Hedera’s Role in Decentralized Governance with Leemon Baird at OSS Seattle 2024

This is Textron tv. Hey everybody. We are here at the Open Source Summit here in Seattle, Washington, uh, 2024.

Uh, enjoying a lot of conversations with people who are contributors to open source projects, users of open source projects, wanting to get involved, uh, kinda helping in the direction of where all this is going. And we're gonna be talking about security and blockchain. I have a great pleasure having, uh, Lehman Bear, who is Chief Scientist Right.

Uh, at SWS Labs. And then co-founder of Hedera Hadera. Great.

Wonderful. Tell us a little bit about, um, Heera, the folks I know Hedera. So Hedera is A-D-L-T-A blockchain, uh, that was started long time ago, 2017 is what we started, we announced It in ancient, ancient in blockchain years, In blockchain years.

That's ancient. Yeah. Uh, so that's what we are.

And we have been growing rapidly since 2017. Uh, we are widely used. We have lots of things building on top of us.

We have lots of council members, which is unusual. Other blockchains don't have a council governing them. And it actually is better governance, more decentralized governance than you would see in a typical blockchain.

Uh, and we just keep growing. Interesting. Is there, is there an oxymoron of having a, a governance on a, what's a decentralized No.

No. Okay. Tell, tell us About that.

Because anything is decentralized, you could say, well, everyone in the world can vote, but you know what ends up happening? Power concentrates in a few hands and not everyone in the world is voting. Okay.

This is what inevitably happens. If you really want something to be widely separated, not just come down to five people, control it. What you have to do is from the very beginning say, no, we're gonna have 32 different organizations controlling, and each one's a large organization with a reputation to protect.

So that's what we've done. So there is no one individual, no one corporation that runs this network. And it's not five developers that ended up having a lot of power Yeah.

Went over. And their goal is to take over the world of blockchains. Exactly.

What you end up with is it's all above board. It's 32 individual organizations spread around the world, under different governments, on different continents. Every continent except Antarctica, we need to work on that.

Well, there are people down there doing science. There are people. That is true.

Right. Um, but it's, it's widely spread. And it is, um, different industries.

They're in different industries, and then they join. And it's not just companies, it's also universities. Some of the top 10 universities in the world, we have, uh, so that's, well, that's Representative of the widespread use.

It's representative of the widespread use. And so we have governance that really is decentralized and it's not just a handful of people and it's transparent. The minutes get published of their meetings, and you don't have that when it's just five people in a smoke filled room deciding what to do.

So that's, Tell us a little bit about, so not everyone's heard of blockchain, but yeah, maybe few really know what it is. I think maybe a disservice we did in the early days of blockchain was describing it as a distributed ledger. And technically that's what it was.

I'm not sure people got it about that. That really communicates the real power of what blockchain can do. So maybe you, you could explain it better for us.

You're right. So it's called A-D-L-T-A distributed ledger technology, or it's called a blockchain. None of which tells you at all what it is.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. What it really is is a lot of different computers run by different people independently, that together come to an agreement.

And if a few of them are bad or malicious or evil, it doesn't matter. The group as a whole can still come to an agreement and they come to agreement on things like, well, we can have cryptocurrency, which is just a number. It just remembers how many of these things you have.

How many h Mars do you have, how many bitcoins do you have? Mm-Hmm. It just remembers this number.

But they all agree on what your number is. And then when you try to give some of it to someone else, you got to digitally sign, you know, a secret key that no one else on Earth knows. And then they all look at it and say, oh yeah, that really is signed by your key.

We will go ahead and make your numbers smaller and make someone else's number bigger. And that's how you transfer it. And you can take real things in the real world, golden real estate and stocks, and you can turn them into tokens.

And all a token is, is someone ones and zeros. It's a little note that they all agree who currently owns it, which Is what a piece of stock is. Right.

Isn't actually, it doesn't have to be a piece of stuff. Right. It's a thing we're saying, you own it 'cause you bought it and you're how many they are and what you bought 'em for.

