Title: Breakout_Session__3__EIPs___Interoperability
Category: Protocol_Calls___happenings

Author: boris
Date: 2018-10-31T02:04:47.282Z

I was the facilitator & scribe. Here’s the HackMD.
A lot of the discussion ended up revolving around Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA) inter-operating with EIPs. Action items are at the bottom, to be turned into Github issues in relevant repos.

?? Brazil

Genisis Block VC fund
university

Sam / Aion

AIP process
modeled on EIPs

Chelsea

open source
Spankchain – community education
newcomers be a part of the process, non tech have a voice
EIPs going somewhere

Chaals

work for EEA
long background in W3C

Thor
Bryant

freelancer
helping clients understand technology
Vyper EVM languages
education through EthSecDevs

Brooke

open source – distributed systems and FP
generally a big fan of specs
specs are even better than open source

Dan

standards team at Pegasys
like Chaals, active in W3C, and some at the IETF

Cyrus

work at Splyt
autonomous teams / organizations and scaling them
part of the open source community – excited to bring my skills, and scaling to this space

James

New Zealand blockchain economics think

Alex

Consensus
Working with EEA
getting people using open model
interested in open source model

MP

work at Golem
working towards an indsitution of incluseion

Amber

Clovyr dev tools
permissioned and public chains
involved

Bob

been involved with ETH for 3.5 years at EF, Consensus

Gary

crypto 5 years
EF in Switzerland
interested

EEA
Amber

Ethereum Enterprise Alliance
Heavy focus on permissioned
Also bridging to public
Everything around using in business – throughput, privacy, etc.
Common industry providers

Alex

not much was produced initially other than discussions
reformed
industry groups – use cases, happenings, create requirements
in addition to requirements to clients – message formats, and specs how
called Special Interest Groups (SIGs)
on the other side is tech focused groups – what are some baseline things we need to figure out, identity, off-chain trusted execution
Technical Specification Working Group
Main product towards a specification of what an Ethereum client must be capable of doing to be considered Enterprise grade, and then on top industry specific – e.g. healthcare might need encryption
whole goal is an entire spec – everyone is focused on the spec

Chaals

client spec v1
open source the specs layer
we will have a version 2 of the spec
will have a spec for offchain trusted computing – taskforce has Golem, iExec, Intel, IBM, etc.
need a process for building the spec
we had a starting point – then revisions pushed out
consensus based process – find a bit of the spec that is rubbish / sub optimal – make a proposal – proposals get shopped around a working group
when they get consensus – EEA has a formal voting system – if you have to have a vote
spec on private Github
except when published specs

Amber

discussion about tech specs – supposed to be default to be open
technical discussion to be more public?

Chaals

will keep pushing for it to be open
various things connected to member organizations
EEA is trying to push ahead with things that are important
want to base this stuff on Ethereum – base it on public Ethereum – get engineer in, they already know it from the open
compatability has business value
some of those extensions are things that will never get into public Ethereum
people will want to have a number of things in public ethereum, permissioning
figuring out how we work in a way, that change will be in public ethereum
much better than public world going in one way, and EEA another direction – want to converge
how do we do that?
various ideas – we should do this an EIP

Alex

did biz dev for Consensus
serious lack of education
people think Enterprise Ethereum is a thing – rather than interoperability
Quorum is rushing to take improvements from Geth, etc.
Enterprise should be participating
been in these conversations

Chaals

Pantheon / Pegasys at Consensys – Java Based
Public first and then go Enterprise

Chelsea

close everything and better solutions

??

why not better closed rather than open?

Bob

Vice Chair on Tech Committee
everything on technical should be public – but went the other way

Amber

Amber was arguing
concern is that if you want them to make EIP
if people don’t feel incentivized

Describe EIPs / ERCs Process
Boris

describes

Alex

not timebound?

Brooke

EIPs vs. ERCs
ERCs are simple – as the author, can make FINAL CALL
Then ACCEPTED
If no one implements, too bad
As the author, can make it as ACCEPTED
EIPs – even if accepted, needs to be implemented

Bryant

with ERCs less people involved
EIPs have more editors

Chaals

AllCoreDevs – all clients active?
how many?

60 EIPs vs ERCs?
Will look for real data
54 core
Boris

EIPs / ERCs

ABI Spec
Vyper compiler
Non standard proposals
JSON RPC
AMber

Mainnet connects? Maybe 2 or 3
Dozen clients – Enterprise ethereum

Chaals

our interest to have a standard

Don

speak to protections against patent trolls
one of the reasons for being a member of EEA is for patent protection

Boris

not aware of anything

Chelsea

isn’t patents trolling?

Chaals

enterprise would prefer no patents

Boris

explain

Brooke

Apache has a patent covenant
Outputs of this ring
Should there be a license that applies?

Thor

wondering, if EEA members worry that it isn’t accepted?
I don’t think we need new licenses – doesn’t exist in the web sphere?

