Blockchain 101 With Andreas Antonopoulos: How Bitcoin Makes Each Of Us As Powerful As A Bank

“Shifting from a perspective of ‘only humans control money’ to ‘machines and software control money’ is really radical and it changes a lot of things,” says the popular blockchain and Bitcoin author and speaker Andreas Antonopoulos. Antonopoulos discusses why the real magic of blockchain is decentralization, why criticisms that Bitcoin is a waste of energy are wrong, and why he now charges a 20% premium to be paid by wire transfer instead of bitcoin. And if you’re amazed by the idea of a self-driving car, wait until you hear his description of how the taxis of the future might operate.

Show Notes

Transcript

Laura Shin:

Hi everyone. Welcome to Unchained, a Forbes podcast produced by Fractal Recording. I’m your host, Laura Shin, a Forbes contributor covering Blockchain, digital currencies and Fintech. Thanks for tuning in. For today’s episode, I’m speaking with Andreas Antonopoulous, someone who is everywhere in bitcoin and blockchain, and he was really good at explaining this complex technology in simple terms. Andreas is the author of Mastering Bitcoin, a host of the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast, and a frequent speaker on cryptocurrencies at technology conferences. Welcome Andreas.

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Hi Laura. Thanks for having me.

Laura Shin:

So, tell us about your background in blockchain. How did you learn about it, and what do you do in the space?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Well, I first came across bitcoin in the early part of 2012. Actually it was my second or third instance of hearing about it, but I had, like many before me, dismissed it the first few times, and then it caught my attention and I read to Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, and because of my background in Computer Science as a distributed systems specialist and working in security, I immediately understood that this was a lot more than just a currency, it was a fascinating distributing system, so I got hooked. I stopped doing everything else and I started working full time in the space, and at that time, there weren’t that many people working full time, so I got involved in that space and now I continue to work in the space. I participate in a number of entrepreneurial activities, some start-ups, I’ve written one book, I’ve got another book in progress right now, and also, I speak at conferences and try to explain bitcoin, blockchain, and other technologies to audiences all around the world.

Laura Shin:

When you say that you were doing computer science, like what exactly were you doing?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

I have a Masters Degree in Distributed Systems Networks, and I’ve been working in security, data centers and cloud computing and the networks that connect them for 28 years now, and so that was my background, and until 2012 I was doing a lot of work in information security and distributed systems, but I’d also been involved quite a lot with cryptography and I had an interest in digital currencies every since the early ‘90s when DigiCash and David Chaum did some groundbreaking research in the cryptography of digital currencies, so bitcoin kind of slotted right into my areas of interest, expertise and professional activity.

Laura Shin:

When you read the white paper, and you immediately dropped everything else, what seemed so significant to you?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Well, I think the realization was that this wasn’t a currency in the traditional sense, and that it was really a very powerful, decentralized system. A system for coordinating resources on a massive scale, and also a system for embedding trust into a network centric system of coordination, resolving the byzantine fault tolerant problem, the byzantine general problem.

Laura Shin:

Which is? Can you explain that?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

So this is really a computer science, or a distributed systems problem, which is the idea that when you have systems coordinating over the internet and you don’t know, or any network, and you don’t know whether those systems are real or fake, whether you can trust them or not, whether your messages are being intercepted, and you’re trying to coordinate resources to execute some kind of action, or to agree on the state of a system, and that’s a really difficult problem, and so far, before bitcoin, there were some solutions to finding it and coordinating between parties, but they all required a certain amount of centralization, so you had to have some trusted third party, or the system didn’t really work very well, and with the introduction of Nakamoto Consensus, you know the technology at the heart of bitcoin, which uses the proof of work algorithm, that technology really allows you to coordinate with other parties on the state of the system and arrive at the same answer, have a single trusted ledger in this case, or state of the truth, without having to trust any of the other systems that are participating in the network.

