ERP006 - Blockchain Industry w/ Lisa Cheng of Vanbex

Welcome to Evolve Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. Today I'm joined by Lisa Chang from Vanback. Vanback is a group that specializes in strategy, marketing and operations consulting for blockchain companies. Lisa has a relatively long history with blockchain tech. Having worked with companies like Mastercoin, Ethereum, Factum and Tendermint. Lisa is a strong believer in the future of blockchain and its power to evolve countless aspects, not just finance, but of all business. We chat about the politics of Bitcoin, the fast evolution of the blockchain markets and some of the hurdles still in place before mainstream adoption of blockchain currencies. Hope you enjoy this one and here we go. So today we have Lisa Chang from Vanback. joining us. Thanks for coming on Lisa. Thank you Todd, happy to be here. your service Vanback, you're providing consulting services, marketing services to the Bitcoin and blockchain industry, is that right? Uh yeah, so it started off as a kind of communications and uh marketing and PR vehicle. And uh we've actually recently expanded into a research, consulting and technology uh different divisions of Vanback, so we're developing APIs. We're consulting on um product design and we're also researching uh ways of kind of adapting current business models onto the blockchain. Yeah, it's a an ever evolving space, so I suppose. the business and certainly the aspects of what you're consulting on with your clients is changing as the industry changes as well. For sure. It's uh it's always rapidly changing as the Bitcoin industry is the narrative is changing. At first it was a currency, now it's a blockchain platform and now we're kind of seeing the segmentation of these into separate industries. Um and maybe we'll see further that of like government and business and um you know, social applications. So certainly Bitcoin being the most recognized vehicle in in the blockchain industry. Do you see that as the the segregation creating that more as the currency market and that the other platforms are developing into more application sets? Or do you do you still see Bitcoin being very prevalent as a the the front runner in the blockchain and the adaptations of the apps that are that are going on there? I think that we'll see a decoupling of uh Bitcoin and the currency from the platform. Like I've always kind of explained it as there's Bitcoin the currency, Bitcoin the platform and Bitcoin the ideology. Um Bitcoin the ideology drove a lot of early interest towards Bitcoin. lots of libertarian minded folks, lots of ideological driven people saw Bitcoin as a way of liberating themselves from the current dynamic. and kind of freeing themselves from banking and governance. And now Bitcoin the currency is kind of decoupling and so we're still seeing a push for Bitcoin being accepted as a payment mechanism. as a way of sending remittances. Um but separate from that, there's Bitcoin the platform, which is the blockchain. And um there are companies developing on blockchain now and they're not necessarily using Bitcoin. So I I think that that's kind of um that's kind of how I understood it and that's we'll see further uh more of this as the year progresses. Yeah, I've certainly seen a lot of uh the libertarian stint and uh the the political ideology as a component of uh of the thought process as people approach this. Do you see that now that there's a more uh wide stream or mainstream adoption of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? Do you see that that as a a bit of a combative issue that people are trying to still maintain the independence or is the commercial application really not a sort of a a realized threat or or an issue for the people that are are looking for more of those sort of libertarian approaches for for currency and governance? There's still definitely folks that uh are um supporting the idea of Bitcoin being used as a way to pay national taxes. as a recognized global currency. Um there are fundamental issues with that, of course, if any government was to adopt Bitcoin or allow Bitcoin to be used for um for paying taxes. or for uh as a accepted as a regular currency, um that would undermine the uh responsibilities of a central bank. Um if we look at the examples of like uh what's it not Estonia, uh there was a country uh that recently created their own cryptocurrency. Not Tiana, it's not Estonia. It was in Africa. Um and they actually used um and there's another country in the Caribbean that has created their own cryptocurrency. So we're seeing like Bitcoin examples, but um not necessarily Bitcoin being used as a mainstream type of cryptocurrency. Yeah, I've heard a number of um, you know, Goldman Sachs, uh TD, some of the the other big banks, Bank of America are are starting to become a lot more interested in cryptocurrencies. From what I understood, they've created their own cryptocurrencies off of sort of the existing blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Is that is that what you've heard as well? Oh, Tunisia created their own. Tunisia, okay. Um and regarding Goldman and uh other banks. Like Goldman created settle coin, STL coin. City created city coin. Um and uh their interest in kind of a cryptocurrency is more from what I've been reading is more of it used as a settlement and uh transaction uh platform. Namely the blockchain. So the blockchain can only transmit um like assets on the blockchain. It can't send regular fiat dollars. So what they're doing is actually creating representative assets representing US dollars. JPY, Euro, what not and