Chaals

W3C went through a process of developing a patent license through their prose
built a patent policy – was controversial
if you want to put something in the spec, you can’t patent (patent covenant)

Chaals

work out how to make a proposal
possibility is you submit an EIP, do it in parallel
discussions in private and public

Amber

legitimate concerns
any proposal from enterprise may add bloat
concern that they will die in EIP
then you end with ego
looks like they failed

Chaals

is a real issue
won’t do it because they’re nervous
my company has this idea, submitted it, get yelled at by public people
strong disincentive for individuals who are afraid
AFAIK no one has taken a proposal and put it in as an EIP

Bob

something comes both ways
talked to Hudson (EF AllCoreDevs project manager)
have a process, can have specs that are better

Amber

“not our problem” --> not just enterprise should have funds
not two teams

Alex

vision for Ethereum?
expression of vision
hand slapped around “we”

Chelsea

for eons open source has done emotional labour that have been co-opted
then people have to pay

Boris

long answer to there is no “we”

Amber

tried to push through EIPs
approached by EF and tried to push it out
the process didn’t go forward, lots of people fighting
meritocracy is an illusion

Alex

point of EIPs is that it needs to be deployed on public net?

Bryant

if community believe that it adds to the use cases

Brooke

there are people who want nothing to do with corporation

James

moving at lightning speed
maybe code isn’t being put in (specs)
blockchain POCs are 80% failing

Chaals

if it looks irrelevant to public chain – no point
doing standards work is expensive
don’t do it if there is no value
we believe there is a real use case for mainnet
if proposed contributor believed that
if EEA was running a mainnet process and a private process
counter-example: lots of requirements for mainnet clients – don’t need to do PoW
turns out lots do – that aspire to run on mainnet – making it a requirement

MP

no core devs here
is this political?
if enterprise has an EIP, nothing happens, because you have to pull strings, there might be other actors
also because it takes dev into a political
maybe we need to think about other ways to have representatives

Brooke

we’re doing lots of analysis of why nobody trusts each other? what’s a next step

Jason

working with large enterprise
change that is incentives
when considering interoperability
the point is to have the same access – whoever they are
additional changes to EIPs, then needs will grow exponently
shouldn’t think about enterprise in a way that benefits them

Chaals

biggest enterprise are very big – the smallest are quite small
politics happens when you put people together
optimize for getting work done
concrete things
have a look through enterprise issues – can ask other members
let’s pick out which might be an EIP
I would like to see EIP process – figure out a patent policy

Alex

curious to enterprise to articulate what more could get on to mainnet

??

what is the size of the gap? what is cool?

Amber

maturing some of the privacy pieces
precompiles for zkSNARKS

Chaals

permissions are smart contracts on network
what does it take to decide to work on mainnet

Chelsea

nothing optimizes for politics as opacity and closed systems

Dan

implementing part of the community that have talked privatey
will be either beneficial to mainnet or not
no more or less important than other members

Amber

non controversial piece is privacy
EEA has enough contentious on the inside – it’s just as hard on the inside as bringing it to public
more and more questions about who benefits from improvements

Chaals

also the case, because it’s an individual act
will be a pain – let individuals

Amber

literally as a corporate employee
the EEA as whole could publish

Chaals

could get a rough list

Alex

if orgs or individuals make contributions
then EEA could be a proxy
hire some on the EIP process – owner to help push forward

??

Would be great to share not all lists
rather than rejecting or accepting the whole list

Topics
Review and examination of EIP process
EIPs (things that clients must implement) vs ERCs (standards and templates such as ERC20)
DISCUSSED
TO DO

canonical reference, or perhaps a companion HOW-TO in the Scrolls Wiki or ETHhub?
Could do with more promotion – why should you EIP, why you should track EIPs, etc. etc

Do we need more editors?
What should editor do and what not? How do we help ensure that people who submit EIPs get feedback? Many EIPs vs. limited EIPs (AKA Boris vs. Nick)
How can we better identify and sort EIPs based on their content
i.e. if you have an interest in following Wallet specific EIPs, how can you find all of them and track their progress? See this thread from a current discussion.
Should we decentralize a EIP process?
as proposed in this thread and in this thread?
How does the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) or other groups inter-operate with the EIP process?
How do EIPs / the Ethereum ecosystem interoperate with other standards processes? (W3C? BIPs or other pan-crypto standards? etc.)
PARTICIPATE IN THE OPEN
Action Items
Document
New License / Contributor Agreement for EIPs for Patent Protection
Needs to go beyond CC0 and add protection against patent trolls
EEA interest in this topic
Need to file this as an issue (probably in EIP repo) and see who might take this on
JSON-RPC as EEA test case, working together
Connections TBD, @boris will take this on, further discussion during DevCon session
Infura might be able to support
EEA test case
List to be shared with public
Chaals to look at getting an EEA list of top items that might make it into EIPs
Problems outside YellowPaper
Various things that are under specified to be identified (eg JSON-RPC from above)

Author: boris
Date: 2018-10-31T14:18:28.832Z

From the EIPs / EEA session, we emerged some new items to move forward.
(1) Suggest contributing tests along with EIPs (2) Whisper and (3) DevP2P need a better, more formal spec; (4) EEA needs a public descriptor of its governance model / interfaces.

Author: boris
Date: 2018-11-09T16:43:58.619Z

The JSON-RPC work is moving forward, with a first call planned here https://github.com/spadebuilders/community/issues/15
Please add yourself to that thread / suggest agenda items.