Sebastiaan van der Lans

Dan Larimer – How Blockchain is Evolving (Q&A)

Sebastiaan van der Lans

Block.One’s Chief Technology Officer Dan Larimer discusses the future of blockchain at the 2019 Blocksburg Summit. After writing a full transcript of his keynote, here you’ll find the full transcript of the Q&A on how blockchain is evolving.

Featured Speaker: Dan Larimer — Blocksburg Summit, Department of Computer Science

Firstly, a table of content to make this extremely valuable collection of insights easier to navigate through:

Blockchain and Smart Contracts in Real Estate

Q: How can smart contracts aid in buying homes? 

What are the most challenging things when you’re buying a home? It’s just having proof that the person who owns the house currently has the right to sell you the home. That the land is properly surveyed, that you got the right title insurance, that the loan for the home is paid off. And then the lender of the previous, buyers, the new lender knows that you’ve got all the insurance. 

Blockchains can make it trivial to know who owns the house. It can make a trivial deal, how much debt is on the house. To know that it’s been paid off. A smart contract can simultaneously and atomically switch ownership and satisfy all of the constraints. It could completely eliminate the need for title insurance, once everything is on the blockchain. If it’s on the blockchain, it’s good. If it’s not, then it doesn’t exist, all your rights are away. 

For other agreements, whether it’s a driveway maintenance agreement, or whatever it might be, it should all be documented on the blockchain so there is just one source of truth. That provides great efficiency for the real estate market. 

It can even make things like real estate investment trust much more automated. You can remove a lot of the overhead, remove a lot of the trust. Blockchain and tokenization can change investing in individual houses; rather than debt financing houses, equity finances your house, right? 

In our culture, banks don’t have any skin in the game. If the house prices go up or down, they get their money no matter what. Muslim culture is different. They’re not allowed to have interest, so they structure things a little bit differently. 

There are lots of opportunities to create new incentive models to prevent bubbles. To align interest between the owner of the house; be it a fractional owner and just buy your house over time. There are lots of really cool things that can be done in the real estate market.

Launching Blockchain Social Media Platform Voice.com

Q: When will Voice get launched? 

Launching Voice.com has got many problems we need to solve. Everything from the technology to the legal. Not everything is within our timeframe. I can tell you we’ve got amazing code ready to go. We’ve got amazing progress with the regulators and it was very encouraging to just see the stance of at least one SEC commissioner from yesterday. That was very good for the future of Voice. 

We’re very excited and I’d love to share with you more. Like Brendan says, if we don’t tell you anything, everyone’s wondering what are we doing? And we tell you like, when’s it coming? It’s coming as fast as we can bring it to you. No one’s more excited to get it out to market as quickly as possible than we are.

Related: Brendan Blumer & Dan Larimer on Voice.com, “Social media has not been a good friend to us”

Centralization versus Decentralization

Q: How do you think of the divergence between academia and industry? The academia focuses more on decentralization, while the industry focusses more on efficiency and scalability.

A great debate; efficiency versus scalability versus decentralization. I’d like to address that because I think it’s actually a major source of debate in the industry. People form their different tribes, having their different beliefs, like “Proof-of-Work is the one only truly decentralized way” or “Delegated Proof of Stake means 15 people, who all happen to be Chinese, is completely centralized”. There’s this huge debate on “What is decentralized?”.

EOSIO on Proof-of-Work

The truth is that you can take EOSIO and you can use the Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm with EOSIO, and still process thousands of transactions per second. The belief that Delegated Proof of Stake is the source of the performance of EOSIO is possibly my fault, but possibly it is other people, not understanding. 

Delegated Proof of Stake provides a way to reduce the latency, but it has nothing to do with throughput. So, you can have 15-second blocks, processing thousands of transactions per second using Proof-of-Work and have much of the same developer experience that you have with EOSIO. So, while Proof-of-Work doesn’t necessarily does have a performance impact on the latency of your transaction confirmation, it’s got no impact on the throughput.

The role of Academia versus Businesses in Blockchain Industry

Efficiency is all about reducing costs and scalability is necessary to operate things like Voice as a social media platform. If you’ve got to have tens of millions of users interacting on a blockchain, you want low latency so you can preserve the user experience. 

The reality is, most people are extremely spoiled by the expectations of how fast things operate today on the internet. We can’t go backward. We have to bring the technology of blockchain to the same performance capabilities of what we have without blockchain solutions, but then add the integrity, add the security, add the auditability and accountability to it.