they can create their own settle coin or city coin, which will just represent um the flow of fiat dollars. moving between correspondent banks or between their own partner banks. That's interesting, so the you know, this is kind of a parallel application of what currently exists. is a Swift network, right? So the the the settlement process takes up probably a lot longer, you know, they what I've heard is they don't know what their assets are really until the next day. because the the transactions can't really be captured in in any salient way before before the end of business. So um the the settlement networks that they're creating through a blockchain are probably a lot more efficient, but suffer from not having the capability of processing as much volume. Is that the case? Um, I don't know if it's a question of volume, but it definitely is an issue of uh transparency and visibility. Um Swift is a an archaic messaging system that essentially sends information between its partners, saying like Bob sent $100 from bank A. wants to send it to Alice at bank B. Like money doesn't actually move along Swift. This just messaging. So what we have are reserve accounts on each side and it does as a plus and minus. Um the issue with that is that from what our discussions have been with um different clients and different uh uh consulting engagements. is that there isn't a uh visibility into the reserve accounts and so there's a counterparty risk. At one point, uh Bob can cancel his transaction and Alice, Alice's bank could have already issued those funds. Um they can always reverse the transaction within the banking system and because it's not in real time. at least Swift isn't doing transactions in real time, not as closely as blockchain, uh that risk is there. And from our understanding of talking to these folks, that's why they're looking at blockchain technology. Interesting. It's uh it's really neat stuff just to see uh you know, the the how quickly these applications have been adopted mainstream by by some fairly large parties. It lends a lot of credibility. Have you seen kind of an acceleration of the consumerization or the mainstream adoption of blockchain, do you see it as more prevalent in business? Um, for blockchain certainly. Um like uh myself I got into this purely uh out of um interest in the technology, not so much the currency. And seeing blockchain as a way of moving um as a moving away against a centralized understanding of database architecture. And if we apply that to enterprise, it means that there is no single point of failure. that we can move away from uh large server farms that we are in still in the cloud essentially. But we can distribute this information across all the members across the network. Um and I think that's where blockchain will be going in terms of commercial enterprise adoption. Yeah, the um the one of the the thought leaders that I follow a lot in this is uh Vinnie Gupta uh with Ethereum. And you know, some of his his conversations and his chats on uh you know, the history of distributed networks and uh the the death of SQL and the the adoption of the blockchain. as kind of the new database of the future connecting the network and the databases. is is really kind of an amazing view and and really trying to kind of turn my head sideways to realize, you know, what the capability of this was. And despite understanding the technology, not really seeing sort of the future vision of the application that was really eye opening for me when first sort of seeing his his discussions on that. So it's it's going to be uh a pretty revolutionary future. But there's a lot of discussion about how quickly that's going to come. Do you have any sense of of sort of what we're going to see over the course of the next two years or five years? How long is it going to take before these things really start to become uh a really a commercial norm? Um, you know, there's like a large insurance company in the states doing uh trials right now using blockchain. to kind of uh store their record keeping. And um there's uh another company that is doing land titles in Africa on the blockchain as well. I think that we're at this phase where we're kind of investigation. We're investigating, we're kind of finding out how it would fit within the current dynamic. But we haven't replaced the current dynamic yet. Um is it 10 years out? I would say it's it's a bit too far away for us to be throwing money at this. And we could look at it within a year and see if it's going to be replacing legacy systems and then within a year either it's going to be fully implemented or we're going to throw it out entirely. So we're probably in the alpha stage for the next year or so and then moving into beta for the applications that have some validity. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Cool. That'll be it'll be a good year, you know, I've heard um 2016 described as the year year of the bot. But uh and you're seeing a lot of that activity from Facebook and others. It'd be interesting to see uh you know, the how quickly blockchain comes up the middle. And probably 2017 and and more likely 2018 are definitely going to be blockchain years for for technology adoption. Yeah. Well, like with bots in particular, like I with our slack especially. Like I'm interested in playing and setting up different bots just for our slack channel and seeing what it can do. And there was one that I set up where you can play trivia with it. or um and it'll award you with uh bits. Um and if we think about what blockchain is coupled with smart contracts, it really just is another form of automation. And