2025 Q1 Blockchain Commons Report
Blockchain Commons focused on the ZeWIF project for the Zcash blockchain during the first quarter of 2025, but that didn’t stopped us from also advancing a...
Posts by Category
- Quarterlies 19
- Musings 16
- Articles 11
- News 4
- Specifications 4
- Introduction 4
- Apps 3
- Salons 3
- Courses 2
- Videos 2
- Libraries 1
- Community 1
- Partnerships 1
- Top Articles 1
Quarterlies
Blockchain Commons 2024 Overview
Making Visions Reality We’ve often written in our yearly reports that the goal of Blockchain Commons is “the creation of open, interoperable, secure &...
2024 Q3 Blockchain Commons Report
Blockchain Commons’ work to create open, interoperable, and secure digital infrastructure continued in Q3 2024. Here were some of our main topics of intere...
2024 Q2 Blockchain Commons Report
Blockchain Commons is a not-for-profit organization that advocates for the creation of open, interoperable, secure, and compassionate digital infrastructur...
2024 Q1 Blockchain Commons Report
In the first quarter of 2024, Blockchain Commons continued its work on specifications, updated some of its references, and did new research on constrained ...
Blockchain Commons 2023 Overview
Welcome to Blockchain Commons’ yearly report on our status and projects.
2023 Q3 Blockchain Commons Report
Blockchain Commons work in the third quarter included: Specifiations: IETF dCBOR Gordian Envelope Gordian Envelope Attachments Gordian Envelope...
2023 Q2 Blockchain Commons Report
2023 Q2 in Brief Our major work in Q2 this year included: Pushing the Envelope Rust Libraries Educational Use Cases Wellness Us...
2023 Q1 Blockchain Commons Report
2023 Q1 in Brief In brief, our work Blockchain Commons work this quarter included: Foundations dCBOR Wyoming Legislation Musing...
Blockchain Commons 2022 Overview
2022 might have been Blockchain Commons’ strongest year ever. Though we laid down much of our foundational architecture a few years ago, we returned this y...
2022 Q3 Blockchain Commons Report
It’s been another busy quarter at Blockchain Commons, with a focus on new foundations, created in coordination with our community. Major Works Firm Found...
2022 Q2 Blockchain Commons Report
This quarter Blockchain Commons had one of its biggest events ever, the Silicon Salon, but there was lots more going on: Major Works Growing the Communit...
2022 Q1 Blockchain Commons Report
In Q1, Blockchain Commons achieved a variety of milestones, from the maturation of our community to the development of Smart Custody v2.0, from the release o...
Blockchain Commons 2021 Overview
Though Blockchain Commons initiatives date back to our 2016 foundation of Rebooting the Web of Trust and our 2017 work on Learning Bitcoin ...
2021 Q3 Blockchain Commons Report
Q3, 2021 saw Blockchain Commons projects that spanned the spectrum from our first security review through continued reference releases, new translations, a...
2021 Q2 Blockchain Commons Report
It was another busy quarter for Blockchain Commons, with a focus on work on our Gordian reference apps, which demonstrate our architectural models and spec...
2021 Q1 Blockchain Commons Report
In Q1 2021, Blockchain Commons largely focused on working with companies to integrate our Gordian architecture, best practices, specifications, reference l...
2020 Q4 Blockchain Commons Report
In Fall 2020, Blockchain Commons continued to work on creating architectures, specifications, and applications to support blockchain infrastructure. This ha...
2020 Q3 Blockchain Commons Report
In summer 2020 (Q3), Blockchain Commons really came together as both a professional organization and as a collective to support open infrastructure for block...
Musings
Musings of a Trust Architect: Architecting Trust in Software Releases
When can you trust a software release? How do you know that a software repo is safe, that it represents the intent of its creators? On the 20th anniversary o...
Musings of a Trust Architect: The Case for an International Right to Freedom to Transact
I recently wrote about “How My Values Inform Design”. There I discussed the issue of autonomy and how it can be supported by progressive trust, proof against...
Musings of a Trust Architect: How My Values Inform Design
ABSTRACT: By grounding technical decisions in ethical values, we can create compassionate digital architectures. This article examines how core human valu...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Building Trust in Gradients
Progressive Trust—it sounds a bit like something from a relationship advice column, right? But in the world of digital interactions, it’s actually a revoluti...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Has our SSI Ecosystem Become Morally Bankrupt?