Laura Shin:

And you just used a couple of terms that I’m not sure everyone listening will know. You said Nakamoto Consensus, and you talked about proof of work. What are those concepts?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

So, Nakamoto Consensus, named after Satoshi Nakamoto, is the algorithm that is used not only by bitcoin, but by hundreds and hundreds of other systems that have come since bitcoin, and use that fundamental mechanism, and this mechanism is a competition that occurs online to solve a mathematical problem, and it creates this very delicate balance where if you participate in this competition, you have to commit resources, mostly energy in the form of burning electricity to compute a difficult problem, and if you succeed and validate something, in the case of bitcoin, validate transactions and secure the network, in a way that everybody agrees is true, then you stand to win reward, and in the case of bitcoin, that’s new bitcoin, but if you try to cheat, then you don’t get the reward, but you’ve still spent the electricity, and the system on a large scale creates a very, very high level of trust because since every participant is incentivized to play fair, and punished severely if they try to cheat, it creates this equilibrium where the network as a whole can be trusted to execute bitcoin transactions, or whatever else you’re doing with the consensus mechanism.

Laura Shin:

And proof of work, is that the energy commitment?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Yes. Proof of work is, through mathematics, you prove that you’ve actually expended the effort, the work, which translates directly to expending electricity in order to arrive at an answer because there is no short cut, there is no way to arrive at these answers, these mathematical solutions, without performing a specific amount of computation, which costs a specific amount of energy, so there are no short cuts, and so if you’re presented with a solution, you know that the other person has actually spent the time to find the solution, and there is no easy way to do it.

Laura Shin:

So, let’s tie everything together with the word that has become the biggest buzzword over the last year, which is blockchain. What does that really mean, and how does that play into everything you just described?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Well, the blockchain is the artifact of all of this. It is the thing that is created through the mechanism of consensus. Meaning that, as all of these systems compete, what they’re competing to do is to gain the temporary right to record something on a shared ledger, and then have everyone agree that the state of that shared ledger is the same across the entire world, without having to trust that the person who last got to write on it is being honest because the network constrains them to be honest, so blockchain is really a ledger. It’s a recording of all the transactions that have happened, grouped into blocks, which are just convenient containers, and each block depends on the previous block, and they form a chain, all the way back into the past, from the beginning of when the system was created. So, in the case of bitcoin, you have the first block created in January of 2009, and then every subsequent block depends on the previous block, and it grows this great chain, each block adding to the state of the ledger, and also each block being very difficult to record because of this proof of work that is required. So, blockchain is really what the consensus mechanism creates.

Laura Shin:

And what keeps it all secure, and from being kind of like, rewritten, or revised, is cryptography, right?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Well, it’s a combination of cryptography and the proof of work algorithm, meaning that, on an individual basis what keeps someone from, for example, spending my bitcoin, is cryptography, it’s digital signatures, more specifically, and these digital signatures mean that only through possession of a private key can I sign and execute a transaction that spends bitcoin that belongs to me, so I exercise control over my bitcoin, or in the case of another blockchain, over whatever resource I’m controlling. On a one on one basis, each participant controls the resources, they control through cryptography, but the system as a whole, depends on proof of work, which is not really a form of cryptography, it’s a fairly novel category we would now call consensus algorithms.

Laura Shin:

And you hear a lot of concern about the energy consumption that proof of work takes. Is that something that can be done differently, or should the energy concerns…do they really matter?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

I think a part of that is because of a misunderstanding of what that energy is used for, and what that energy does, is it secures a global network against any adversary who might try to corrupt the global ledger, and so what the energy does, is it prevents attacks against the network, it provides security for the entire network. Removing the cost changes the balance of the entire system, so if you didn’t have cost, then you’re not bound to play fair, and seek reward. Then entire balance of the system depends on having to commit a certain cost, and that’s really the security of the network. Now, I think it’s a misunderstanding to see that as a wasted energy, that’s simply the cost of securing the system, and unlike other competing systems, in bitcoin, you can see that cost, it’s very visible. In most of the systems that we use on a daily basis, like when you swipe your Visa card, the cost is still there, you just don’t see it. There’s enormous energy being consumed by data centers doing fraud protection, the same function that the bitcoin proof of work algorithm does, and there’s also additional costs of moving money around in trucks with armed guards, and the buildings that it’s housed in, and all of that, so it’s just that in bitcoin, you really, really see that. So, what is the right amount of energy to spend to secure a global currency and a global payment network? I believe that we let the markets decide that, and the market is clearly demonstrating that it is appropriate to do that.