Definition of a Decentralized Public Blockchain

So you can say that if it’s a public blockchain, as in anyone can fork the chain and go in a different direction and everyone can see the entire ledger, it’s decentralized. That’s my definition of decentralized; that there is no vendor lock-in. 

If you don’t like the current block producers or the current mining pools, fork it and go a different way. If the majority of the community agrees, then that’s going to be the new official chain.

So that is my key definition of decentralized. Is it public? Is there a vendor lock-in? The person who controls it, do they have the permanent control of it or is the community of all users who have the ability to say, “you know what, we don’t like this dictator. We put a new dictator.” or “forget dictatorship, we’re going to have an election” or “forget that, I’m going to go to Proof-of-Work”. Right? 

You can swap the consensus algorithm if you get enough buy-in from the community, as long as it’s public and everyone can see it. 

Currency makes forking very easy. Right? We’ve got Bitcoin, we’ve got Bitcoin Cash and 20 different forks of Bitcoin and each community says, “we’re going to use this currency for us”. They all have different market caps and it’s all nice and clean. 

But when you have a blockchain that’s selling movie tickets and the movie ticket’s on the blockchain, when that chain forks, you don’t all of a sudden have twice as many seats in your theater. That’s a real problem. And that’s where some of the lock-ins comes.

That’s largely solved by having every single business have its own blockchain, right? Every business can go its own way and then have lots of competition between businesses.

If you don’t like this movie theater’s policies, then go use some other movie theater. If Oracle is not doing the database work you need, go to MySQL, go to Mongo DB. There are different alternatives in terms of how you can structure the governance of your chain to achieve decentralization. 

Now I’d like to talk about academia and, and the research side of things. The blockchain industry as a whole does a ton of research into advanced cryptographic techniques, zero-knowledge proofs, and new ways to do trustless things. They’re not really practical for today’s business environment, but that’s good. 30 years ago, computers weren’t fast enough yet, so blockchain’s spawning future technology.

Passwords and Security in the Blockchain Era

In the short term, we need to design things with ease of use in mind. If you build a system, it doesn’t matter how fast the car can go, as long as we can drive it. We need to make things easy to use.

Ease of use is actually a critical component of security. If people can’t figure out how to use it, they’re gonna find ways around it. They’re going to put a post-it note with their password on it, right? So, we can’t just say it’s more secure. Theoretically, it has to be more secure practically. In practically, that means, making it easier to use. 

Relevant: For more on Security and Deterministic Code, see Dan’s keynote at the U.S. Capitol.

Building the World you want to Live in

The other thing to consider is: which society would you rather live in? The society where everyone’s got bars on the windows and security checkpoints and TSA lines at every store that you go into, or society where there aren’t locks on the doors, where you can just trust everyone?

Security systems and solutions are there to keep honest people honest. We should focus on increasing the integrity of the individuals in society because that actually creates the environment we want to live in.

We don’t want to live in an environment where you have to work really, really hard to protect your security, protect your identity, where you have to use 20-character passwords that change every other day. That’s not the society we want to live in. So, let’s not create that society. Blockchain can help to automate a lot of these things, make passwords disappear. That’s one of the things I’m most excited about. 

With blockchains, in combination with phones with hardware keys in it, you no longer need a password. Any system that’s using passwords is doing it wrong in my opinion, because passwords you forget, they change often, they can be forged, right? 

An Example: Twitter on a Blockchain

Let me show you an example, I use this example a lot.

A tweet comes out from an executive I won’t name, and it violates some SEC regulation. Stock prices go up or down. People make or lose tens or hundreds of millions of dollars because of that tweet. People might end up in jail for that tweet. 

We have no idea who actually said it, right? Did the CEO really say that, or does someone inside Twitter modify the database to make it look like he said that? Or did some hackers from the outside corrupt the database? It’s Twitter saying he did versus the person saying “no, I didn’t say that”. 

And then, we get into situations where I’m going to say that, and I’m going to claim that I was hacked. And some people can start to use this, “Oh, we don’t really know what happened” as an excuse to escape accountability for their actions. So, if websites like Twitter do build on blockchain, designed with integrity from the beginning, then there would never be any doubt about who said it.

They might be in this situation where someone’s holding a gun to your head and making you put your Face ID or Touch ID and sign the transaction. But that’s an extremely rare circumstance, that would have lots of other evidence to go along with it. In lots of other ways, it protects and documents what happened. 

