Re: Chainpoint Community Group Announcement

Hi,

I speak for everyone at Stampery when I say I am very happy to see
Chainpoint gain traction and media attention.

Wayne, I apologize if any of my prior messages made you to think that I
somehow disdain all the hard work behind Chainpoint. On the contrary, I
am strongly betting for Chainpoint as a base for a future standard
because I am fully aware that it is the result of collecting tons of
feedback from Tierion's customers and many members of the community.

We at Stampery understand it perfectly because we have gone down the
exactly same path. We have spent nearly two years building and improving
our scalable blockchain data anchoring platform (BTA). This has been
possible thanks to all the valuable feedback we have gathered over this
lengthy process from our customers and partners (among them,
multibillion companies like Telefónica [1] and Prosegur [2]).

Counting solely our consumer-oriented solutions (stamp.io, Trailbot and
our former Gmail plugin), we have anchored more than 100K files, emails
and datasets during the last year. Moreover, for the last 6 months, we
have been performing dual blockchain anchoring (Bitcoin + Ethereum), so
the total number of proofs/receipts delivered to our customers is close
to 150K. In addition to this amount, there are also many thousands of
"stamps" made by our customers' production products and services
directly using Stampery's API through any of our wrappers for NodeJS,
Ruby, Python, Elixir, Java, and PHP.

I can imagine that Tierion, Blockstack and other relevant players have
created a similar number of records and also delivered a huge amount of
proofs/receipts.

In my opinion, it is unacceptable that proofs/receipts generated by all
these platforms are incompatible, not uniform and impossible to verify
by using a single test suite.

So, the reason behind all my suggestions is not accommodating Chainpoint
to Stampery's own technology but tackling some improvements that, based
on our experience, we believe would worth being discussed for future
Chainpoint updates. All of them just aim to ensure maximum coverage of
all the currently existing data anchoring scenarios [3].

I am really happy to hear that Tierion is open to consider the
aforementioned and other suggestions. Otherwise, what would be the point
of creating a Chainpoint Community Group? In a standardization process
like this, I believe there needs to be a continued discussion and
negotiation between all interested parties. Furthermore, all this should
be set in a context of mutual acknowledgement without anyone having an
implicit superiority.

It is important to be as inclusive as possible, to consider all valid
proposals regardless of who is the proponent and also to try to embrace
novel approaches (e.g. Peter Todd's recent and outstanding OpenTimestamps).

I think we have a unique opportunity to establish an industry-wide
standard for proofs/receipts. This is an extraordinary chance to prove
the maturity of our blockchain technologies in contrast to the
prevailing noise and nonsense.

Let's bring all the affected parties into the conversation, make them
join the Chainpoint CG and manifest their commitment to cooperation.
This is key to the success and adoption of the eventual standard. The
more parties will get involved, the better proposal we will come up with.

Let's do our utmost to make this standard happen. I am sure it will
worth it :)

That said, I am starting a thread in the Chainpoint CG with some
proposals regarding the group mission, methodology, governance and areas
of work.
As further proof/receipt format discussion will take place there, I will
also send another email explaining my suggestions for the standard with
more detail.

Links:
[1]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telef%C3%B3nica
[2]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosegur
[3]  See the "Scenarios to cover" section:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wBnKYxLVE8P7ve-0RIWCWSV3E5LaPcZ4gGLihszpzV4/edit?usp=sharing

Best regards,

-- 
Adán Sánchez de Pedro Crespo
CTO, Stampery Inc.
San Francisco - Madrid
T: +34 663 163 375

Received on Wednesday, 21 September 2016 16:31:36 UTC