Unless you've been living under a rock,
you've probably heard of cryptocurrencies.
There are digital forms of money that have their
own shifting values
and are slowly being accepted by
more and more businesses.
The conceit is that they're not regulated
by any government
but by users using blockchain
technology.
This week we cracked the code blockchain technology,
where it started, how it's used,
and its crazy future.
Blockchain ensures that there's no one
centralized force,
like a bank, making sure that
people aren't abusing the system.
They created this technology so that it would be very
hard to hack.
And in the case of cryptocurrency,
any amount of money
you could possibly steal trying to hack
into a system would take way more time
and energy to actually be profitable.
Today
blockchain technology is being used in really
interesting ways from managing
humanitarian crises to controlling
international supply chains.
But how is it technology,
originally created for keeping tabs on cryptocurrency
transactions, assisting so many other
business sectors today?
Is it really even private?
And most importantly where
does it come from and how the heck does
it work?
Good morning class and welcome to blockchain
101.
Dain, it's just me in here.
No Andrew I know there's no people here.
This is like my dream.
Can you just support me please?
Ok ok fine.
A lot of people think that Bitcoin
and blockchain are synonymous
but they're actually not.
Blockchain is the technology behind Bitcoin
that allows Bitcoin to even exist at
all. It's a lot like an internal combustion
engine and how it made the car ubiquitous
but it also powers things like lawnmowers
and weed whackers.
A white paper was published in 2008
by a person who uses the pseudonym
Satoshi Nakamoto that
described and explained Bitcoin
and its philosophy,
its technology,
and its functionality.
But it wasn't until 2014
when the wider investment community really
took action
with blockchain, seeing the value
in its decentralized system
of peer to peer transactions.
Now Andrew can you show us how blockchain
works?
I sure can Dain and thank you for calling on me.
Blockchain works like a game of telephone.
Basically the first person,
or user, chooses a word
or phrase and then they whisper that word
or phrase to the person in front of them.
This happens down the line until you
reach the last person playing.
Then they stand up
and repeat the phrase
or word that they heard.
Excuse me.
Now if you've played this game
before you probably know that when that person
stands up at the end and says that word
or phrase it's dramatically different
from the word or phrase that we started with.
This is a perfect example of how
an online ledger can get corrupted because
if a prankster
or hacker wants to corrupt data
that would be otherwise honest they can
without any protection from any outside sources.
But now imagine that a teacher,
which represents a node,
listens to every whisper
and makes sure that the phrase stays the same.
The prankster can't change anything up which keeps
all the data honest
and unchanging.
Now this entire classroom is a secure
block.
And if every other classroom in the building was playing
the same game of telephone,
with all the teachers
or nodes checking all their information against
each other, you could call the entire school
a secure blockchain network.
Did somebody in here say blockchain?
What is blockchain in simplest terms?
It's a data structure
that allows us to trace
a train of data back to its initial
providence and that is really hard to alter.
But like really but like what
is it? Okay.
If you're talking about a public blockchain
like Bitcoin,
then what you're talking about is a ledger
of transactions.
It's kind of like a big shared
Excel spreadsheet in the sky.
But instead of being part of The Cloud,
where you might have heard that The Cloud is just
somebody else's computer,
the blockchain is really all of our computers
working together at once so that
after some amount of time,
and in Bitcoin it's about an hour usually,
that everybody sees the same thing.
No matter where you are.
But.
But what about beyond Bitcoin?
I mean people are doing more than just paying each other that was kind
of stuff right?
The internet of information that we're familiar
with is great if you have a picture
and you want to e-mail that to someone else
and now you have two pictures
and everyone's happy.
But it's really really bad if you want to send something
and then not have it anymore.
So whether that's a dollar
or a land title it's not
just about paying each other anymore
and representing currency
but really any kind of marketplace
where you'd want to move a representation
of something you own around the world.
So what do you do
with blockchain?
I run a company that's called Clover.
And what we're doing is trying to make it
a lot easier for people to build those kinds
of applications I was talking about
on top of these blockchains.
Whether you want to be a business
that's running inside one of those private consortiums
and it's Fortune 100 companies working
together or you're somebody
at home that's working on a hobby project
or building their next startup that they think is going
to become a big business someday.
We want you to be able to use the same tools so
that these things can ultimately come together.
And what's the future of blockchain?
Well let me get out my crystal ball.
Nobody knows yet
and it really depends how the technology
continues to evolve.
It could drive democratization
and globalization
and free flow of jobs
and help people kind of meet
each other around the world
and come together.
But on the other hand we have to be really careful
about what information we are putting on that blockchain.
Until the privacy thing is solved in a
bulletproof way,
which it's just not yet,
there's always the risk that any information
that's on a blockchain could be seen by anybody.
So if we end up
with Twitter for our bank account,
imagine what Twitter for the national
economy looks like.
We could see a whole new era
of cyber war.
So guys do you know what the blockchain is now?
Yes.
Happy to help.
Thank you so much.
Bye.
Amber just gave us both a great lesson on
blockchain tech but now we have a lesson for you.
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Now. Let's go.
Yeah.
Blockchain.
It's a concept that felt so alien at the beginning
of this episode
and it's finally making so much sense.
Andrew why are you on your phone?
My mom just asked me what I did
today and I'm just explaining blockchain
over text.
Oh right on.
Spread the knowledge. And the wealth. You're
putting that all in one text?
Mhm, she's going to hate me.
Thank you so much for watching ConTECHtual.
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