Integrity in News

When you talk about the integrity of our news, they can change history, they change it all the time. Governments change the stats; they released their economic indicators regularly and then six months later after no one’s looking at the indicator, they revise it to be closer to the truth. Or sometimes they revise it in the other way. Talking about scientific measurements, whether they’re trying to generate evidence for or against that we’re warming. How do we know there’s any integrity to that? They can just make up the numbers. 

Related: Brendan Blumer on Timestamps & 10 Reasons Why Timestamping Content with Blockchain Matters.

We have all kinds of research being done where the source material can be doctored and there’s no way of knowing or authenticating or reproducing a lot of the research, but this gets back into the integrity. 

Starting with a question about decentralization in academia versus industry. I think that academia needs to study advanced math, like advanced crypto. That leaves the groundwork for the industry to come along after it is optimized and applied. They’re both at different stages in the pipeline of research.

Q: If I were to launch an app today with 10 or 20 million users, is that something that a single chain of EOSIO can support or do I need to wait for a multi-chain solution?

A single chain can support it, particularly if it’s a private chain, depending on how you structure the chain. I’ll talk to another aspect of blockchain, another distinction that is often lost. People talk about transactions per second. Well, what’s in a transaction? If every transaction needs extensive calculations, you’re not going to be able to get very many. But, if the only thing you’re trying to do is logging the order of events, say, an election, then you can get much higher throughput. 

I’m going to throw some numbers out here based on internal testing that we’ve done. If you’re not running any smart contract code, an EOSIO chain can do over 20,000 transactions per second just ordering the transactions. These are authenticated, signed transactions, and that’s today on a single chain. 

A Multi-Blockchain World

You can do a lot with that kind of throughput and we’re only going to expand it from there as computers are only going to get faster. And that’s already fast enough to do at least Visa-level. A single business can have many different blockchains and load balance, right?

Facebook or Voice.com doesn’t mean one blockchain for the entire world. It can have a blockchain per country. The financial system doesn’t need one blockchain for the entire financial system, It’s a blockchain per bank. And if the blockchains trust each other, then it’s really easy to move money from one blockchain to the other through Oracles and things like that.

So, I believe that there are really big businesses that need a multi-chain setup, but there’s a whole lot of the small businesses and medium-sized businesses that blockchains can easily handle today.

Blockchain Should Replace MySQL

My personal goal for EOSIO is to make it the fastest, most general-purpose application database out there. So you’d rather use EOSIO than MySQL because it’s faster.

The reality is EOSIO is faster than PostgreSQL, is faster than MySQL when you’re doing the type of stuff we’re doing. Right now, we’re processing transactions on the blockchain and then trying to propagate them into traditional databases and the rest of the infrastructure can’t keep up with the blockchain, right? We just need to make the blockchain data the stuff that we’re storing in our smart contracts, more accessible via APIs. 

That’s what we’re working on at Block.One. Make it so you don’t have to compromise. You just go with blockchain, because it provides you all the features and capabilities you expect from a current database with all the benefits of blockchain.

The Challenge with Elections on a Blockchain

Q: What do you see as some of the challenges in doing election voting on a blockchain?

The challenge with elections is trying to cram 320 million votes into a single day. I don’t know how many pay attention to what’s going on with the EOS public network right now, but they’re doing 50 million actions a day right now, which averages out to about 570 transactions per second. So, we already have the capacity to process a US election in one day on an EOSIO chain. 

The biggest challenge is not technological when it comes to elections. It’s philosophical. It’s getting people to accept the idea that it’s actually possible to have an election that is secure at the information layer and not have to rely on the voting machine manufacturer to tally things. Getting people to be comfortable with the idea that they can prove to themselves that their vote was properly cast. That’s the requirement for an honest election.

Blockchains and Politics

The trick here is that we live in a country with political parties. The political parties can use whatever election system they want in their party, laws don’t apply to that. So, you could have a new political party and if enough people do not believe in the integrity of elections, they would actually vote for a party that uses blockchain to do its primaries. 

That doesn’t solve the integrity of the final election, but right now you can only vote for any candidate, as long as they’re for big government; they all have the same views on the important stuff. I think just that technology is not limiting in provably honest elections. It’s all political.

Facebook’s Immensely Positive Impact on the Blockchain Industry

Q: How do you think that Facebook’s moving forward with blockchain?

