069. Brian Behlendorf on Hyperledger, Open Source, and Blockchain for Good

Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of The Hyperledger Project at The Linux Foundation, previously worked at the White House under the Obama Administration and also as CTO for the World Economic Forum. When he read the Bitcoin White Paper and saw what some people were doing in the crypto and blockchain space, he recognized that open source technology was a way out of the top down hierarchical structure that he’d been a part of.

“I saw a lot of determined technologists trying to answer this question of -how can we build systems that are as trustworthy and scalable as the centralized systems we know about today, but don't have that concentration of power and concentration of risk and concentration of wealth that the traditional client server model seems to inevitably lead to?"

We talk about Hyperledger, some of what’s being built on top of it, open source technology as a concept, and Blockchain for Social Good (he uses the example of tracking where a diamond has come from and sites the United Nations SDGs.)

We also get into data privacy and protection and how Europeans have taken action to make changes around this.

“I definitely think people in Europe and the United States have this sense of a lot loss of agency around their personal data. In fact, in Europe, they actually felt that so sharply and so intensely that they developed this thing called the GDPR, which has a lot of critics out there, but is fundamentally at its heart about helping citizens understand, you know, in relation to any business out there, what information do you have about me, I have a right to see that I have a right to correct it, if it's wrong, and I have a right to delete it, if you don't need it anymore. You know, if it's a part of the history of a transaction between you and I, then I can't make you delete it. But if you're just you bought my data off of a third-party data broker, and I know about that, well, I get the right to pull that back.”

Brian also talks about quantifying the IP investment of the Linux Foundation with all of its different projects and said that it has to be in the 10s of billions in terms of economic value.

Brian Behlendorf

https://twitter.com/brianbehlendorf

The Hyperledger Project

https://www.hyperledger.org

The Linux Foundation

https://www.linuxfoundation.org

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