Laura Shin:

You talked about the security of the system, and yet we’re constantly hearing about hacks. Even this very week, there was this hack in bitcoin, the price dropped dramatically. How are we seeing all these hacks, and yet you’re saying the system is so secure?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Well, you have to understand that part of the premise of bitcoin and blockchain technology is to change the fundamental balance of how money is controlled and held. In bitcoin, I don’t need to store my money with a financial institution, I don’t need to trust a bank, I don’t need to give control of my money to other people. I can control my money directly on my own devices, independently, and what that means is that you can massively decentralize control over money, at which point it becomes very, very difficult, near impossible to hack. If you wanted to hack a million people’s bitcoin accounts, you have to hack a million individual computers. Unfortunately, what we’ve seen is, as this technology has grown, especially where it touches the traditional banking system, people fall into a pattern of replicating the past, and what they do is they create financial institutions in bitcoin that are very, very similar to traditional financial institutions where people give custodial control, they give control of their bitcoin to others, and trust others. This is unnecessary in bitcoin, you don’t need to give your money, or put your money in a bank because your app, your mobile phone, your desktop, can be a bank itself. But when you concentrate bitcoin in the hands of other people, then it becomes a very, very good target for hackers.

It’s important to recognize the distinction between a bank in all the traditional sense, that holds bitcoin of other people, being hacked, and bitcoin itself being hacked. Bitcoin itself, has never been hacked. For seven years, this network has not stopped running, and has never been hacked, and the reason for that is because the power in the network is distributed, but institutions that hold money on behalf of other people, get hacked all the time, and this is no different to a bank failure or a bank robbery, in the traditional financial system. So, I think what we’re seeing here is that when people try to recreate the past, they centralize control, and they build things that look like banks, those banks get robbed.

Laura Shin:

Well, in a most recent instance, and here we’re talking about the hacking of the exchange, Bitfinex, a lot of those people probably were storing their bitcoin there in order to do trading, and the exchange offered a number of kind of, more advanced trading functions, so you know, in that instance, I totally understand that if you keep control of the money yourself, then there’s no central point of attack. Then there’s other concerns which are, you know, are you the kind of person who’s going to be capable of managing your private keys, and there have been instances of course, where people have accidentally thrown out USB sticks, or hard drives, or whatever it might be, that contains those private keys, and lost their money that way. But presuming that you can manage that yourself, even if you were to try to do some of these more trading type features in order to make more money, you can’t do that just on your own, so do you feel that there’s any reason for people to be using these exchanges?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Well, the reason people use these exchanges is primarily for speculation, but you can trade bitcoin without giving your money to an exchange, and without putting it on an exchange. There are a number of decentralized systems that allow you to trade bitcoin in smaller amounts. If you want to do very, very high-volume institutional level trading, then at the moment, exchanges are the only way to do that. But for regular people who want to use bitcoin, as a currency, as a means of exchange, as a way to trade, we have hardware wallets that are surprisingly easy to use, and allow people to have very high levels of security and complete control over their finances with very little technical knowledge, and we also have decentralized systems of exchange that are easy to use, and allow people to maintain control over their money.

Laura Shin:

What are examples of the decentralized exchanges?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

For example, there’s a newer exchange that was built in the last year called Bitsquare, that allows people to exchange any number of currencies, both national currencies, traditional currencies, as well as digital currencies while maintaining control over their funds, individual wallets, and what these decentralized exchanges are doing is, essentially, they’re providing, clearing and escrow services on a peer to peer decentralized model. I think that’s where we’re going to go, so what we’re seeing today, is we see these bridge services, these services that are trying to bridge the past with the future. A bit like the days of dial-up on the internet, and if you remember those days, you know, using the internet in the days of dial-up was complicated, it was cumbersome, it was expensive, and your phone company would beat you up with all of these per-minute charges because their model was telephone calls, right, and when you’re trying to run the internet over the phone system, it kind of sucks.

