BUZZWORD: BLOCKCHAIN

Liam: I feel like we’ve missed the absolute elephant in the corner here, which is blockchain.

__Allan: __Ha. Yeah.

Liam: Let’s try and find something else we can use blockchain to solve...

Marley: I just get sick of seeing LinkedIn profiles that say "I'm a blockchain advocate".

Ben: Or a "blockchain expert." Like really? Did you invent blockchain?

Liam: I sort of feel like it's the thing that everyone attempts to try and find a problem to try and solve with it.

Ben: Solution looking for a problem.

Liam: Yeah. It's one of those things, like it works quite well in the cryptocurrency space, right? In terms of that transaction holding the ledger context of it, I think there's a real essence where banks have attempted to look at it for quite some time. You've got the ASX and a couple other organizations that are looking at how that fits in their platform space. You've got groups like VISA or MasterCard that have come out and been very anti-blockchain in terms of going from a power consumption space. .

Ben: It's one of the three big advancements that we've ever had in accounting. There was single-ledger accounting, a double-ledger, and then there’s blockchain. I think that’s going to have a big impact eventually.

Liam: The question I always wonder is, “Is this like the internet?” Is this the early days of the internet when people are just saying, "They can't necessarily see that far ahead". The idea of going, "Okay, if we could tell the future then we'd all be millionaires in certain aspects." But is it like the internet where it existed in like '98, to what it is today and what we do over it today? Were there that many people back in the '90s talking about eCommerce and web platforms and API-driven aspects?

Allan: I’ve got very strong feelings about this…

Marley: If you follow the analogy, it's kind of concerning for the future of blockchain, right, because you're going to go again from a distributed system to things like siloed, walled gardens we have today on the internet, right?

Liam: Roughly speaking, yeah?

Marley: I mean it kind of defeats the purpose of technology in the first place.

Liam: How distributed does a distributed system need to be to still be effective? So if you treat the idea of a monopoly as a single ledger, and you say oligopoly is a controlled network. So let's say the banks all start to do blockchain between themselves as they're all the trusted ledgers. But they don't have untrusted ledgers in terms of, "Hey, you could just go and run the blockchain for the bank or be a node within the blockchain of the bank."

Ben: I might be okay with it if I could read the blockchain. At least to PenSpec what’s going on.

Liam: Yeah, you could still inspect it and look for fraud. Maybe with the Royal Commission that’s happening right now, maybe that’s one way to at least get visibility into a banking institution. But does blockchain always have to public? How distributed does a distributed network need to be?

Ben: Well, considering what Facebook's going through, I'd say distributed is a good thing.

Liam: Yeah...data sharing.