Presentation given at an Invited talk at Leicester University. Covers work we are doing at the Open University on applying blockchains/distributed ledgers in the adult educational space

1. Blockchains and
Adult Education
Prof. John Domingue
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University
UK
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/
http://blockchain.open.ac.uk/

2. BLOCKCHAINS IMPACT
Copyright http://dilbert.com/

3. Blockchain
3
World Economic Forum Survey Projects
Blockchain ‘Tipping Point’ by 2023
Santander: Blockchain Tech Can Save Banks
$20 Billion a Year
Bletchley: blockchain as a service in Azure

6. Everledger
www.everledger.io

8. IBM: Device Democracy
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/multimedia/GBE03620USEN.pdf

9. Distributed Autonomous Organisations

10. BLOCKCHAIN ELEMENTS
Copyright http://dilbert.com/

11. Ledgers

12. What is a blockchain?
A blockchain is a
permissionless
distributed database,
based on the bitcoin
protocol that
maintains a
continuously growing
list of transactional
data records hardened
against tampering and
revision, even by
operators of the data
store's nodes.
The initial and most
widely known
application of the
blockchain technology
is the public ledger of
transactions for bitcoin
and the inspiration of
similar distributed
ledgers known as
altchains.
Each blockchain record
is enforced
cryptographically and
hosted on machines
working as a data store
Source: Wikipedia

13. Cryptographic Hash Function
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function

14. Blockchain is a Linked List (1/2)
A blockchain can be thought of as a linked list of transactions
that is built with hash pointers instead of pointers
Source: Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies - Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten, Andrew Miller, Steven Goldfeder

15. Peer to Peer Network
http://www.terndrup.net/2015/10/27/Building-a-P2P-Peer-Client-with-Node-js/
Who Next?Add everyone has a complete copy of the data

16. Proof of Work
• Find x such that f(nonce + x) < t
(cryptographic hash)
"Hello, world!0" =>
1312af178c253f84028d480a6adc1e25e81caa44c749ec81976192e2ec934c64
"Hello, world!1" =>
e9afc424b79e4f6ab42d99c81156d3a17228d6e1eef4139be78e948a9332a7d8
"Hello, world!2" =>
ae37343a357a8297591625e7134cbea22f5928be8ca2a32aa475cf05fd4266b7 ...
"Hello, world!4248" =>
6e110d98b388e77e9c6f042ac6b497cec46660deef75a55ebc7cfdf65cc0b965
"Hello, world!4249" =>
c004190b822f1669cac8dc37e761cb73652e7832fb814565702245cf26ebb9e6
"Hello, world!4250" =>
0000c3af42fc31103f1fdc0151fa747ff87349a4714df7cc52ea464e12dcd4e9

17. Blockchain is a Linked List (2/2)
A blockchain actually contains
two different hash structures.
The first is a hash chain of
blocks that links the different
blocks to one another.
The second is internal to each
block and is a Merkle Tree of
transactions within the
blocks.
This allows for efficiently
verifiable proofs that a
transaction was included in a
block.

18. Proof of Work
• Hard to outpace the entire rest of the network… a 51% attack could
do it, but otherwise it is like buying thousands of lottery tickets –
doesn’t help you that much!
Source: Marc Eisenstadt ‘What is the genius behind Bitcoin’

19. Proof of Work
As you go back in time, an attacker would have to outpace the network
for a longer amount of time to carry out a double spend attack, and
replace a block.
Source: Marc Eisenstadt ‘What is the genius behind Bitcoin’

20. BitCoin Mining
http://knkx.org/post/central-wash-home-nations-biggest-bitcoin-mine-more-coming

21. https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-inevitable-failure-of-proof-of-stake-blockchains-and-why-a-new-algorithm-is-needed

22. Ethereum Blockchain Platform

23. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency platform and Turing-complete programming
framework intended to allow a network of peers to administer their own
stateful user-created smart contracts in the absence of central authority.
It features a blockchain-based virtual machine that securely records and
incentivizes the validation of transactions, i.e. code executions, made
through a cryptocurrency called ether.
Ethereum takes the primary developments used by BitTorrent and Bitcoin,
the peer to peer network and the blockchain, and generalizes them in order
to allow developers to use these technologies for any purpose.
Source: Wikipedia
Ethereum Blockchain Platform