This topic was presented at IIWXXXIX Fall 2024 on October 29, 2024. My name is Christopher Allen. In 2016, in advance of the ID2020 conference at the Unit...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Open & Fuzzy Cliques
Digital communities are collections of individual entities that are connected together. They can be modeled as graphs, with the individuals being nodes and t...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Edge Identifiers & Cliques
Since the mid-1990s, I’ve been advocating for the creation of secure digital infrastructures that protect human rights, civil liberties, and human dignity on...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Minimum Viable Architecture (MVA)
ABSTRACT: Minimum Viable Architecture (MVA) is an alternative to the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach, emphasizing the importance of a robust, scalab...
Musings of a Trust Architect: A Layperson’s Intro to Schnorr
ABSTRACT: Schnorr signatures have been a long time coming, but now that they’re finally here, they open up broad new cryptographic frontiers, including th...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Least & Necessary Design Patterns
ABSTRACT: The principles of least privilege and least authority are core computer security principles that can minimize attacks. Not only can they be exte...
Musings of a Trust Architect: The Origins of Self-Sovereign Identity
ABSTRACT: The idea of Self-Sovereign Identity emerged in 2016, but it has inspirations dating back centuries. This article explores the historic evolution...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Open Silicon
ABSTRACT: Drawing inspiration from Ken Thompson’s seminal work, Reflections on Trusting Trust, there are deep-rooted challenges in establishing trust in c...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Problems of Cryptographic Agility
ABSTRACT: Cryptographic agility was once seen as a desirable goal for computer security, but increasingly problems such as high costs, bad interactions, a...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Data Minimization & Selective Disclosure
I have been struggling for a while to communicate my framing of definitions for Data Minimization and Selective Disclosure, which are privacy-focused data-pr...
Musings of a Trust Architect: Progressive Trust
A New Approach to Building Trust in Decentralized Systems by Christopher Allen Musings of a Trust Architect is a series of articles by Life with Alacrity a...
Self-Sovereign Identity: 5 Years On
Musings of a Trust Architect is a series of articles by Life with Alacrity author and Blockchain Commons founder Christopher Allen that lays out some of the ...
Articles
Results of Second FROST Round Table Published
On September 18, 2024, Blockchain Commons held its second Round Table on FROST. Almost twenty expert cryptographers, designers, and developers came together ...
Open Development: The Necessary Next Step for Open Source
This is the meant to be the beginning of a discussion on the topic of Open Development as a growth beyond Open Source. It outlines how we think about ...
Echoes from History II: The Dangers of eIDAS
This article, like “Echoes from History: Designing Self-Sovereign Identity with Care”, is drawn from a book I have in process called FOREMEMBRANCE, which c...
Echoes from History: Designing Self-Sovereign Identity with Care
This article was originally published as an advance reading for RWOT12 in Köln, Germany on August 9, 2023. It has been slightly edited for this reprint. ...
Results of First FROST Round Table Published
On November 8, 2023, Blockchain Commons held its first Round Table on FROST. The results have been published at our FROST developer pages. The meeting inclu...
Self-Sovereign Computing
ABSTRACT: Self-Sovereign Computing is a transformative paradigm designed to empower individuals to take command of their digital journey and to uphold t...
Protecting Your Wellness Data with Hashed Elision
Or: How to Stay Heart Healthy, but Not Become the New Fitbit Murderer Many of us have heard of the Fitbit murder case: a husband killed his wife and then ...
The Dangers of Digital Credentials in Education
And How to Resolve them Using Holder-Based Hashed Elision Digital credentials are the next step in credentialing because they’re quite simply a better way...
Private Key Disclosure: A Needless Threat to Rights and Assets
UPDATE 2023-02-16: This bill has passed the Wyoming Assembly 41-13, a day after the Wyoming Senate passed it by a vote of 31-0. If Wyoming Governor Mark Gord...
Principal Authority: A New Perspective on Self-Sovereign Identity
This summer, we’ve been iterating through an article intended to talk about the success that Blockchain Commons has had working with the Wyoming legislature ...
Project Proposal: New Social Social Key Recovery Approach
The goal of social key recovery is for the user to specify groups of individuals that together possess the ability to recover the root secret of a wallet. A ...
News
Blockchain Commons Awarded FROST Grant from Human Rights Foundation
Today, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) announced a Bitcoin Development Fund grant to Blockchain Common for its continued support of the development of FROS...
Wyoming Passes Private Key Protection & Digital Asset Registration Laws
Blockchain Commons advocates for the creation of open, interoperable, secure & compassionate digital infrastructure, to enable people to control their ...
Seven Years Later: DIDs Have Been Ratified!
Congratulations to W3C on the ratification of DID v1.0 as a W3C standard! Though Blockchain Commons has only lightly touched upon DIDs to date, they nonet...