Exactly. So in a stock market, all a stock is, is ultimately ones and zeros that says, here's a piece of a company and who owns it. However, with the stock market, the market is controlled by one company.

And when you submit bids and asks to, to buy and sell, maybe you're forced to go through a broker who's taking a fee. Maybe it's slow, maybe it takes a while to resolve afterwards and to settle afterwards. But with blockchain or with DLTs, these ledgers are instantaneous.

It's a few seconds. And then the whole world knows that is transferred from you to that other person. There is no broker, there is no intermediary.

You don't have No middleman to take their Cut. There's no middleman to take their cut. It can be incredibly cheap.

I can give you millions of dollars worth of token for a 10th of a cent on Hedera, you will pay a 10th of a cent or I will pay a 10th of a cent to send you millions of dollars worth of tokenized gold or whatever. Mm-Hmm. Um, and it's fast and nobody can, can interrupt it or stop it from happening or corrupt it or steal it.

It's immutable. Right. It Is immutable.

Once I've sent it to you, you can decide to send it back, but we can never undo that. I send it to you. Mm-Hmm.

We can never make that not have happened. Mm-Hmm. And you don't have to trust any single computer.

You have to, I mean, if all the computers are evil, of course you're in trouble. But as long as they're mostly honest, you are guaranteed to never be, um, hurt to never have them lie about it or do the wrong thing. Are There other instances in blockchains where people try to falsify the leisure and you hear about this in books and the financial books of corporations or whatever it might be?

Oh, It's terrible. It is terrible. So it's the wild West in this industry right now.

And the real problem is when people are not using decentralized ledgers to do things like you may have heard of FTX, they were in exchange, they stole lots of money. And the reason they were able to Do it news a little bit lately. Yeah, Yeah.

Right. So s BF is in the news. Yeah.

But the reason they were able to do it is because they were not decentralized. Mm-Hmm. They were not storing all that information on the ledger.

They were off being a traditional scam that's centralized. And then they embezzled. If they had been doing everything on the ledger, it would've been physically impossible for them to embezzle could See it.

Yeah. And that's what you need. You need to use ledgers then to make it physically impossible to do these kinds of scams.

Very good. Well, tell us about, so you're here at Open Source Summit. Um, why are we talking about blockchain here?

I can think of a lot of reasons, but tell me why are we talking about blockchain and open source software? Absolutely. So the blockchains are all open source.

HEDERA is open source. All of the software that's running on these main net nodes that are doing the actual agreement is open source Apache two, it will always be open source. And then you have other computers that watch what's going on in the network.

You have mirror nodes that have, have a copy of all the data. They're open source software. And then you have block explorers that let you do really fancy things of searches through the history.

They're all open source. And then you have tools that are built on top. You have wallets and other things.

They're open source and then you have things to make it easy for you to do stuff. So there is a stable coin accelerator. It's a whole toolkit to make it easy for you to create a new token that is a stable coin.

That's one kind of token. Something that's backed by something real Mm-Hmm. And it makes it easy for you to do that.

Well, that's open source and you have the, um, hash io DAO is a new product, a new thing that we've created. It's all open source and it allows you to create a dao. A DAO is another use of ledgers like hedera.

It's a decentralized autonomous organization, DAO. It's where a group of people can create a community, can create an organization, and the organization itself has voting that goes through the ledger and is insured to be valid. Mm-Hmm.

And so you can't do, and it can hold the value, the the coins or the, the, uh, money for the organization and nobody can embezzle it. You have these rules that are in the ledger itself and so you can trust them. And so we have all that sort of thing going on.

All Open source. Tell us about, um, software itself. Well, the top topics frequently talking about is DevSecOps, but you know, there's shift left and that kind of thing.

But really, how do we better protect our software supply chain and what might we be able to leverage blockchain for? Interesting. So the software supply chain is your program and then the libraries you're dependent on and the library is there dependent on and so on.