Facebook’s got to solve all the scaling problems too. I don’t know how they’re going to move forward because I don’t know what’s going on there, but I do know the impact they’ve had on the industry. A lot of people didn’t take blockchain seriously. They didn’t respect Bitcoin or anything as a threat until Facebook got into it. Libra was the first thing that was perceived as a threat to a dollar. 

And now, all of a sudden, you see every one, even Senator Warner, saying that we have to keep big tech out of finance. There’s a lot of protectionism there. They worry about losing control over the monetary system. So, I don’t know which way they’re going to go. It’s exciting to see that they recognize the value of blockchain.

Facebook and Blockchain; for the Money Grab, or a Change of Heart? 

Once again, the question is “are they going to use it for good purposes with integrity, or are they going to use it to further lock-in their control over information and privacy?”. That’s the real concern. They already know who all of your friends are. They know everything you say. They know everything. 

If you get cut-off from Facebook, not only do you lose your social connections, you lose your financial connections. There’s a lot going on. 

I haven’t seen Facebook try to address the identity problem. How do you verify these are all unique people, and how about the integrity of what they’re doing with respect to advertising. What about the lack of integrity in manipulating elections, in manipulating people’s ability to communicate, right? 

You guys realize we’re being manipulated when Google filters our search results. They can show us just one side of stories, right? That impacts our view on the world. And that gets back to the integrity of big businesses; to make sure that the algorithms they’re using are transparent so that you know why you are seeing what you’re seeing.

Are there some blacklists of sites that you’re not supposed to see? Are there topics that are inconvenient for the powers that be? We don’t get to see those things today, and so we assume that what we see when we go on Google and we go on Facebook is the reality as it is. But instead, it is the reality as they choose to present it to us with their algorithms, without accountability, and without integrity. 

So it’s nice to see Facebook looking at blockchain. The question is, is it just the money grab, or is it an actual change of heart? The jury’s out on that. 

Related: Facebook’s Dopamine-Driven Feedback Loops.

Blockchain and Quantum Computing

Q: What’s your take on blockchain and Quantum computing?

Quantum computing will eventually change how blockchains have to do signature verification, and the technologies we use to do that. I think we’re still ways off before it becomes a practical concern versus a theoretical concern. And blockchains will adapt. 

There’ll be new cryptographic techniques, new signature techniques. But, the fundamentals of hashing are still secure against quantum. Blockchains are transactions, linked together with hashes to the previous one. That part of the blockchain will remain secure. And then, it’s just a matter of upgrading from keys of a certain type to do new signature schemes.

The Dollar, Inflation and Tax in the Blockchain Era

Q: What’s your take on the dollar?

The dollar inducing its reserve status; that is a huge point of centralization in our society.

The dollar allows the federal government to print unlimited amounts of money, fund infinite deficits, and direct all the resources of the economy. And, when they create new money out of thin air, it doesn’t create more chairs, more computers, more steel; it doesn’t create more real things. All it does is reallocate those things and make it more complicated to calculate whether or not you have a real profit or loss. 

We’ve got lots of people out there who think they’re making money every single year, right? You have an interest in your bank account like 1%. You think you’ve made 1%. The government takes half of it. “All right, I’ve made half a percent”. But then they inflated five or ten percent, right? So, you get less, your money’s going down. So companies are recording profits, but they’re not. They’re investing in things that are not sustainable as resources or are redirected. 

The IRS creates a very complicated bureaucracy, where the government has to know all your financial transactions, in terms of when you bought and sell stocks, when you buy and sell gold, when you buy and sell crypto. They have all kinds of employment contracts and business deals are structured around the tax code. But the tax code is only so complicated because we’re using the dollar. The dollar has no accountability and no integrity.

Entrepreneurship in an Absolutely Fair Economy

In a fair economy, the currency should have an absolutely fixed supply. The same as we have in blockchain. Then the interest rate would be the average productivity of society. Businesses will borrow money, and if they can produce things more efficiently than the interest that they’re paying, then they’ll make a profit. If they can’t, they won’t. So that’s the average productivity of the best entrepreneurs, right? 

Every entrepreneur in society is saying “How can I make money?”. If they have an idea that can make a 5% return, but the interest rate is 6%, then it’s not a good idea. It’s not about the absolute 5% return that they make. It’s about the relative return to all the other entrepreneurs, who can, for example, borrow at 6% and make an 8% return. 

How Blockchain can bring Integrity to the Monetary System

When the government comes in and decides we’re going to subsidize loans for this and, and lower interest rates for that, all of a sudden, we’ve got a system where the signals are off. People are investing in things that are unsustainable, right? Rather than investing in what’s most profitable, which increases the total wealth of society, the highest return, now we’re investing in things that only make sense in nominal terms. 

