LEDGER IETF 96

Contents

Administriva/Goals and Non-Goals

The Interledger Protocol / Crypto-conditions

Adrian Hope-Bailie

Evan Schwartz

Stefan Thomas

Weaving the ILP Fabric into BigchainDB/ascribe.io

Next Steps / Open Mic Discussion

Date: July 21, 2016
Location: Berlin, Germany
Area Director: Alissa Cooper
Chairs: Adam Roach, Matt Miller
Minutes: Bryan Call

Administriva/Goals and Non-Goals

Presenter: Chairs
Slides: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/96/slides/slides-96-ledger-0.pdf

Non-goals

not forming a working group

not introduce blockchain

Goals

introduce interledger and crypto-conditions

gauge interest

determine how to proceed

Chairs request that only clarifying questions be asked during the presentation, others held for open-mic portion of session.

The Interledger Protocol / Crypto-conditions

Presenter: Adrian Hope-Bailie, Evan Schwartz, Stefan Thomas
Slides: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/96/slides/slides-96-ledger-1.pdf
Slides: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/96/slides/slides-96-ledger-2.pdf
Drafts: draft-thomas-interledger, draft-thomas-crypto-conditions

Adrian Hope-Bailie

Background

whitepaper https://interledger.org/interledger.pdf

irc channel #interledger on irc.w3.org

mailing list public-interledger@w3.org

Business adoption

Ripple, BigchainDB

Gatehub, Bitstamp - exchanges

interest from central banks

interest from protocol and platform developers for micropayments

IP and project resources

nonprofit foundation

IP will be royalty-free

github: https://github.com/interledger

Evan Schwartz

Ledgers are about accounts and balances

The world will never agree on one ledger

Payment networks are disconnection now

Interledger - protocol for payments across payment networks

Connector - pays and routes money

Ilp packet instructs a connector what to do

if a connector fails or steals money?

ledger provides a hold

holds expire

crypto condition

process

sender puts fund on hold

recipient get a notification

recipient signs the notification and sends it back

Stefan Thomas

Addressing and routing

ledger.subleger.account

connectors advertise their routes

connectors will have multiple routes with a cost

Eric Rescorla: What if the connector just lied about the exchange rate?

Stefan: The receiver will need to verify the exchange rate (the amount transferred) and fail if the amount was too small. As a connector you will want to be reliable and want to have a good exchange rate If connector fail then people wont want to use them.

Cullen Jennings: how often are rates going to change, how often will they be propagated? how do you prevent someone putting something on hold for awhile until the exchange was in your favor?

Stefan: fees can be used on the connectors to limit the amount of hold gaming Current exchanges allow for 60 seconds to confirm transfers now.

Evan Schwartz: Connectors that fail to transfer money may lose money. In multi-hop payments connectors are incentivized to retry in through the same route

Eric Rescorla: Why do payments timeout if the recipient doesn’t respond for a while?

Presenter: Money can be locked up for that time period

Are simple signatures sufficient?

no, insider can steal the key

Using multi-signatures

possible extensions

larger hash sizes (512-bits)

sub-delegation condition

crypto-conditions

minimal

verifiable keys

Questions about scale: Assume your routing is between a couple institutions?, Would it be good for people to have their own ledger?

Presenter: other people do not need to know about sub ledgers

Question: How do you get a public key for someone at verify it is valid?

Presenter: interledger doesn’t define how you get the information for getting the public keys

Weaving the ILP Fabric into BigchainDB/ascribe.io

Presenter: Dimitri De Jonghe
Slides: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/96/slides/slides-96-ledger-3.pdf

Interledger allow bigchaindb to exchange other items besides currency

Next Steps / Open Mic Discussion

Presenters: Adrian Hope-Bailie, Evan Schwartz, Stefan Thomas, Chairs

Dan: How do connectors get fees?

Presenter: connectors can get fees by changing the transfer amount from the sender and receiver or having it a condition on another payment

Question: Barriers to entry for being a ledger?

Presenter: you have to get a connector to connect to your ledger

Rick Salz: Good to see a protocol that puts the risk on the connectors instead of the end users

Dave Crocker: If there is a way that can split out the design from the payment subject matter then it would be helpful.

Andrew Sullivan: Models that are used in other designs used in the IETF: hierarchy of domains, routing, etc and echoed what Dave said

Eric Rescorla: I have number of concerns with IETF taking up this work. We don’t have a lot experience with game theory and working in adversarial conditions.

Yaron Sheffler: interested in the work and thought it was relevant. Doesn’t like some of the details, but this isn’t the place to talk about. Good that there are financial institutions interested.

Richard Barnes: Thinks there are overlaps with the IETF. BGP is used in adversarial conditions today.

Dave Crocker: Most of the time, the question is did they pass the smell test? The answer is yes, and sees that an overlap with the IETF. There is a chance that the IETF might get something out of it having this part of the IETF

Jason Nicols: exchange rate process is kinda hand wavy. How do you think that splitting out

Eric Rescorla: Doesn’t think that IETF haves any experience with routing in adversarial environments.

Unidentified speaker: Would love to see this work part of the IETF.

Chairs: more discussion will happen about this on the mailing list. NOTE: chairs pointed to the art discussion list, but that has been overtaken by events. Interested parties should use the LEDGER discussion list: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ledger