Going all the way back. It's interesting. Tracking that is a question of providence.

It's very much like tracking real world or ordinary change. It's A lot of trust, not verification. A lot of that.

This is the problem. So what you can do is the same things. There's a lot of work going on in Hedera right now to be doing providence and tracking of real world supply chains.

And you can apply the same thing to software supply chains. So you could know that this library was digitally signed by someone who then used libraries that were digitally signed by someone. You could track it all the way back.

Mm-Hmm. Just like right now, people are doing providence tracking for if you have organic food, is it really organic? Is it really food?

Is it trustworthy for, um, here's one on Hedera. The, uh, vaccines for covid have to be stored in refrigerators that are cold. If it ever spent part of its life in a warm refrigerator, then you're getting an injection that may not be as good.

It may not protect you. You may get covid. Mm-Hmm.

And so in England, they were actually storing on hedera the temperature of all the, uh, uh, refrigerators that it passed through. And it was automatic. There was a computer in the refrigerator measuring the temperature, sending it automatically, no human involved.

And you can talk about GitHub and other things doing some of this sort of tracking. Mm-Hmm. This is what we need.

We need providence, we need it for drugs, we need it for diamonds. You don't want this to be a, a, uh, blood diamond. Mm-Hmm.

And you need it for software. And I think it'd be great for people to start, start doing that on hedera. Uh, right now they're doing the providence tracking for real world assets and real world or physical supply chains.

Why not software supply chains? I think that's great. So how, I mean, there's a lot of sources going into people creating software, right.

Open source software from whatever, you know, repositories. Yep. Um, as well as commercial libraries, all kinds of, you know, different licenses.

It's a pretty dog daunting problem. But how would you get started bringing in the blockchain to help with the provenance of this? Where would you start?

What, what do you think is a good beginning place? Is it, is it at the very beginning? Is it somewhere Else?

You know, I would probably say the easiest way is to go to one of the companies that's already starting to do this, like equity lab. Mm-Hmm. Equity lab is looking at the providence, not of software like an LLM, but of the model, the weights in the LLM and the training data that was used to train that LLM.

So that really is software providence. Yeah. But it's not for the software.

It's for the, the weight, the content. But, but it's a bunch of numbers. You know, a neural network is a bunch of numbers.

The weights are a bunch of numbers. It's where did those numbers come from? And so they look at what was the training sets, and there may be multiple training sets and maybe some training sets.

Were used to create a model with machine learning an LLM or something. And then more data came along and then they trained a new model using the old model and that data. And so it keeps track of the tree of where it all came from.

Mm-Hmm. I would go to them and say, Hey, let's start doing this with other forms of software other than this. You've started with one kind of software, let's expand out to other kinds of software.

I think that would be very good. Uh, and then you could just have people digitally signing it. And when we have somewhere a list of all their public keys so that you know who they are.

But that's just a first step. Mm-Hmm. Because how do you know that's really their public keys?

Exactly. So then we get into identity and there are many companies building on Hedera right now to track identity. And the idea is you really want self-sovereign identity.

I don't want some third party that knows who I am and everything about my life that controls my identity. I want it myself. I want it on my phone.

I wanted my own thing that I manage. And people are doing this on Hedera where you manage your own identity, but you wanna be able to revoke it. And for that you need a ledger.

Mm-Hmm. You have to have something public that everyone sees, so that when someone's checking their identity, sure it was digitally signed by the right people, but did they ever come along later and revoke it? Yeah.

If you're a bad guy, you're not gonna Tell 'em standing out. Your public PGP key is not, not, not revocable very easily. That's the problem.

You have to be able to revoke it. Mm-Hmm. And so people are doing that with ledgers.

And so the identity itself isn't stored on a ledger. It's stored on your own phone. You have it yourself.

Mm-Hmm. But the revocation of it leads to be on a ledger so everybody can see it. And no one can stop you from VOing.

And then the people checking it can know that it was revoked. Mm-Hmm. So all of that.

