In this episode of What That Means, we’re talking blockchain with the blockchain god: Mic Bowman, of Intel Labs.
We cover:
- The differences between blockchain, Bitcoin, and distributed ledger technology
- What people are arguing about in the blockchain world
- How blockchain acts as a substitute for inter-organizational trust
- What cryptokitties are going for these days
- Hashing
- What smart contracts are
- When blockchain is the right decision
- Blockchain in a box
And lots more. Check it out!
Here are some key take-aways:
- With blockchain, you have to think about the application. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?
- Blockchain acts as a substitute for organizational trust and allows us to have an authority that’s outside any given organization.
- With Bitcoin, whatever the record says is truth, whether it really happened or not.
- There are trade-offs between trustworthiness and computability.
Some interesting quotes from today’s episode:
- “Really there's no delete. There's no removing something from the record. There may be reversing it, but removing from the records very, very difficult.”
- “The specifics of the technology have to do with the applications.”
- “Blockchain is a useful technology for addressing some problems. But it’s not the solution for all problems.”
- “Agreement is not always truth, but for the purposes of things like digital assets and cryptocurrencies, agreement is truth…”