Agenda:

• Technology subsection candidate: describing and analyzing "blockchain" (Jeff and Eve)
• Vs. "smart contract"?
• Use case content mappings to technology content

Attending: Eve, John W, Domenico, Scott S, Thomas, Jeff, Scott D (deeply interested in progress in distributed systems that are reliable), Jim, Andrew, John M, Colin

Looking at Eve's candidate definition of blockchain: The second bullet: The value is transparency, is not privacy per se. Or secrecy per se? Transparency isn't necessarily inconsistent with privacy. Data controllers need to be transparent.

If many of the risks are controlled for by putting all the nodes in the same cloud or the same organizational domain (where "distributed" is defined in a very special way), it's still a blockchain.

There's support for the three bullets at least as a starter definition, along with the "SWOT" subbullets beneath them. Jeff believes that the only requirement for it to be a blockchain is a particular encryption mechanism for the ledger, but we didn't reach (ahem) consensus on that. Let's share the writeups on the list and see if we can form a draft subsection shortly, and then leverage the SWOTs and other analyses to build our understanding of how well the use cases can be served by the technologies and techniques. Eve makes an exhortation for use cases not to assume use of technologies, but to test them for suitability.