that's what bots represent. Um if we allow like smart contracts to settle transactions for us, if it listens to certain Oracle feeds. Um I could send Todd, you know, uh five bits only if it's a Thursday and only if it's like 10:30 Pacific time. You know? Interesting. Okay, so this is I didn't even think of this, but the marriage of the AI and the bots with the blockchain on the background. as sort of the the uh the contract network would be really, really powerful because you really don't need a human interaction. You know, the person interacts with the bot and you can kind of gamify everything, so certain people need to do things within their business. And you know, they're rewarded by a bot system assuming that, you know, all the checks and balances and all the contract conditions are met, right? Exactly, exactly. Like um I'm looking into this personally because we have employees that we pay via smart contract. And um to be able to, you know, say that we want to pay Bob every Monday and this amount and only if like, you know, he sends in a report. Then if the Oracle sees that yes, this person sends in the report. Uh then release the funds. So I it's almost like an automated payroll system where I don't have to be involved, like I can just load up the smart contracts at the beginning of the month. Um and not have to worry about whether I'm paying people on time. Right. Yeah. everyone's responsible for their conditions and therefore the contract gets executed. That's really cool. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. So uh you know, you the the work that you're doing with um the the clients that you have. I guess from what I've read on on your website and conversations with people, it's really kind of across the board. So, you know, you're you're working with developers, you're working with uh investment groups. Um do you have sort of a focus within the industry or is it that you're really lending expertise in the blockchain and Fintech space to to all areas? Or is there a certain vertical client that that really best suits your services? Um, that's a good question. Like it began as um Vanback began as a vehicle for helping projects better communicate their story. especially in the uh crowdfunding and uh token release area of the industry. And so um now we're working with projects that are coming to us, even traditional businesses that are not Bitcoin. And they're saying, hey, we want to go on a blockchain. And depending on the business model, like we'll try to see if we can help them, either um kind of specking out a blockchain product for them. developing the initial prototype, um kind of offering suggestions on the creation of the spec. And then there's other projects that are Bitcoin blockchain and they want to uh release, you know, a better marketing narrative. Um and we're helping them with that as well and it starts with the white paper, starts with community understanding, what are the goals of the project. Um and so Vanback will actually have multiple divisions of uh marketing communications, which is what our early business was. And then it'll be consulting and advisory, which is what um we're doing now in terms of reviewing the white paper, kind of advising the the decision making team. And uh helping with the creation of new marketing narrative and then research and development, which is where we look at traditional business systems and apply them to blockchain. Interesting. So it's really kind of expanded beyond the the blockchain space and and the the people developing the apps to the independent businesses. understanding wanting to understand how the blockchain potentially applies to their business. Yeah. Yeah. It's um because there's been so much news about blockchain recently in the past year. And this only started like a year ago. Um that uh the businesses have been catching on and they're like, yeah, we want to have instant settlement or we want to have decentralized exchanges of information. We want to have decentralized um distribution of media. And so um it's all entirely possible with the blockchain. But it's just how do we put these pieces together? And for people that aren't familiar with the industry, they kind of look to us as kind of, oh, how do we do this? And we'll point them in the right direction and if they want further assistance, then we actually will tap our research and dev team to work on the project. Yeah, it's uh it's it's a deep, deep space. You know, it's it's something I I I have a an interest in and I've been following for a number of years now. I wouldn't certainly call myself an expert in the space. But, you know, I think I'd be hard pressed to find what you define as an expert in the space because it is so deep and the applications are really limited only by imagination. So I can see why someone would look at this and go, even if they understand sort of the the mainstream application, they go, uh I don't know. I don't I don't see how this applies. I think it's really amazing technology. I think there's a fit here. But it would make sense to be able to leverage some expertise from someone who has more experience in the industry and and to be able to guide them through that. I think that's a it's an important service especially at such an early stage of the game. Totally. And there's like because of the way Bitcoin blockchain is understood, there's different types of experts out there. You know, there's expertise on the ideology of it. There's expertise on the currency and payment system. There's expertise on blockchain and uh enterprise to application level implementations of it and we'll see further, we'll