good evening everyone thank you for joining today's session on blockchain for business how far are we from mass market adoption introducing today's speaker samrat kishore is senior director at ec council global services the world's largest cyber security technical certification body he is also the regional head with enterprise ethereum alliance and serves on the board of four startups actively investing in crypto blockchain and tech projects samrat is the co-chair of baseline protocol an open source protocol being created under the ages of consensus ethereum community projects eny and microsoft with sponsors such as sap servicenow and accenture he is a mentor to the government of india's startup india program uttar innovation mission and b nest smart city incubator samrat specializes in blockchain and ai and carries rich consulting experience from having worked with brands like kpmg deloitte and essentia strategy and clients in over 20 countries he is also a member of the nascom blockchain special interest group our warm welcome to sumrat we are glad to have you present at the online moneyball plus series before we start the session i would like to request the audience to ask questions only in the q a tag we will take them at the end of the session also to help us continue to make our programs better we request you to please take the short survey at the end of this webinar over to your sumrat hey thank you uh so just like every time uh murphy's at play i was having some difficulty turning on my mic and camera uh so thank you all once again for for having me over and and to do this session um and and for the audience i think it's it's uh it's time to congratulate you because you're interested in a subject which has garnered uh so much attention worldwide and uh and and the timing is just right so if you're entering or you're thinking of entering into the space um kudos to you um and as you would have seen towards the end of the presentation i would also open up uh uh suggestions to to to join and get involved into initiatives which could actually help you chart out your plan uh well let me start this session with uh with a with a question um i'm sure some of you may have read in your gk books about this gentleman called charles lindbergh and why is this relevant today in today's session so this guy was the first one to fly transatlantic um the first flight in 1927 it took him 33 and a half hours uh today it takes about eight and a half hours and there are players like virgin or or even trying to maybe reduce it to half or even less than that um now maybe we could use the q a tab and just just to um take a sense of the audience and what do you think how much time does money take to travel the same distance across the atlantic ocean from new york to paris your answer is in the q a tab and i'm talking about money traveling across this distance in 2022 okay awesome i think we've got some some answers and there was there's one outlier where vaquish is saying that it takes three days well in my opinion also it takes three days if you are in transacting with an unknown counterparty if you're into a new business transaction it takes over three days so that means it's faster to send money over a plane than to send money via the banking system and that's the kind of problems which blockchain technology can potentially solve for us so that's why the world today is you as you see it is euphoric about this blockchain technology and especially cross-border transactions using cryptocurrencies uh so that was just one example of the problems which potentially the blockchain network can solve uh let's explore a little more why why this is so new and why everybody is talking about web 3.0 and what does it entail so i'm going to bring in my dear friend mr navarr ravigant i'm a big fan of naval ravikant so if you guys don't follow him please do he gives fantastic advice on blockchain and in general new technologies his twitter handle is very simple at the red novel um so he says there are three epochs of the internet there are three paradigms which which changed for us to reach here where we are today uh the first came web which was the internet as we knew it as we were growing up and then came mobiles and then with mobile phones came came a new wave of mobility and apps and that has now graduated into blockchains so now you're going to see daps which are decentralized applications which are created using the blockchain technology uh that's the that's the that's the present wave that's the present form of internet which people are experiencing as we as we talk um there is billions of dollars being put into cryptos and blockchain projects in general um so so yeah do keep that in mind that we are now in third third age or third generation of the internet with blockchain technology um but let's you know let's now delve a little deeper let's double click on what blockchain is so here is a book definition of what blockchain is the core of this technology is built on the concepts of distributed consensus of transactions which are validated executed and recorded in a distributed network of nodes extremely important point here distributed network of nodes this distributed network allows participants to join jointly create evolve and keep track of one immutable history of transactions and other successive events which simply means that there is one ledger which everybody looks at uh and which everybody trusts so you know a lot of you may be working professionals and you would have heard of terms like single source of truth well this single version of the transaction just says single version of truth so while it may be various sources it may be various copies across all nodes which are in a blockchain network we just trust one version of the truth which is the most updated ledger so that's the that's the primary that's the basic definition of what blockchains are or how dlts distributed ledger technology networks are created uh there is no central administrator or centralized data storage extremely important point to note here and that's the decentralization which everybody has been talking about that's the core