Blockchain Commons Joins COPA
To fulfill its commitment to open source and to a defensive patent strategy, Blockchain Commons has joined COPA, the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance. ...
Specifications
Deterministic CBOR Goes to IETF
If you’ll be at IETF 117, we hope you’ll join us for dCBOR discussions there on Monday July 24th. The CBOR meeting will be 17:30-18:30 July 24th (Session IV)...
Seven Years Later: DIDs Have Been Ratified!
Congratulations to W3C on the ratification of DID v1.0 as a W3C standard! Though Blockchain Commons has only lightly touched upon DIDs to date, they nonet...
Blockchain Commons Launches LifeHash on the Web
Wolf McNally’s LifeHash is one of Blockchain Commons’ interoperable specifications intended to make digital infrastructure open, interoperable, secure, and...
Blockchain Commons’ Uniform Resources (URs) Support Airgapped PSBTs & More
The Uniform Resources specification is one of Blockchain Commons’ most notable wallet enhancements of 2020: it enables airgapped PSBTs and is supported throu...
Introduction
Why CBOR?
Why CBOR? Blockchain Commons is dedicated to developing open-source technical specifications, reference implementations, and tooling that help developers ...
Gordian Envelope Use Cases Overview
Gordian Envelopes can be used to store and transmit information in a structured, privacy preserving way. By what does that mean? Following are examples of fo...
An Introduction to Gordian Envelopes
Gordian Envelope is a specification for the achitecture of a “smart document”. It supports the secure, reliable, and deterministic storage and transmission...
Blockchain Commons Overviews Its Technology in New Video
In the last year, Blockchain Commons has produced a large collection of specifications, reference libraries, architectures, and reference utilities meant to ...
Apps
Gordian Seed Tool Reveals the Foundations of Cryptography
Blockchain Commons has released Gordian Seed Tool, a new iOS app that allows for the creation, storage, backup, and transformation of cryptographic seeds i...
Gordian QR Tool Supports Vaccine Records, 2FAs, Cryptoseeds, and More
The state of California recently announced their Digital COVID-19 Vaccine Record system. It allows Californians to access a digital copy of their vaccine rec...
Blockchain Commons Releases Feature-complete LetheKit
Blockchain Commons has released a feature-complete version of LetheKit, a do-it-yourself hardware platform that allows you to conduct cryptographic operation...
Salons
Silicon Salon 3 Call for Contributions
The Silicon Salon is Back for the New Year! Sign Up Now at Eventbrite Blockchain Commons will be facilitating Silicon Salon 3 in mid-January, tentatively...
Silicon Salon 2 Posted!
Thanks to everyone who joined us for our second Silicon Salon, this one focused on Secure Boot, Supply-Chain Security, and Firmware Upgrades. Courtesy of s...
Announcing the Silicon Salon
What if semiconductor manufacturers made chips especially intended for crypto-wallets? That’s the topic of Blockchain Commons’ first Silicon Salon, which w...
Courses
Learning Bitcoin Upgrades to v2.0
Blockchain Commons has recently released v2.0 of our Learning Bitcoin from the Command Line course. Visit the Course Support the Course Learning Bit...
First #SmartCustody Workshop: Simple Cold Storage & Self-Custody
Our first #SmartCustody workshop will be on Tue, January 29, 2019, 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM PST, at 554 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto, CA 94040-1217, Map. You can s...
Videos
SSI Orbit Podcast: Christopher Allen Interview
On January 31, Christopher Allen spoke with Mathieu Glaude at the SSI Orbit Podcast on the controversial topic “Has Our SSI Ecosystem Become Morally Bankrupt...
Foremembrance Day 2024 Presentation
For Foremembrance Day 2024, Christopher Allen gave a Twitter Livestream discussing the tragedy of overidentification in The Netherlands in WWII, how France o...
Libraries
Announcing Open Source Bitcoin Framework for iOS
Building on Libbitcoin Today we are announcing the availability of the open source Bitcoin framework for iOS. We have been working with veteran iOS develope...
Community
Announcing Blockchain Discussion Forum
Blockchain Commons has been accepted into the new GitHub discussion program, allowing for more freeform discussions within the context of our GitHub repos. A...
Partnerships
Blockchain Commons Joins COPA
To fulfill its commitment to open source and to a defensive patent strategy, Blockchain Commons has joined COPA, the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance. ...
Top Articles
Musings of a Trust Architect: Architecting Trust in Software Releases
When can you trust a software release? How do you know that a software repo is safe, that it represents the intent of its creators? On the 20th anniversary o...