see more of this um as the industry moves forward. Yeah, I see this as a a very common change in consulting and knowledge work as a whole. The there's sort of this rise of that expertise. And you know, you you can formulate a team of independent experts in order to to uh develop a project. or to work on a on a on a system or an idea that that someone may have. And it's sort of a change from the traditional consulting model where you used to hire sort of a big group that had a massive research team. And now you you pull individual experts or, you know, have someone who acts as kind of a a general contractor to pull the relevant expertise to apply to a particular project. It's really kind of an interesting change in that there's this rise of the independent contractor and how those those individuals fit. because the expertise becomes so specific that there's no way you can expect one person or even sort of a small group of people to be able to carry the the relevant expertise on some of these technologies. For sure, there's different like because Bitcoin is made up of uh cryptography, um consensus. Um and uh peer-to-peer networking, like you almost need an expert in each of these three to agree on something to say, yes, this is a sound project. Right, yeah, the the business expertise, the uh the the mathematics expertise, the coding expertise. That's obviously not the same person, right? No, not at all. Sometimes the coding expert will say, yes, this will work. But often times we found that like it's the business expert that will come in and like lay out how things should be organized. from a top-down approach, um that will help the project achieve goals faster if it's raising money, gaining users, creating more awareness. Because you can have the greatest project and the greatest idea, but if no one uses it and no one hears about it. Um then have your goals been reached? Like what was your goal in the first place? So that that touches on something that I've I've talked a bit about in this space is that uh despite sort of the the mainstream recognition of blockchain. Uh it it still is kind of a fringe element of of people that that are aware of this. You know, if you if you talk to, you know, someone's grandma or their mom and and ask them, you know, what what's Bitcoin, what's blockchain, they probably don't get that. I still sort of joke that we're in the fringe of the fringe stage. So how does that apply with with the work that you do in getting the message out? Do you is it still sort of a more of a a localized community, people that are working within this space or, you know, is there some type of uh vehicle that you're using for for getting that message further outside the bubble of the current Fintech space? Um, so I think in the beginning when Bitcoin was first driven less by technical folks, more by ideological folks, it was like about join Bitcoin, accept Bitcoin. And people didn't really understand how it worked, they just knew that it was a new currency. And maybe they didn't have to pay taxes, maybe they could not have to use a bank account. And they liked that idea, that was cool. Um, so that we're seeing a lot of that even here in Vancouver locally. Like a lot of folks just love the idea of uh liberated currency. doesn't really matter how the currency works, but it means that we don't have to use a bank. Um and if we look separately from that, then there's the messaging of blockchain. And how blockchain is being adopted, we're seeing bankers, uh you know. executives from like cloud computing, software, architecture, like enterprise systems join the current industry. But they're all interested in different things. Um and how do we how is the messaging coming across, is that what your question was? Yeah. just the the messaging out to the wider community, the the wider uh more mainstream head space rather than sort of the people that are that are already invested and already interested in this technology and the platform. Um. Funny thing is, we actually are getting our driveway repaved. I know it's kind of off tangent. But we asked they asked what we do. And we said we were in Bitcoin. And um I said that like I work in the Bitcoin industry and they started to talk about how they're really interested in Bitcoin. This is the guy who's a contractor, you know, not in the space at all. And he's said he's really interested, has heard a lot about it, he just doesn't know how to get it, what it's all about and like, you know, what you do with it. Um so we kind of explained how how it's used as a way of paying for things, how the the value does kind of fluctuate. Um and uh how it's kind of remained around 350, 420 for the last six months or so. And um he was really interested and we ended up being able to pay for our renovation in Bitcoin. Um. And uh it's just things like that that are really grassroots that kind of change the conversation. And get more interested people interested. Um and then on the top down, it's kind of doing podcasts like this, talking about it to an online community and a written community in both media that explains that Bitcoin is not just a currency. And it's not just used for illicit purposes. And it's not just a way of hiding from the tax man, it's actually a way to distribute assets digitally. Um in a way that is secure and um semi pseudo anonymous and transparent and efficient across geographies. Yeah, you touched on the the illicit application, I think that's an important point to cover. because you know, Bitcoin gained probably a lot more mainstream notoriety through its illicit use. And you know, things like Silk Road and you