In today’s homepage story we publish the first in atwo-part Q&A with Winding Tree founder andCEO Max Izmaylov. In conversation with him this week, he recommended a
fascinating new video from technologist, serial entrepreneur and bitcoin expert Andreas
Antonopolous.
If you watch one video this week, we recommend thisone!
Aside from explaining why today’s hierarchical
organisations, which are increasingly corrupted by power and often led by
‘sociopath CEOs’, no longer work for the information age, he also clarifies
something that is often stated as fact: That blockchain is the technology that
underpins bitcoin.
“Blockchain isn’t the tech behind bitcoin, it is one
of the technologies - it is actually the database, the artefact, the ledger
that is produced. But here is the really interesting thing: how is it produced.
And the way it is produced in bitcoin and thousands of other cryptocurrencies
and blockchains, that use a similar recipe, is on a completely flat,
peer-to-peer non-hierarchical network where nobody knows or trusts anybody
else.
"Where we are able to engineer an emergence of an artefact, a ledger that
records transactions that everybody can trust, that no one has the power to change,
to modify after the fact, that removes the trust from the person to a
mathematical construct that is neutral. That process is called consensus. It is
the fundamental invention behind bitcoin and all the other digital currencies
as a way to achieve trust at massive scale on a completely flat network. It allows
us to achieve such a level of trust that we can conduct transactions worth
billions of dollars…”
Phew! Something to think about!