So, I got more dollars, but we’re still disconnected from how many chairs there are in the room. The only way that you make money is if you have more real things at the end of the day. So, that’s where blockchain can bring integrity to the monetary system. 

Now, let’s view a country as a blockchain. Blockchain could be viewed as a country. The token can be viewed as the currency of the country, and inflation of the token can be used to fund the government. That works, as long as there’s a fixed limit. A fixed limit at the amount of inflation. 

Let’s say that the federal government was only allowed to increase the money supply by 5% a year. That’s less than what’s going on right now in many places. That fixed amount of income causes the government to have to prioritize and be subject to market demands.

For efficiency, they have to make trade-offs, asking “What is the best investment of that fixed budget?”, and it also aligns them with the people, instead of the government and the people being in conflict with each other. The government wants a strong dollar and the people want a strong dollar. Because the only way for the government to grow in its purchasing power is for the currency to grow. 

So, these are the type of things where blockchains can provide integrity. To things like the dollar and national governments, where the current system doesn’t.

In the current system, banks are just creating money. They don’t know where it’s all at. They have to estimate the money supply. They don’t know how much money there actually is. They can’t even agree on the definition of what a dollar is in our society right now. And that’s a problem. 

Stable Coins; Dollar Backed Cryptocurrencies

And then we have all these regulations about stable coins, can you create dollars? Cryptocurrencies backed by dollars, then you’ve got this middle man and trust. What happens if they’re lying about their reserves, like with the whole fractional reserve. Does the bank really have the gold? Except now it’s dollars.

The dollars really have purchasing power. That’s the problem, right? It makes it difficult for businesses to integrate with the money. Right? And that was one of the big things; make the dollar programmable, put the dollar on a blockchain. That’s just an example. 

So, to be competitive in the future, the only way a country can actually be competitive is if it’s got integrity in its markets; if it actually knows that it is making a profit, instead of just thinking it’s making a profit, right? 

If you are eating all your seed corn, you can’t plan for next year. You might think “Oh, there’s plenty of corn”, but then the future comes and it’s time to pay, right? As a society, we’re deceiving ourselves into thinking we’re productive, to think that there’s money, to thinking we have wealth, when in fact we don’t. And that results from a lack of integrity in our accounting practices, as like government, as a banking system, and so forth.

What will be Replaced by Blockchain? And where to expect Resistance?

Q: What are the challenges for blockchain in the short-term and the long-term? 

In the short term, the biggest challenge is making blockchain easier to develop and cost-effective so that it can be competitive against non-blockchain solutions. 

In the long term, like all technologies that make things more efficient, it’s going to eliminate all the jobs for lawyers, it could eliminate the need for a lot of regulators. 

People are always worried about AI displacing everyone, or blockchain displacing a whole bunch of accountants and attorneys. They control our legal system and they make a lot of money from doing so. So it’s going to be a belief that there’s something special about ink signature versus a digital signature. It’s going to be a desire to protect the status quo, to protect vested interests.

We can completely eliminate most of the overhead in our insurance industry with blockchains. We can streamline our justice system, and minimize the number of disputes in our society. All these things put a lot of people out of unproductive work, right? 

Accountants and Tax Attorneys will Disappear

Accountants and tax attorneys, they’re not doing anything productive. Their necessary overhead for the society that we have and the structure we have. Those people will have to find new work, doing new things and that’s where we’re going to get a lot of resistance. For example in switching the election system out for one built on integrity and provably secure from an information perspective. 

A lot of people don’t want a system that is secure because their power is based on leveraging the loopholes, leveraging the crony capitalism. The requirement for licenses that are no longer necessary, right? Licenses became a way of excluding competition and protecting, rather than being about their original intent to making sure people have integrity.

So, it’s the existing power structures that are going to resist this. That’s why it’s important to each and every one of us that we choose who we do business with. Are we going to choose to do business with the companies built on a blockchain or are we going to choose for a company that offers us something a little cheaper, but it’s not on a blockchain?

Decentralization is an Individual Responsibility

All of society is in a prisoner’s dilemma. Do we sell out to Walmart and give up our freedom, or do we buy from the local store, the local producer, the local farmer and maintain our freedom? Freedom costs money. Decentralization means redundancies. Redundancies mean lack of efficiencies, while we’re used to be efficient.