know, people hear about Bitcoin being used to buy drugs and guns. and potentially assassinations on the internet. And it it it really kind of detracted from from the message. Uh you know, the the the most relevant point that I saw counter to that is that, you know, fiat currency has been used for these things since the dawn of time. So, of course, people are using a digital currency uh in probably what is a safer manner. But the, you know, that's not the only application and in in the grand scheme of things is is a very, very small sliver. of of how the digital currencies are being applied. So I think it's important for people to realize that uh you know, this is coming, it's not just a portion of the dark web that's using this. These are things that like we noted are being adopted by governments and banks because they see this as a very, very real technology that that will will change transaction and interaction in the very near future. Mhm, I completely agree, like cash has been the main vehicle for illicit purposes since time immemorial. And I I was doing a presentation at Santander in Spain in December explaining Bitcoin and they're like, well. couldn't that means that you can use Bitcoin for illegal reasons and for, you know, um, you know, hiding money. And I said, well, so can you do that with cash? Like cash has been used for this for forever. And you always hear on the news like this uh drug person got arrested with X amount of dollars uh hidden in the back of his car or hidden in the tire of his truck. And it's because they find cash that they connected that he was doing something illegal. Well, what if he used Bitcoin? Not saying that they should use Bitcoin for that, but the main reason people use cash right now. is because they maybe don't want it recorded on the books or they're trying to do an off-book trade. Right. So it's kind of the same application, different technology, right? Yeah. So you know, you do a ton of travel. You know, I I I follow you on on Twitter and and see your your news posts from all the the Fintech uh blog spaces and things. You know, you're you're in Europe, you're in the US, you're uh all over the place. Um so I wonder how you see the Vancouver space, obviously being from Vancouver in uh comparison to the development of the Fintech industry through the rest of the world. Yeah. Um well, uh San Francisco and New York have like in North America are the biggest Bitcoin Fintech kind of hubs. Like their meetup groups are in the hundreds for a weekly Bitcoin meetup. Um in Europe, like London also has a weekly Bitcoin meetup, it's a Fintech meetup and it's huge. Like it has hundreds of people, developers, professionals, they come out and they also do uh pitches, they help people raise money. Um Spain has a Bitcoin Boulevard, a whole block of high-end retailers that accept Bitcoin. Um Hong Kong is very Bitcoin friendly, they have a huge Bitcoin following there. And when you come back to Vancouver, um there isn't a huge Bitcoin community here. Um it's mostly ideological folks that uh believe in the creation of uh the currency and um the creation of, you know, decentralized systems. Um but we're not really seeing a technical community here. Even though we have folks like SAP, Microsoft, um a huge gaming community, EA Sports, um in Vancouver. Um the development meetups in the city are are huge. But the development of Bitcoin is not big, so I don't think we're there yet. Interesting. because I you know, I've certainly seen a lot of uh rise of Fintech uh companies and development. You know, there's uh Grow, there's Entrust, um and you know, Rise, you know, probably a dozen other Fintech companies. But they're not most of those are not blockchain based. Do you have a sense of sort of you know, is it that the the development started early and they're not necessarily blockchain based or is it the interaction with Fiat and you know, PayPal transactions being an easier backbone? Do you have a sense of sort of why the Fintech space is split? between the blockchain based applications and sort of the more traditional transaction methods? I think like um like Fintech has always been kind of there, but it's always been grouped with technology. It hasn't it never never really was decoupled. So there was like PayPal, then there was Alipay. And then there was always software behind current um stock systems. Like there's five serve, there's different software systems, but they always were coupled together with cloud or software or technology. And now we're seeing this decoupling um within the past couple years. And now it's being recognized as Fintech. Like I had a algorithm startup before and all we did were uh create algorithms for financial services. And if we said Fintech, they would say what what is that? Um and now there's Fintech groups. So we're it's really just been a a revolution in how financial technology is becoming more mainstream. And how legacy systems are kind of being innovated. Um and it's only been within the past couple years or so that it's been making major news headlines. And I think that's why we've started to see more of it. So one of the things that I've I've sort of struggled with uh traditionally is is how uh the transactions. you know, to a digital currency uh through Fiat is still quite troublesome. And you know, you you have to go usually to a meetup or to some type of, you know, currency exchange in order to to get that transaction processed. Do you feel that that's a barrier that, you know, will soon be going away, is there anything that you've seen in your travels in the industry of someone that that's been able to sort of