Well, we’re in the same situation now where we’re trying to run bitcoin in relation to the traditional banking system, and whenever you touch the traditional banking system, everything happens in 3 to 5 business days, with lots of paperwork, lots of delays, and the risk of concentration, centralization of funds, but that’s not how it needs to be. It’s simply a transition, and I think we’re beginning to see these decentralized services that show us what the future could be, where you don’t rely on third parties in order to control your money.

Laura Shin:

So, how is blockchain technology likely to affect the everyday person, and when?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Well, that really depends on where you live because the needs in terms of these technologies vary greatly. I think in the first world, the opportunity was blockchain technology, and currencies like bitcoin, is to invent completely new applications that have never been done before. Bitcoin and the concept of the internet of money that it creates, are this new model where you can have a payment network that spans the globe, that has no borders, very much like the internet, and that allows you to run financial applications that are controlled by software, and rather than political rules, are controlled by mathematical rules, and you can have systems that can make payments as tiny as hundredths or even thousandths of a penny, and as big as billions of dollars on a single network, so that kind of convergence of all financial activity on a single, broad, flat global network, that can create a lot of applications that simply can’t be done today. So, there are very significant limitations to traditional financial payment networks, they’re slow, they’re cumbersome, they really represent 1970s technology.

So, the first world, I’m really looking at new applications, but to me, the bigger promise here is the fact that the traditional financial networks we have in payment systems, leave many billions of people outside. There are more than two and a half billion people who are completely unbanked, according to the world bank, and that usually only counts heads of household, not their entire families, more than four and a half billion people are underbanked, have very limited access to banking, and if you look at kind of the power banking that your average westerner has, that probably is the purview of maybe a billion and a half people in the world, the other six billion don’t have those opportunities. So, what you do when you have a global network that puts the power of banking into an application, is you could give everyone on this planet the same capabilities that a banker has today. Not just access to a bank account, but access to the full power of a financial institution, the ability to trade and transact anywhere in the world, in very, very short time, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, without limitations, in any currency. That’s an enormous power and bringing that to all of the people who are currently outside of the financial system is one of the reasons I’m very excited about this technology.

Laura Shin:

So, you know, I like what you’re talking about here where you say that bitcoin gives everyone the ability to have all the functionality that a banker has today, but how are we seeing people in companies use the technology right now?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Well, there’s some areas that are particularly difficult to operate in, and a lot of the greatest difficulties in traditional financial systems have to do with crossing borders, and so when it comes to making payments, international payments, those are some of the areas that are very difficult. We’re beginning to see bitcoin being used for international remittances, for example, for immigrants sending money home, we’ve seen a lot of increase in the trade in places like the Philippines, Mexico, India, and places like that that have very high flows of money coming from immigrants in other countries, and in those cases, the difference in cost between paying Western Union anywhere from five percent to 20 percent, plus an exchange rate spread that is often shockingly high, and using bitcoin to do the same thing with a much smaller exchange rate on either side, we’re beginning to see that as a rising application, obviously still early days, and complicated to do.

I think we’re also seeing import/export businesses and companies that are working with clients all across the world doing billing in multiple different currencies, now those are areas where it gets very difficult to transact. I can tell you as a consultant, and someone who does conferences all around the world, that when I get paid by these conference organizers, if they pay me with a wire transfer, it takes on average 4-6 weeks, and when I get paid in bitcoin, it takes on average, 4-6 minutes, and that’s 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to the point where, I now charge a 20 percent premium if you try to pay me with a wire transfer because I have to call my bank five times to find out where it is, and why it’s delayed, and there’s always problems, and I’m not talking about getting paid, you know, from someone in a disadvantaged country, I had a wire transfer sent to me for payment for speaking at the Bundesbank, the German federal reserve, and that wire transfer was frozen on my end for four weeks after it got misplaced for two weeks. This is just one of countless examples of people who work internationally will keep demonstrating these facts.

