Hi, I'm John Wolpert,
I'm the Seeker of Awesomeness for ConsenSys labs here in Washington DC.
ConsenSys is a company that operates in many countries
where the largest blockchain company right now in the world by many accounts,
and one of the fastest growing software companies in the world,
and by many accounts,
the largest blockchain company in the world.
We help businesses start up on the new Internet of transactions on the blockchain.
In particular, on Ethereum.
So, I'm here in DC with team looking for new ventures to get behind,
to help bootstrap, and to get going faster.
We are a new venture development lab.
My experience of the evolution of blockchain,
which I think is pretty common,
was a number of years ago hearing about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency,
and thinking that was novel and interesting.
But, I was at IBM at the time working on the Watson team.
That was artificial intelligence and pretty interesting onto itself,
so I didn't pay a lot of attention.
Then, a few years later,
my boss met one of my favorite people at IBM who's now the head of IBM Blockchain,
Jerry Cuomo, called me up and he said, "Hey Louis,
it's Clark," and I said, "What do you want Jerry?"
He said, "Well, there's this thing called blockchain.
We don't know a lot about it, but there's gold in those hills, go out and find it."
I said, "Well, give me a ship and crew,
and I'll go investigate."
He said, "Well, I got a canoe,
two dogs, and a musket."
I said, "Well, okay."
We got lucky.
It turned out that blockchain was,
we got halfway across the Mississippi,
looked over our shoulders,
and found that there was a wagon train behind us,
and now we're running a boomtown.
There was definitely, they're there.
So, we got lucky, and that's how I stumbled into blockchain.
Every use case I've seen in industry to date since
2015 that tried to do something with blockchain,
that said, "Hey, let's do this on blockchain," has
almost every single one of them has proven why it doesn't need blockchain.
Everyone that says, "Hey,
let me look at this problem differently," through
the lens of immutability, of decentralization,
of a number of nuanced ideas that are actually packed
up into primarily public blockchain technology,
especially around token economics,
and what you can do with this emergent notion of being
able to not just gamify human interaction.
Gamification is just keeping track of scores,
but then turning that into an economic set of decisions, right.
I'm going to vote,
I'm going to bet that this thing,
that this piece, that this fact is true.
Well, if the consensus is that that's false, I just lost.
Not just a point but real economic value in some way either in money,
real money, or some kind of other value,
many voting points, or something else.
So, it's applying this notion of powerful social-.
Public blockchain is effectively
a high precision instrument for seeing problems differently,
and then instrumenting them in ways that would have been way too
expensive and difficult to do if we had the old rails only, right?
We needed a new railway to run these kinds of transactions,
one that's more nimble,
one that's more precocious, more always available.
Once you have that kind of new rails,
you have an infrastructure that can allow you to just do things completely differently.