Having one source of everything, which maximizes economies of scale, is counter to de-centralization. It’s counter to being an antifragile. It’s counter to decentralization. 

As a society, each individual has to choose to pay a higher price for a little bit of redundancy in our life. To make sure that we have choices, that we don’t have to shop at Walmart because all the other stores have gone out of business. To make sure we don’t have to shop at the one grocer in town, the only one that could operate at scale, with all the regulations in place because of its government mandates. 

We have to choose decentralization, we have to choose, with that, a level of inefficiency and higher prices.

If we care about the freedom, diversity, and resiliency of our society as a whole, we have to actively choose for decentralization. With that, comes a level of inefficiency and higher prices.

The State of Inter-Blockchain Communication

Q: What do you think are going to be the impacts of inter-blockchain communication (IBC)?

Inter-blockchain communication is nothing more than inter-database communication. Nothing more than inter-business communication. At the end of the day, nothing more than person-to-person communication. 

So, the impacts are more streamlined. If a business can verify that you actually do have a degree from Virginia Tech just by validating a signature, and you don’t have to get a sealed envelope mailed directly to them, we can add a lot of efficiencies. 

So inter-blockchain communication adds efficiency, adds integrity, and prevents fraud, in business to business communication. It has a huge impact. The other place where inter-blockchain communication is used is within one company. The design we’re using for Voice has multiple blockchains on the back-end; some of them private for maintaining personal information, and some of them are public for all the stuff that people get to see. And that provides security. And there is two-way communication between them. 

There is already inter-blockchain communication between Ethereum and EOS, it exists today. People ask this question frequently, and here’s the analogy I often use: What have today’s equivalent of dialing modems. This blockchain can connect to this blockchain because we got a direct connection. 

What people want is AWS (Amazon Web Services), where you can spawn an unlimited number of virtual servers, that are all connected to each other at a push of a button. To deploy your application across it and have it all working seamlessly. That will come in time, but we’ve got to master modem connections first, in all the intermediary ways of doing it.

Block.One’s got some really innovative approaches for making blockchains more general, to facilitate blockchains to connect to each other.

New Paradigm: Each Person as a Blockchain 

Just to throw a concept out there; each individual person can be viewed as a blockchain. Imagine, everyone has a checkbook and you sign messages that you send to different places. There’s an order of events in which you’ve generated things. You’re the sole block producer of your own chain. 

So if you take that mindset, then EOS is a blockchain that’s communicating with tens of thousands of other single-person blockchains. How can we then generalize that so that EOS itself can just be viewed as another person from the perspective of other blockchains?

That’s where we’re going to get. And right now it’s already possible, but the cryptographic proofs are complicated. The overhead and the complexity is in putting it together. It’s not easily automated and made accessible, but it’s technologically possible. And there are things we can do to change the structure of the blockchain; simplify the proofs and make it more efficient and more accessible. But it’s as big of a challenge. 

You need to have the right mental paradigm for what you’re doing as to technically be able to do it. And that’s what we’re focused on. Block.One is getting the right paradigm so people can actually think and reason about inter-blockchain communication and reason about what’s going on. 

Thinking of each user having their own blockchain is a change in paradigm, a change in perspective. It opens up a whole new set of possibilities on what we can do and how we can build and design systems. And that’s the level that we’re trying to innovate on. Looking at things from a different angle and not just from the perspective that we’ve been given by the blockchain experts. 

Recruiting Blockchain Developers

Q: Where do new users find the individuals to evaluate and hire for blockchain?

You’ve just described the biggest problem we have in growing Block.One; how do you find all the best and brightest people? The reality is, very few people understand blockchain technology at a deep enough level to build it. 

We’re having to train the vast majority of the engineers in blockchain technology. We’re still at like at the cutting edge of blockchain technology, this is a time for experimentation. Find someone with a passion to learn it, there is no one place. In fact, you can take someone who is already an expert in your field, any field. If they have the right passion and the commitment to pursue it in-depth, they can become a blockchain expert. 

They can learn the skills they need and Block.One is here to help with that discussion, that’s why we’re working with Virginia tech. That’s why we’re doing this is to help educate more people. We are building the tools to make it easier, to lower the barrier to entry, for learning how to build for blockchains so that developers don’t have to worry about the nuances of it. 

I wish I had an answer to “where can you go?”. The reality is that we have to train and grow and teach people from the ground up and that’s what this is all about. So thank you very much, everyone.

Sidenotes

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