So, these are the areas where there’s a lot of friction in the traditional payment systems, and that means there’s a lot of opportunity for bitcoin to really shine, and that goes for all other digital currencies that really kind of dissolve borders. I think we’re going to see more and more growth in remittances, in import/export businesses, and companies that pay a lot of associates, affiliates, in outsourcing businesses to major outsourcing areas like India, and things like that, and you know, gradually it becomes easier and easier to use, and more and more people use it, so it kind of snowballs from there.

Laura Shin:

And so, you know, here we’re talking about kind of like, shorter term, you know, what’s happening now, you’re saying you’re already seeing it making ______00:25:25, remittances, and import/export, but long term, what industries do you think it’s likely to impact, and how?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Well, I mean, from my perspective, we’re fundamentally reinventing finance and banking for the 21st century, and this is going to not only impact core financial services, banking and payments, but it’s going to have much broader impact because it unleashes the possibility for investment and crowdfunding for raising money for start-ups. It completely changes how you do lending on an international basis because micro-lending from investors directly to borrowers without intermediaries across the entire globe becomes possible, and that’s a really exciting opportunity that can unleash a lot of capital. Also, I think, in the areas of protecting individuals in countries where, through corruption and governmental banking, there are repeated crisis with their currencies, and protecting them from essentially hyper-inflation and confiscation of wealth, the ability to really accelerate trade on a global basis, but also, I think more futuristically, you’ve got through these technologies, you’ve got machine to machine payments, so the idea of software systems being able to buy services from other software systems, or even hardware systems, combining these currencies with the internet of things, or unmanned drones, or self-driving cars.

Laura Shin:

Can you give some examples when you talk about machine to machine payments, what would that look like?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Well, one of the surprising things that you realize if you’ve looked into bitcoin for a while, or any of these currencies, is the idea that every single financial system we have assumes that there is a person in control of the money, and requires that there is a person, or a group of people in the form of corporations, in control of the money, and bitcoin doesn’t care if you’re a person, a piece of software, or you know, an automatic dog feeding bowl, it is exactly the same, you know, the old adage on the internet, no one knows you’re actually a dog, that cartoon really goes quite far because now you can have payments. So, imagine a self-driving car that can give passengers rides as a taxi, and using the money it earns, buy gasoline or electricity to maintain itself, and then also buy service and maintenance, even perhaps lease more cars in a self-running corporation without any human owners. I know that sounds really far-fetched, but you know, if you described Uber 10 years ago, people would think you were crazy. So, I mean, we have this opportunity to see how we can connect a lot of the systems around us in a way that it also makes them financially enabled.

Another example would be the ability to have automatic charitable giving, or disaster aid in the case of a hurricane or an earthquake. You could have, for example, earthquake sensors that recognize the presence of a severe earthquake in an area, and automatically release funds into aid organizations on the ground. So, there’s all kinds of scenarios, futuristic, and I can guarantee you most of those are not going to happen the way we imagine them now, but just simply shifting from a perspective of only humans control money, to machines and software controls money is really radical, and it changes a lot of things.

Laura Shin:

And in that last example about the earthquakes, that’s something where it’s like, an organization collects donations from people saying, we’ll deploy these funds in the next earthquake disaster. Is it something like that?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Well, even more so, I mean, the question is, do you really need an organization at that point, and by organization, meaning do you need a hierarchy of people managing this? In fact, we see that one of the best predictors of earthquakes at the moment is the google search engine, it becomes aware of viruses, pandemics, flu epidemics, earthquakes, and things like that long before anybody else notices, any human notices, simply because of the change in search patterns. So, you can imagine a situation where you have an autonomous, altruistic organization, an automatic charity, that doesn’t have any people, that doesn’t pay any salaries, where 100 percent of all of the donations go directly to funding disaster relief, and on the other end, you could imagine doing disaster relief directly to individuals, by recognizing where they are, and verifying their location in a disaster area, and sending, you know, 10 dollars to a million people, instead of giving 10 million dollars to a charity that has to then move equipment into the area, so it kind of redefines a lot of the concepts of how we do organization.

