Techproof Me by Siddharth Pai

Techproof Me by Siddharth Pai

Author:Siddharth Pai
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2022-04-08T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter 13

Musings for the Originator or ‘Cross-Pollinator’

In 2016, as bitcoin had begun to gain ascendance many years after its original debut, I was asked by a senior banker what bitcoin and blockchain were. Another friend, a doctor, insisted that she knew what blockchain was just as well as she knew Facebook, Instagram and other social media ‘technology’. The fact that someone with so many degrees and many years of experience thinks that blockchain is a social media technology boggles the mind.

Notice how one was willing to accept his lack of knowledge, while the other only too willingly displayed her ignorance! The banker showed enough humility to ask about something most people would have simply assumed he knew about. But he didn’t, and he had the guts to ask. This is acceptance at its best. The banker’s attitude allowed him to accept the seemingly ‘unacceptable’ (the fact that a banker might not know about financial technology).

The doctor, who works in a back-room speciality where patients don’t get to choose their doctors, has probably led her life without paying much attention to feedback. She is unable to accept that she might not know everything simply because her expertise has not yet been challenged. She certainly could use the tricks we discussed in Chapter 11.

Are you in the doctor’s position or in the banker’s? You may as well be honest with yourself. If you don’t know something, it’s best to ask. The only stupid question is the one that you didn’t ask.

Now we’ve got that out of the way, here is a superficial explanation of what blockchain and bitcoin really are:

Blockchain is the formalization—through Internet technology—of a process that most people intuitively understand—the promissory note—and its dark side, the ‘grey market’ system. Blockchain technology was underfunded because few still understand what it means. At least until 2016, according to the Wall Street Journal and research firms familiar with VC funding, only about 2 to 3 per cent of the total new VC funding of about $20 billion in financial services goes to blockchain.

If I issue a promissory note to pay the bearer a sum of, say, $20,000, then I have no choice but to cough up when the holder of the note demands payment. After all, I want to continue to keep my reputation among my business associates and their extended network that I can be trusted. In a grey market exchange, the promissory note is notional. It is often converted into different currencies while it passes through the hands of individuals. Each individual in the chain trusts that the next one will deliver on the promise to pass on the same $20,000 until it reaches its final recipient.

In short, it is a clearing system. The $20,000 (or any other amount initially defined by the first two transacting parties) is the defined ‘block’ and the hands it passes through form the ‘chain’. All these hands recognize that the value of the block is $20,000 and not some different amount. And they all have



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