24. Ethereum Blockchain Platform
Ethereum is a 100% open source software platform to build distributed,
decentralized applications
Ethereum is 100% peer to peer, censorship-proof and corruption-proof.
Ethereum can be used to build anything: Asset issuance, crowdfunding,
domain registration, title registration, prediction markets, internet of things,
voting, educational certificate issuing systems, hundreds of applications
Source: Ethereum slides - Stephan Tual and Ethereum in 40 minites by Vitalik Buterin

25. Ethereum Virtual Machine
Sources: Ethereum Development Tutorial
The Ethereum Virtual Machine can be thought of as a large decentralized computer
containing millions of objects, called "accounts", which have the ability to maintain
an internal database, execute code and talk to each other.
There are 2 types of Accounts:
Externally owned account (EOA):
an account controlled by a private
key that has the ability to send
ether and messages from it.
‘Smart’ Contract: an account
that has its own code, and is
controlled by code.
Any user can trigger an action by sending a transaction from an EOA, setting
Ethereum's wheels in motion.
If the destination of the transaction
is another EOA, then the transaction
may transfer some ether but
otherwise does nothing
However, if the destination is a
‘Smart’ Contract, then the
contract in turn activates, and
automatically runs its code.

26. State vs History
• State = “current” information
– Account balances
– Nonces
– Contract code and contract storage
• History = things that happened
– Transactions
– Receipts
• Currently, all “full” nodes store state, some
store history and some do not store history
Source: Devcon2 slides – Ethereum in 25 Minutes by Vitalik Buterin

27. State
• State consists of key value mapping
addresses to account objects
• Every account object contains 4 pieces of
data:
– Nonce
– Balance
– Code hash (code = empty string for private
key-controlled accounts)
– Storage tree root
Source: Devcon2 slides – Ethereum in 25 Minutes by Vitalik Buterin

28. Gas
• Halting problem
– Cannot tell whether or not a program will run
infinitely
• Solution: charge fee per computational
step (“gas”)
Source: Devcon2 slides – Ethereum in 25 Minutes by Vitalik Buterin

29. What are Ethereum Contracts?
‘Smart’ contracts are computer protocols that facilitate, verify, or enforce the
negotiation or performance of a contract.
‘Smart’ contracts can be partially or fully self-executing, self-enforcing, or both.
Smart contracts in Ethereum have the ability to read/write to their own
internal storage, read the storage of the received message, and send
messages to other contracts, triggering their execution in turn
Sources: Wikipedia and Ethereum Development Tutorial and Ethereum - Introduction to Smart Contracts

30. Contracts in Ethereum
Maintain a data store
representing
something which is
useful to either other
contracts or to the
outside world
Serve as a sort of
externally owned
account with a more
complicated access
policy
Manage an ongoing
contract or
relationship between
multiple users
Provide functions to
other contracts;
essentially serving as
a software library.
Contracts in Ethereum generally serve 4 purposes:
source: Richard Gendal Brown “A Simple Model for Smart Contracts”
http://gendal.me/2015/02/10/a-simple-model-for-smart-contracts/

31. DApps
Source: Ethereum - Stephan Tual
A Đapp is a decentralised application which serves some
specific purpose to its users, but which has the important
property that the application itself does not depend on
any specific party existing.
Rather than serving as a front-end for selling or providing
a specific party's services, a Đapp is a tool for people and
organizations on different sides of an interaction use to
come together without any centralized intermediary.
A Dapp consists of two parts: a frontend, written in
HTML or QML, and a backend (think of it as the
‘database’ for your frontend).

32. DBrowsers
It is an end user interface onto
the Ethereum blockchain.
A DBrowser is how users will find
and interact with DApps
‘Mist’ is the name of the
Ethereum DBrowser.