Laura Shin:

So, it’s basically like using software to manage all that, rather than people?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Yes. And that really, if you understand this technology, the thing to grasp about is, the technology behind bitcoin and all of these other things, isn’t really the blockchain, the technology behind these things is decentralization, that is the magic thing that is really different. So, what is really empowering about these technologies, is that you don’t require a hierarchical organization, a center of control, a nexus, a position of power to do money anymore, or finance or currency, or payments, or many of the other things that have always required a centralized position of power, and that centralized position of power almost always get corrupted by the money that flows through it, and so decentralization is the really important trend here. It’s a trend that of course didn’t start with the internet, it precedes the internet, but was really accelerated by the internet, and now is arriving in finance in a big way.

Laura Shin:

Okay. And earlier when I asked you about impact, you primarily focused on financial services, but you know, everybody’s always talking about all the applications outside of financial services, like healthcare, and governance. What impact do you see this technology playing outside of financial services?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Well, the concept of a decentralized system of trust that can record information in a way that cannot be altered, the concept of digital immutability, which is a new concept, the fact that these blockchains, if powered by proof of work, and operating in a decentralized fashion, cannot be modified after the fact, history becomes hard, and fixed, so the old expression, written in stone, in a hundred years will be written in blockchain, and this idea of digital immutability, which sounds like an oxymoron, but is now fact, changes a lot of things, and you can build all kinds of applications. People are talking about using it to track all kinds of assets, from the title to your house, to registering a bicycle and being able to transfer ownership of that bicycle digitally, and track ownership through a chain, you can do that for assets in general. You can also do it for all kinds of other information that you want to record in a way that is permanent, but you know, looking at all of these applications, I think it’s important to realize that some of the simplest things you can do, are directly related to finance.

Some of the biggest immediate need is directly related to finance and payments. Globalizing money and building money on an equal basis and making it available in a borderless way across the internet, is an enormous application, it’s a self-funding application, and it has enormous opportunity. I think, just like email was the killer app on the internet for 15 years before you saw anything else really emerge, and it drove a lot of the early investment and opportunity, and provided a lot of great applications for people, I think you’re going to see that payments, just simple payments, which is a massive industry around the world, representing more than two trillion dollars in annual activity, and revenue for financial services, that in itself, is the first killer app, but in the future, yes, you will see many other applications emerge from the other properties of this system, the decentralized trust mechanism, the ability to have non-human entities interacting with trust.

Laura Shin:

So, I was interested in some of these examples that you gave where people will eventually take real-world things, like the title to their house, or registering their bike, I was interested in how you ensure that what is being recorded, is actually true, because there are some start-ups in this area right now that are trying to do these things where, you know, they’re pretending that they’re sort of like notary services, but then when I’ve spoken to them, they have no systems for guaranteeing that the information that somebody actually puts in the blockchain is actually correct. So, how do we verify the accuracy of this information that gets entered?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

That’s a really interesting, and astute question. When it comes to notarization, if you want to just simply attest that a specific piece of information existed at a specific time, that’s something you can do on the blockchain, it’s a very effective application. I can prove that a specific document existed on a specific day by attesting it with the blockchain, that’s a great application. What you can’t attest, is whether the information within the document is true or not, you can only show that it existed, and you can’t attest easily who put it in the blockchain, so you can’t relate it to an identity, so verification of facts is a big and complex problem and applying these types of applications, doing title to a house, for example…there’s some efforts, some really interesting efforts happening in places like Ghana, to build blockchain based real estate title and land title. One of the big challenges of course, is that if you are able to embed lies into a blockchain, then the lies become permanent and so if you don’t have a very good mechanism for verifying who owns the land in the first place, then whoever compromises the input, compromises that land forever, that problem doesn’t go away.

What’s interesting, again, with all of these problems, is to think about what kind of solutions can you find, and inevitably, there are two types of solutions you can think of, one is a decentralized solution which involves a much less efficient approach. It’s a lot harder to do, it’s a lot slower, but in the end, it is much harder to corrupt, much harder to ______00:37:50, much harder to sensor, and really follows the model we’ve been talking about of decentralization. Then there’s the centralized solution that seems simple, easy, direct, and efficient, and it puts power back in the hands of a few individuals, and that solution in this context, is almost always wrong.