value which blockchain networks carry that the these are decentralized and there is no central authority which could control data and which would control access to these networks you know provided there are there are public blockchain networks and you know that also brings me to an important concept that there are three kinds of blockchains one is the public blockchains the second is the uh private blockchains and the third one uh picking up the best of both worlds is a hybrid blockchain which has a combination of public and private so that's the so that's the uh you know just just bear these concepts in mind while you look at the following slides and sort of let's go through a little more business so my my aim today is to educate people on educator listeners today on um the business value of blockchain so i'm not going to talk a lot about technology but yes even business leaders need to understand the capabilities of the platform um so that they're able to think and and ideate and and and create solutions around around this technology so that's why i'm going to little let's touch the technology a little bit but but not too much okay so we're going to be now going deeper into business side of blockchains that what has really shift what has really shifted um when we talk about business models so what happened in the in the web 2.0 as you see right now it used to be a linear transaction any buyer or seller transaction used to be a linear transaction it would have been it was always one firm and then a broker and then a bank and a clearing house and a custodial so imagine it to be a complex transaction of let's say selling a credit note it could be stuff like that or it could be a very simple transaction as selling a property what happens is there are tons of parties involved on the left-hand side as you can see there are tons of parties involved and all operate in a linear fashion which means that the party ahead of you does not have a view of the party which is behind you in the transaction that's the way linear business models were designed up until the web 2.0 what changed in web 3.0 is
that we started trusting one common network one common version of truth and because of that all the all the players in the business model were able to come together in a circular model as you can see on the right hand side of the slide so that's a major shift in the business models you know on the left hand side you see linear models on the on the right hand side you see circular models now what caused that shift is very important to note here because blockchain is bringing in the digital trust people are able to trust a network and that is why they are able to open up their data to other parties in their supply chain and another extremely important concept to hold here they're able to trust the network for conditional access of data and that is imp that that is all implemented using technology so there is no administrator who's giving access granting access and revoking access it's all programmatically done so so that's the that's the cool thing which blockchain is bringing in and that's why you see disintermediation as one of the key uh key takeaways of implementing blockchains um so so yeah it's disintermediating it's it's eliminating the need for any intermediaries it is eliminating the need for any brokers uh and that's why a lot of business i would not name those business i don't want to pinpoint any particular industries i think i believe most of the industries which are functioning today a lot of parties in those industries were making money just doing matchmaking just doing brokerage business so this these this shift in the model has actually caused a lot of pain to those parties um and also given a lot of opportunities to the parties who wanted to do business directly with the customers yeah okay um so what changed technology why so web again comparison between web 2.0 systems versus web 3.0 systems or blockchain systems uh look at the left-hand side which is the traditional data technologies uh which can be changed if there's a hierarchical data model uh hierarchical database model as you as you can see there it can be changed it can be manipulated of course there are certain technology controls which can be implemented around whether it data that the changes that have been made can be detected or not detected but the point is it can be changed then the second thing is it is fragmented and replicated now why is that because if two parties are transacting the two parties are individually storing their own information and imagine if if in that one transaction there are three or four parties involved all of them will have a copy of the same transaction so eventually they are maintaining multiple copies of the same transaction and then they get out of sync and then they have and then they have requirements for reconciliation so that's a and that's also by the way a big business that a lot of outsourcing companies uh in india and abroad have been doing so so reconciliations are a big are a big loss to productivity and uh and yeah i think older applications were that's the way they were operating that they required reconciliations in too many interactions then the last one is protected in aggregate so again an important point that they too to secure transactions um in a in a in a web 2.0 sort of traditional data technology system you have to you always have to make sure that all parties which are in a particular transaction have to be secured there only the transaction will be secured all right which is not the case in a blockchain network if you design the consensus mechanism correctly and i'm going to come to consensus mechanism in a bit which is just my next slide but importantly if we design the network right then the network is smart enough to kick out uh malfunctioning actors if there is a if there are actors which are which are operating in battery the network should and will kick it out that's that's the way it is designed and look at the distributed ledger technology the blockchain systems on the right hand side they're consistent and durable because the ledger the the single version of