33. Characteristics of Blockchain DApps
• Shared database
• Multiple writers
• Absence of trust
• Disintermediation
• Transaction interaction
• Set rules
• Validators
• Asset backing
http://www.multichain.com/blog/2015/11/avoiding-pointless-blockchain-project/

34. BLOCKCHAINS AND HIGHER
EDUCATION
Copyright http://dilbert.com/

35. MSc Certificates on Blockchain
http://digitalcurrency.unic.ac.cy/certificates
35

36. MIT

37. “For example, after taking an examination
to demonstrate his or her academic
proficiency level, an individual could direct
the testing organization to share the test
results with one or more third-party
evaluating organizations.”
“As education paradigms evolve,
technological innovation is expected to
diversify the ways in which tests are
designed and individuals are evaluated.
With this diversification and the changes it
brings about, different evaluating
organizations may come to utilize
individuals' test results in different ways,
each in accordance with its own evaluation
methods.”
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201602/16-0222E/index.html

40. Demos of movies available at: http://blockchain.open.ac.uk/
Certification

41. Course Contract
Functions:
Storage:
enrol
unenrol
getStudents
studentsPaid[address=0.6, address=0…. ]
students [address, address, address]
Course Administration ViewStudent View
Enrol for 6 ETH!
your Ethereum
address
password to private
key
Signing this transaction will transfer 6
ETH + gas from your account. Estimated
gas cost is 0.02 ETH. Maximum gas cost is
set to 0.05 ETH
Enrol
Student Enrolment Page
Signed
TX
Unenrol Student
Admin Ethereum address
Admin password to private key
Signing this transaction will transfer 6
ETH + gas from course admin account.
Estimated gas cost is 0.02 ETH. Maximum
gas cost is set to 0.05 ETH
Unenrol
Course Admin Page
Signed
TX
Student List
(Listing students is a free transaction)
Course Enrolment Page
Signed
TX
Student
Address
Array
unenrolStudent Account 11
Student Account 23
Student Account 45
Student Account 67
Student Account 89
unenrol
unenrol
unenrol
unenrol
Student Account 67
Course Smart Contract

42. Jane enrols on an OpenLearn Course

43. Jane enrols on an OpenLearn Course

44. Block no: 45566778
Jane enrols on an OpenLearn Course

45. Jane enrols on an OpenLearn Course

46. Jane enrols on an OpenLearn Course

47. Jane enrols on an OpenLearn Course

48. Jane enrols on an OpenLearn Course

49. Jane enrols on an OpenLearn Course

50. Demos of movies available at: http://blockchain.open.ac.uk/
Peer Accreditation

54. Higher Education Disaggregation

55. Collaborations

56. Collaborations/Dialogue
• APII
• Banking Standards Board
• Blockchain Limited
• Consensys
• Ethcore
• Fraunhofer
• Imperial
• Institute of the Future
• Jisc
• KPMG
• MIT
• Mozilla Open Badges (BadgeChain)
• Southampton
• UCL

57. Summary
• Blockchains seem to be a revolutionary new platform for
sharing data at scale in a trusted fashion
• Provides the basis for global distributed computation
• Interestingly combines
– History
– Rules
– Value
• Has many application areas related to the recording and
transference of value
– Includes Higher Education and training
• Badges and certification
• ePortfolios
• Educational reputation centric currencies
• Disaggregation

58. Acknowledgements
• KMi@OU Implementation Team
– Michelle Bachler
– Kevin Quick
– Allan Third
– Chris Valentine
• Discussants
– Sören Auer, Fraunhofer
– Adi Ben-Ari, Applied Blockchain
– Carla Casilli, Mozilla Open Badges
– Marc Eisenstadt, OU
– Matthew English, Fraunhofer
– Denis Gillet, EPFL
– Hugh Halford-Thompson, Blockchain Tech Ltd
– William Knottenbelt, Imperial College
– Konstantin Kudryavtsev, Ethcore
– Gary McKay, APII
– Rebecca Migirov, Consensys
– Titi Roman, Sintef
– Philipp Schmidt, MIT Media Lab
– Mike Sharples, OU
– Elena Simperl, University of Southampton
– Ashley Taylor, Consensys
– Sergej Zerr, University of Southampton
• Graphics
– Harriett Cornish, OU

59. blockchain.open.ac.uk