Very good. So, um, for your technology, the open source project, is it mostly being contributed by you? Do you have a lot of third, you know, people from all over the world contributing?

How is it run? So we have people around the world. Um, it is controlled by 32 different giant companies that are spread around the world, but they're not writing all the software.

There's Different, is that the governance? That's The governance, yeah. I think that's so important.

The good governance really is critical here. Uh, but they're not writing the software. So the software is written by a number of different people.

And you have different layers of the stack and different layers have have different people writing them, lots of people writing at the higher levels and cured the lower levels as you might imagine. You have also the question of what features are being requested and, and what features ought to be implemented. And so that we have this huge community that is involved in the hedera improvement process, the hip process, then open source community.

Mm-Hmm. And they are contributing. Here's an idea, you need to do this as a feature.

And then someone else says, no, I don't like that, but you could tweak it this way. And then someone else says, well, no, really, we should go back to the first one. And they, they debate and I love watching it.

And then they eventually come up to a conclusion. We now have come to a consensus as a community. Here's the future we need to do.

And then the 32 council members vote and say, yeah, we like that. We approve it. And then it eventually gets written and becomes part of the main net notes.

The, the ledger Itself. It's like a good Game of Thrones episode to me. I'm just kidding.

Sometimes the arguments are heated, but you know, I have been impressed the professionalism of the community. I didn't mean to imply anything by that. No, no, No.

I think it's a great, a great analogy. And so yeah, there's always politics and people and people get mad, but I think the people have been, have been professional about it. And I I appreciate that.

It's not just screaming. It's really people that want to see good features and they're arguing because they care. I love that.

Well, and you can't have, uh, one, one house take over the throne. Exactly. They want, they're more proud.

Exactly. Right. Um, are you giving any talks or anybody from your company?

I Am. You are. So, uh, Andrew Aiken and I will be given a talk tomorrow.

It's a keynote. It comes right after this guy named Lena Val's. Not sure who he is, but you know, you might have heard check, check Out.

Might you download his software? Check it out. Exactly.

Exactly. So we have the keynote right after his, uh, we'll be on the stage right after him and I, I'd love to see you there. Very nice.

Well, if I can make it, I will. How do you follow? Yeah.

No one's gonna listen to us. No, no. Don't still Stick around.

But you know, that is a little bit of pressure, isn't it? Oh, of course. How do you follow up that?

And the answer is you don't Just do your thing. Well, I, I'm just gonna do my thing. Hopefully they'll get something outta my talk.

Um, but the talk I'm looking for is the one before me. I think That's what, what's your talk about? So we're gonna be talking about use cases, and this is very exciting.

The real world is finally using ledgers for real world things. Mm-Hmm. They're using this open source software that's been around for, you know, a decade, but they're using it half a decade, not Long coming up on Okay.

Centuries in blockchain time because it's all very new, but the real world is now using it. And so this is an example of, so open source software that has been in, used for a long time by enthusiasts, but now is starting to be used by the broader world as a whole. And, uh, we're talking about that.

Good. I, I think that's also helpful for opening up people's kind of views and ideas and imaginations of Oh, what I could use it for. That's a great use case.

I have something like that. Could I do this? Be checking it out.

Great. Exactly. So what time's your dock again Tomorrow?

It's uh, it's sometime tomorrow. Same Time Right after this, uh, this one guy we're talking about. Okay.

And some guy is talking before us. Yes. Talking before.

Right. Well, thank you for stopping by. It's great to chat with you and kind of get an update of what's happening in blockchain.

And of course a lot of things have changed in the last seven years plus, I guess, what is that, seven years since you started? Eight years. Yeah.

Good stuff. Well, thanks again. Great to be talking with you.

Thanks. It's been great to talk with you. Thank you, man.

Well, if you're here, check out the, the conversation. I'm sure it'll be available on, uh, recording online again soon. So I appreciate stopping by and chatting about blockchain, more security content.

We will have other great interviews. So stay tuned. We'll be back soon.