Laura Shin:

But how would you do a decentralized verification system?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

Well, there are a number of interesting approaches to this. For example, using attestation by hundreds of thousands of people instead of just a few people, so right now if you want to register a piece of land, you have to go to an appointed government official with some kind of stamp of approval, and there’s presumably, behind that, there’s a process of accountability and oversight, although in many countries you’ll find there isn’t, and do it that way, that’s a centralized solution. A decentralized solution would be to have 100,000 people in a city pledge a small amount of money into proving who has ownership of certain parts of land. Now again, I’m not saying these solutions exist today, or that they’re easy to build, but I think one of the challenges we face in this space is coming up with decentralized solutions to these problems that are really novel.

Laura Shin:

Earlier when you talked about the software that would release charitable funds in a disaster zone, that’s kind of like a smart contract. Can you talk a little bit about what a smart contract is, and how this technology enables that?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

A smart contract, which is a concept that’s been discussed since the early ‘80s is the idea of a program, software program, that has universal execution, and is executed in the same way on every computer in a way that can be trusted. So, with the invention of the bitcoin blockchain, one of the things that became possible is the idea of being able to execute contracts, or software programs in a way that is consistent across an entire decentralized system without having to trust anyone in that execution. In essence, every bitcoin transaction is a very, very simple program, and a very simple smart contract by extension.

There’s another system called Ethereum, which takes that several steps further, and allows for global execution of programs of arbitrary complexity, in computer science we would call that Turing complete programs, that allows you to write this software, and the software runs on a blockchain, and as a result, it runs consistently and exactly the same way, and you interact with it by making transactions. So, you could program the software to run a company, you could program it to have essentially a board of directors who vote through the blockchain, and disperse funds through the blockchain, of course, what gets complicated is, what functions can you do inside the world of software, and what functions interact with the real world, but very often we’re seeing that line get blurred. So for example, you could have a smart contract that controls the ownership of a car, and the car could have within it, software that identifies who the owner is, not by their ownership of a physical key, but by their ability to provide a digital signature with a smartphone that shows that they are the current owner, and which would then allow you to basically transfer ownership to your car with a digital transaction, and your car would be able to recognize that as valid without having to contact any central data base. So, that’s where you start seeing smart contracts touching the physical world, and these applications essentially extending a fact into the physical world, it’s a very interesting new space that’s opened up as a result of the invention of bitcoin.

Laura Shin:

And how mature is this space? We’ve seen probably I think, what is the most famous smart contract, which is the Dow, the decentralized autonomous organization that…I mean, actually, that’s kind of a category of groups, but this particular one decided to name it The Dow, and they structured themselves like a venture fund, and managed to crowd fund an enormous amount of money, more than 150 million dollars, and then some really smart person out there exploited a loophole in the technology and was able to steal more than 50 million of those dollars, or it was actually a different currency, but if you converted it back to dollars, that’s how much it was. So, how mature is this space right now, and are we going to see just a lot of mistakes where people are coding, you know, poorly and not realizing it?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

I mean, this space has no maturity. It has the maturity of a one-year-old baby because it is a one-year-old baby, and you know, by comparison, bitcoin is now a toddler, but you can’t really make comparisons between institutions and practices of law and contracts and institutions that have existed for hundreds of years, or thousands of years, and have gradually iterated away all of the rough edges, and become much, much more mature. The level of maturity now, is maybe where the internet was in 1990, maybe 1992, it’s still very early days, but those of us who really understand how technology works, and have kind of the vision to see forward, notice that what has changed, is the rate of innovation, and the ability to iterate very, very fast into maturity. So while this technology is a toddler, it won’t take hundreds of years to grow up, it will take one decade, maybe two, and in one decade or maybe two, it will be able to deliver levels of maturity that are equivalent to all of the institutions we see today, at a fraction of the cost, at a multiple of the speed, and that is truly transformative, and it’s very much like looking at the old days of dial-up on the internet and saying, this will never work, no one will ever trust it to do e-commerce, or to buy things online, or to do banking online, you know, but to those of us who could see the rate of evolution knew that it was just a matter of time, and just iterating slowly, we get to a level of maturity.