more effectively solve that? Or are we sort of going to have to wait for the banks to to be able to do that transaction? So that you you can either, you know, buy Bitcoin uh through your bank website or you're at least able to, you know, convert currencies in in a more uh consumer friendly fashion. Yeah, I completely agree. Uh there's still too much friction involved. So when I'm talking to some of these financial institutions about Bitcoin and explaining this to them. They're asking, well, will Bitcoin disrupt PayPal? How much of an impact will Bitcoin have on uh the payment networks? And I'd say there's too much friction still. For the regular mom and pop to accept Bitcoin to exchange it into Fiat to pay for their lease, like it's not a very smooth process. Only someone who's aware would know that you have to join Coinbase or Bitfinex or like you said, a local meetup. to meet someone who can regularly do that for them. It's um in Vancouver especially, there's uh someone that owns uh India Gate restaurant. He also does the Linux meetup and he also was a very early adopter of Bitcoin. He started accepting Bitcoin when it was like, I think it was like $2 or something. And he always held on to it. Um he doesn't really sell it. So there's like the option of do I sell this Bitcoin or do I keep this Bitcoin? Most people have to sell it. Um. In terms of technology making it easier, um we're actually working on a project at Vanback where we're using smart contracts to exchange. Um if you're moving from, you know, Euro to US to be able to exchange those dollars and have them actually uh transferred to your bank account using correspondent banking networks. Hmm. So it it is it is being worked on. I'm I'm glad to hear that. because you know, the the the adoption of technology, you know, one of the first limitations is exactly that, that friction. If it's just too difficult for for people, you know, if you need to, you know, do hours of research. and set up accounts to be able to figure out how to get in. It's probably not going to be widely adopted. And recognizing it's early times. But I think that that uh I think that's sort of been the limitation to date around Bitcoin, but you know, the the the blockchain as a a technology and a methodology. in more of a transparent fashion in that it just runs in the background, it does its thing. You don't necessarily need to interact with it. I think that will give much quicker rise to the technology. So as we noted, you know, the integration of blockchain and AI. I think that's probably a perfect marriage because the AI handles the transactions, handles the the technical plumbing and the user just interacts with what, you know, seems to be, you know, a a person or some type of, you know, functional AI. Mhm, well, so smart contracts are just kind of uh dumb robots in a sense. They just carry out instructions, they don't really think about things. So they actually need to be hooked up to an Oracle and an Oracle in um very simple terms. is just a source of truth. It can be a news feed, it can be a weather report, it can be baseball stats, hockey game stats, what have you. And um the Oracle will tell the smart contract, yes, it is sunny and if that condition is met in a smart contract, then it'll settle the uh condition. So it's always an if then statement in a smart contract. doesn't really have AI. The Oracle itself is AI. Okay, yeah. So, you know, the the instruction set is in maybe independent from from the AI. The AI functions more on the process, right? Mhm. Okay. Yeah. Cool. So what are some of the uh the the the cool stuff that you guys are working on? The the current up and comers and things that have really sort of lit a fire. And see as as really a high high growth applications. Um so with Vanback, we're working on a project for um with a financial services company. that will uh create um that will combine both smart contracts and blockchain applications. And be able to not only send information uh well, send money from here to Europe for instant settlement, which is what they're looking for. But also combine the compliance mechanisms that are already being used internally. So a lot of the questions we have are, well, you understand how you can send money on the blockchain, but how do we make sure that it's still adhering to regulations? that it's still, you know, making sure that we're fully compliant. And so we're taking the uh concepts of compliance and and actually using um the blockchain and smart contracts to address those. Um. Folks like uh R3 and their platform Corda and Ripple are using blockchain for clearing and settlement. They're doing it in different ways. So Ripple has gateways that will um do the exchange for you and also they have a token called XRP. which is how they charge transaction fees across the network. Whereas Corda from what we've read and what I've understood is that it's not necessarily a blockchain, but a distributed shared ledger. Um we don't know if it's going to be cryptographic in nature. Let's hope it is. Um. There's other projects of storage, which you may have heard of. It's also uh entering their last beta stage. They allow you to store data on the blockchain similar to Dropbox. Um. There's a spell of Genesis, which is a gaming on the blockchain. which allows you to buy and sell gaming assets outside of the game. Um I'm also working with Dash uh which is a kind of a um emerging cryptocurrency that uses the best of Bitcoin. But also um obscures who the previous owners of the Bitcoins of your coins were. So right now in Bitcoin. you can if you receive it, you can actually look on a block explorer