to as the genesis. All the IOTA tokens were created in the genesis, and no new ones will ever be created. All transactions in the tangle reference the genesis directly or indirectly.

Transactions with no approvers are called tips. In the figure above, node 100 is a tip because no one approves its transaction yet.  All the nodes must choose tips to approve, rather than older transactions, because this helps move the network consensus forwards. The method for choosing which two tips one should approve is one of the key innovations of IOTA.


Tokenization Explained

What is Tokenization?

Tokenization has become a buzzword today due to its adoption in the payment industry and blockchain. However, Its usage is not limited to the aforementioned industries. It can be applied to many other industries such as healthcare, stock trading, gaming and more.

The primary purpose of tokenization is to ensure data security. It is used for handling sensitive data such as payment, medical record, personal ID and more.

According to Wikipedia,

“Tokenization, when applied to data security, is the process of substituting a sensitive data element with a non-sensitive equivalent, referred to as a token, that has no extrinsic or exploitable meaning or value. The token is a reference (i.e. identifier) that maps back to the sensitive data through a tokenization system. The mapping from original data to a token uses methods which render tokens infeasible to reverse in the absence of the tokenization system, for example using tokens created from random numbers.

The tokenization system must be secured and validated using security best practices applicable to sensitive data protection, secure storage, audit, authentication and authorization. The tokenization system provides data processing applications with the authority and interfaces to request tokens, or detokenize back to sensitive data.”

In short, Tokenization is the process of substituting sensitive data with non-sensitive identification symbols known as tokens. Tokenization retains all the essential information of the data without compromising its security.

A Short History

According to Wikipedia, the concept of tokenization has existed since the invention of the currency system centuries ago. It was adopted as a means to reduce risk in handling financial instruments by replacing them with surrogate equivalents.

In addition, coin tokens have a long history of use replacing the financial instrument of minted coins and banknotes. In more recent history, tokens are used in mass rapid transit payment, casino chips and more.  The adoption of the above systems is to replace physical currency and cash for reducing risks such as theft.

In the digital world, tokenization techniques have been used since the 1970s. They were meant to isolate real data elements from exposure to other data systems(Wikipedia, 2018). In databases, surrogate key values have been used since 1976 to isolate data associated with the internal mechanisms of databases and their external equivalents for a variety of uses in data processing.

More recently, these concepts have been extended to consider this isolation tactic to provide a security mechanism for the purposes of data protection. For example, in the payment card industry, tokenization is one means of protecting sensitive cardholder data in order to comply with industry standards and government regulations.

Definition in Blockchain

In blockchain, tokenization is a method that converts rights to an asset into a digital token. Thus, we can take an asset, tokenize it and create its digital representation that lives on Blockchain. Blockchain guarantees that the ownership information is immutable.  The tokens created in this way is also known as crypto tokens.

For example, you can tokenize an asset such as a book that you authored. The book is kept somewhere while the book token is uploaded to the blockchain network. The book crypto token is a representation of the book ownership. You can specify how many tokens need to be transferred to your crypto wallet before you can transfer the book ownership to a buyer by means of a smart contract.

One of the actual use cases is https://stamp.io , a platform where you can store your tokenized documents on the block and certify it, as shown in the following figure:

Cryptokitties is a brilliant example of the crypto token that allows users to acquire an adorable collectible by transferring some cryptocurrencies to the owner. The owner will then transfer the digital collectible to the buyer. The transaction occurs automatically via the smart contract.

Another use case is we can create a crypto token that represents some customer loyalty points on a blockchain. This type of token is also known as utility token. It can be used to manage customers’ reward schemes for the retail chains. Other examples include the crypto token that gives entitlement to the token holder to view certain hours of video streaming on a video-sharing blockchain. A house owner can sell his house by transferring the tokenized house deed to the buyer. Last but not least, a crypto token may even represent another cryptocurrency.