This is now experimental technology, which means, that for entrepreneurs and people interested in taking risks, there’s tremendous opportunity, and it is a very, very interesting and fast-moving space. For the rest of us, whether there’s enormous need, for example, in areas like remittances and cross-border transactions where there is no other opportunity to do something like this, I think we’re going to see some early applications, but it’s going to take a decade at least before you see broad-based adoption of applications, especially in the developed world, where the need just isn’t so great.

Laura Shin:

Well, I actually wanted to ask a little bit more about the Dow because the kind of like, fix for that, they decided to kind of like, rewind the system, and what that required was asking everybody that was running the Ethereum network on their computers, to do what’s called a hard fork, which meant that they would upgrade their software so that it was then incompatible with the previous version. But because of the, you know, fact that obviously, there’s like money in the system, which is this currency that the Ethereum network has called Ether, some people began to see, I guess, this is how I’m interpreting it, that they saw a speculative opportunity with the non-upgraded system and realized that there’s still money to be made there, and so now we have these, basically, two different competing Ethereum networks, obviously one has a higher price than the other, but do you feel like this profit motivation is kind of affecting the technology? Well, how do you think it’s affecting that technology, and do you feel like the, kind of, greed is causing this splintering and could affect the development of it?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

I think what’s fascinating about this space is that we’re seeing on a very grand scale, we’re seeing the actual application of these technologies in experimental settings that involve real-world effects, real actors with real money at stake, and you know, you can have all kinds of opinions about how these things could theoretically play out, but we now have a 10 to 12 billion dollar experiments running with bitcoin for seven years, and 1 to 2 billion dollar experiments with Ethereum that is currently running with real people staking money, and what that gives us is this amazing view into a completely unfettered free market with all of the participants having a say, and all of the effects that come out of that. I don’t remember voting for the bail-out in 2009, I don’t remember voting for the bail-outs of the banks that continue to ______00:48:12 for the next 10 years, almost, in fact, if I’m not mistaken, those votes are made in close-door sessions by the federal reserve, and I can’t even elect those people.

In this system, 90 percent of the community had to agree, and the 10 percent of the community that didn’t agree to this bail-out, were able to continue with the old system without being coerced, so you know, from one perspective, that may look like it’s unruly, and undisciplined, and not easy to control, but that’s not a bug, that’s a feature. That is a free market in action, a market without coercion and a market in which everyone has a voice, and the ability to move their money and make choices about their money. I think that’s a wonderful thing, and I think this experiment in decentralization of power in finance is an incredible experiment, and in fact, if you look at it, it is in some ways, free market capitalism at its absolute finest.

Laura Shin:

Okay. What would you say are the next developments we’re likely to see in the space?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

There is so much going on that as someone who works full-time in the space, who does nothing but read and write and interact with this technology, and experiments with this technology, I barely have enough time in the day to keep up, and I often get surprised by the rate of innovation and the things that come at me from different angles. It is far, far more active in terms of innovation than the early days of the internet. The impact is going to be far felt, and astonishing to many, and it’s really an amazing space to work in, and just watch, every single day as hundreds and hundreds of start-ups and tens of thousands of software engineers, just build new things that have never been seen before.

Laura Shin:

Okay. Great. Where can our listeners find more of your work, or contact you in the future?

Andreas Antonopoulos:

So, I’m very active on Twitter, @aantonop. You can find information about my book, Mastering Bitcoin, on bitcoinbook.info, and information about my other work as well as my videos on my personal website, Antonopoulos.com as well as on YouTube.

Laura Shin:

Okay. Great. Well thank you so much for coming on the show.

Andreas Antonopoulos:

It’s a pleasure Laura. Thank you so much.

Laura Shin:

Thanks for joining us today. If you’re interested in learning more about Andreas, check out the show notes which are available on my Forbes page, forbes.com/sites/laurashin, and if you like what you’ve been hearing, please review, rate, and subscribe to the show in iTunes. Every rating and review helps boost the podcast rankings. Thanks again for listening.