and see, okay, this Bitcoin moves from this address to this address. You can go all the way back to the creation of that Bitcoin. Um and in terms of maybe privacy. I don't really want someone to know that, you know, I got these Bitcoins from a Bitcoin casino. You know? Or. So um Dash actually addresses it so that you can't really see where these Bitcoins originated from. or where they came from previously. Um. So those are kind of the interesting things that we're working on. Cool. And I I guess I would have to ask. Uh you know, there's the the situation coming up potentially in July, which people are call calling the having. The uh the split of sort of the I guess command and control functions. You can consider this a forking of of Bitcoin. And some people uh suggest that, you know, the the technology underlying uh the the block sets. need to be changed in order to properly scale in the future. And a lot of people sort of want to uh keep Bitcoin the way it was. What what's your sort of industry assessment of of this event coming up that, you know, could potentially break Bitcoin into two two two uh competing factions? Um, so the having, I think, which is what you're referring to. It happens every four years. And it's just a uh a production kind of check. where it's cutting production in half every four years. So whereas every 10 minutes, 25 Bitcoins are being created. Now every 10 minutes starting in July, only 12 and a half will be created. Um. What that does to current uh value and how people will, I guess, spend their Bitcoins. Um that's the whole whole intention. to affect how people view it and how people hold on to it and spend it and value it. Um. The other challenges with Bitcoin are the block size. where right now. the blocks are one megabyte and it's kind of um you can wait up to an hour for a confirmation. It should happen every 10 minutes, but the block size debate and among other debates like segregated witness, um allow us to kind of address whether we should have a hard fork, which is what this would result in. Like us creating a hard fork of the blockchain. So we're going in one direction, now we're going to go in a separate direction. And all of us with full nodes, especially the major miners, have to go in the same direction. Otherwise there's going to be a split chain and whoever is still mining on the old chain, wouldn't those transactions wouldn't be recognized on the new chain. And it's just going to be a total mess of whether a confirmation happened, whether a transaction happened. Um. And so like I think the biggest issue right now is the mean pool. Um all transactions before they're added to a block go into a a mean a memory pool. And miners kind of collect transactions from that mean pool and uh add it to a block. Miners will of course pick transactions with the highest transaction fee. because we reward greedy greedy nodes. That's what they're incentivized with. And so. some transactions that have really low fees will take forever to confirm. Um if the mean pool is really bloated as it is right now, then um transactions even if they are at a higher fee. it's the process of going through that entire mean pool and identifying those transactions. We've all which also takes time. Um so there's a few issues with Bitcoin. Okay, so that that's good information for me. I I'd understand the having as the the the issue of the the the decoupling. the blockchain and uh of the size and and that that creating that split. But it is independent events. So that's interesting. Yeah, the um. Uh it'll be it'll be curious to see sort of what the result of that is. I I suspect, you know, it wouldn't fundamentally break Bitcoin. But as you said, it could split the parties and you know, create kind of leave one in the ditch while the other continues on. Yeah. You know, if the largest miners are in China and if they say, no, we don't want to go on this new fork, then they will effectively force the network to stay on the old chain. So. all these debates are great, but if there is no consensus among the developers. And the ones that operate the miners, then we're kind of at a stand still. And it's not very effective. Yeah, it's an interesting story around how this is supposed to be an independent technology and kind of the the libertarian minded folks see this as, you know, zero governance type transaction. and and uh and accountability, but, you know, this in itself kind of defines the fact that you can't you can't really escape bureaucracy. And there is this bureaucracy already applied to what is supposed to be sort of a, you know. an authority-free zone, right? Mhm, exactly and coincidentally decisions are held in the hands of few. It's not like you or I could propose that we do it this way. Although we are probably very valid, it would be rejected because we don't have that reputation and that prior, I guess, influence within the system. Whether it's amount of hashing power, number of commits to the core GitHub. Well, it'll be it'll be interesting to watch. So, appreciate your your time, Lisa. And uh if you want to give us your info if people are interested in in finding out more about your services or want to understand how their application or their business could be related to the blockchain. For sure. Um, I'm happy to kind of uh answer questions and talk to folks and explain uh what we're doing. You can reach me at uh L@vanback.com, our website is vanback.com and I'm on Twitter as well at Lisa Chang. Cool. So appreciate your time, thanks for coming on and have a great 2016, it would be fun to watch. Likewise, see you at the next meetup. Okay, take care.