Blockchain Governance Concerns: The Impact of Forks on Personal Digital Property

There is an anticipated proliferation of "assets" (e.g., identity, real estate, health data) being stored on the blockchain. Though who are the data owners and who has control over the assets? What are blockchain's security guarantees and potential attacks?

For example, what happens to assets when a fork is created over a governance dispute or other disagreement? What is the value of the forked assets and what fork contains the "true" asset? For instance, what would happen if identity is stored on the blockchain and a fork is created due to a disagreement? Furthermore, what are the potential privacy impacts and privacy expectations?

In this discussion, we will explore examples of governance concerns that must be addressed when storing personal assets on the blockchain. We will then show examples when a blockchain might cause more problems than intended and when a blockchain might be helpful.

About the Speaker:
Josh Joy received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA). Previously, he was a part of the DARBA CBMEN program researching tactical edge networks. He recently has deployed a real-time privacy-preserving location service named CrowdZen to UCLA, utilized daily by tens of thousands of UCLA students.

Additional details:
Pizza and soda will be provided!