Summary of the Gordian Developer Meeting 2023-04-05

[shannona]

Gordian Developers Meeting

2023-04-05

This is a summary of a meeting held on April 5, 2023 for the Gordian Developer Community. An archive of the meeting is available as YouTube Video and an MP3 Audio. The meeting slideshow and a Raw Transcript is also available in GitHub.

See our meetings directory for a complete list of meetings.

Video

Intro

Blockchain Commons quickly recapped its focus on self-sovereign control of digital assets and identity, bringing together many stakeholders as a neutral not-for-profit entity.

They asked for other to tell everyone about their work too, so we can make everything more interoperable! (Contact Christopher if you'd like to present on a topic at a future meeting.)

Last Meeting

The last meeting focused on dCBOR, UR interoperability, and Blockchain Commons' community channels.

Promoting QR PSBT Interop

QR PSBT is Blockchain Commons' biggest success to date!

Blockchain Commons wants to get videos from everyone showing how they use animated QRs!

Blockchain Commons has listings of all the UR Implementations they know about and all the UR reference libraries that know know of, and would love people to add in their links! (Just submit PRs!)

Also, be sure to join their community channels at https://www.blockchaincommons.com/subscribe.html.

IETF Dispatch

Blockchain Commons presented Envelope on March 27, 2023.

For the future, Blockchain Commons needs to better demonstrate:

• Simplicity
• Why Blockchain Commons is doing this
• Transforming Guidelines into Requirements

Blockchain Commons was asked who their customer was. They believe that everyone is their customer, because all of IETF should be focusing on the privacy supported by Envelope.

Blockchain Commons had also previously presented to W3C, where it seemed to be better understood.

CBOR/UR Updates

Wolf renumbered CBOR tags in prep for IANA application (other than ones that are "Fixed" because they're already in use, especially the Bitcoin ones in 300s and output descriptors in 400s). Should be much more harmonious, for use by IANA.

Two changes to URs: crypto-digest to digest and crypto-msg to encrypted.

This shouldn't impact anyone at the moment, but let Blockchain Commons know if you've done early implementations of anything!

There will be exciting things this year! Blockchain Commons is really looking forward to distributed function calls, which allow interactions between devices, the cloud, etc. URs should handle a broad range of things!

Evolving Internet Drafts (I-Ds)

Envelope I-D added eighth case, compressed. Currently uses "deflated". Like elided and encrypted, it declares the hash for what the content should be when it's decompressed. These are the "obscured" cases.

Meanwhile, dCBOR made one change due to conversations with the CBOR group, allowing for null map entries.

Wolf will submit editor's drafts once window opens again for I-D updates.

All reference implementations have been brought up to date with these I-D updates.

There was a suggestion that PSBTs could be put in compressed envelopes to make it easier to sign PSBTs, which can be very large right now! There was a question about how to make that standardized, but overall it seemed like a great use case for the new functionality.

Legislative Work!

• Private keys are protected in Wyoming.
• Digital assets can be registered in Wyoming.
• There's more at advocacy.blockchaincommons.com.

QuickConnect: The Next Generation

QuickConnect is a QR code that allowed a server to be connected to a mobile app, via a QR code, using Tor.

There are a number of small node companies that use the QuickConnect specification.

The next generation is nostrnode, which can handle Lightning services and other elements!

This also raises larger question of service discovery.

(Might have more next month.)

Proxy Updates

Blockchain Commons' SSKR libraries have been converted to JavaCard! Allows for use in constrained devices with constrained memory.

(Might have more next month.)

Next Monthly Call

Will be in coordination with Silicon Salon 4.

The salon will include a discussion of preventing key exfiltration, putting bigint on chips, and open hardware definitions.

Let us know if there's any special topic you'd like to talk about before then!

After the regular presentation [⏳54m47s], there was further, more scattered discussions on legacy signing, keys, rotation, support for BIP 85, and other topics, which are available in the last 30 minutes of the audio recording. One of the main points was that it's the goal of Blockchain Commons to make all of these types of things EASIER (and to have people do it right)!