truth is replicated on all nodes it comes by design it comes with a high level of high degree of resiliency so even a few nodes go down the network does not go anywhere it can still survive and it can still answer to incoming requests the data is shared and mutualized as i said pretty straightforward encrypted by identity i think this is extremely important all nodes and all actors on a blockchain network are individually hold an individual entity and and that entity is used to sign each transaction which is made by that one particular actor so till the time you know look at degrees of separation till the time this person's identity or this in this system that entity is not compromised uh no garbage data can actually enter a blockchain network so that's so that's the uh that's higher higher degree of security i know system is absolute in terms of security by the way uh since you know i have a cyber security background i can definitely tell you there are only two kinds of systems you know systems which have been hacked and there are other systems where people don't know that the system system has been hacked all systems can and will be hacked um then there is last last but not the least which is very important stuff data is projected at data element level i think that's the stuff which i was just talking about that all data elements are signed off in a way signed off by the entities identity how how it's happening is by you using using cryptography and i'm going to come to that in a bit uh that how your your your private keys are used to to sign off data bits which you are sending on to the network all right so so that's those are the fundamentals we just we just covered what has changed why we are here uh and how it is causing a big shift in the in the way businesses are designed or can be designed now you look all big companies talking about uh cryptos and and nfds and and and tracing via blockchain networks um they definitely see a lot of value i've been into this space since a long time uh you know even through my past employers or through my startup experience as well uh where where clients were exploring you know 20 16 17 clients were exploring that what could we do in this my competition is doing this but now you know when we're sitting in 2022 since the past couple of years people have put in a lot of money and onto designing and creating these systems and now 2022 and three is going to be probably going to be the year when we see production employ production deployments of a lot of a lot of these these systems which have been designed and implemented in the past couple of years so that's my prediction um and of course reality is yet to be seen um coming on to some foundational concept so you know there are some keywords which i use and i'm just going to touch upon three fundamental concepts and uh to everybody's surprise all of these concepts are pretty clear pretty easy and they have already existed before blockchains existed uh it was only one gentleman satoshi nakamoto who thought about putting all this together and designing a bitcoin network so so yeah so so the first concept extremely important one an extremely simple one a peer-to-peer network so peer-to-peer networks have been in operation since the 80s all right very very very simple that there is no central so there's no harbin spoke model or there's no central servers where the systems connect it's it's it's like a mesh network where people actually transact with each other so that's why all these nodes these computers which join their network their each network is each system which joins a network is called a node so that's the peer-to-peer network very simple concept connect multiple systems across for data sharing all right next one is public key cryptography again a simple concept being used since i don't know many many years i don't know i think i i i first read it in my school days and and then college days and and whatnot and i'm sure a lot of you would have also come across similar books and texts etc so so public pre-key cryptography has has been there right been there for a while so very simple concepts there's there's a public key there's a private key you sign your so you sign your data with your private key and you can also use you can also use the other person's public key to sign that information so you can you can actually sign the document if i if i want to if i want to send you one document if if bob and alice want to exchange a transaction or exchange a document so then bob can actually sign a document using his private key and alice's public key all right so when alice receives that document then only alice will be able to unlock that document using her own private key that's a simple transaction in a cryptography in a public cryptography now here bob and alice are making a secure exchange of of of one document for example if anybody sniffs that data if anybody picks up that data by any means you know by medium of exchange either by uh sniffing their emails or are stealing their hard drives they would not be able to open up the files because they have been encrypted so all they will see is gibberish okay and last but not the least the core decision point of any blockchain network which is a consensus mechanism so consensus mechanism since it does appear to be a network and since every node in a public blockchain every node is at the same level of hierarchy there is no so so we definitely need a consensus mechanism how will all these nodes who have been connected why are operating that one software and joining that one network how will they come to consensus on the on the real version of truth so they definitely need some rules it's just ways of working it's just simple ways of working if i give you a set of instructions to follow and imagine it to be like simple if then else statements then we would have been defining a consensus mechanism so if bob and alice same example if they have to work on a particular project they made you know in the beginning of the project they may decide to have a certain you know have have have a certain ways of working how will they exchange emails how will they exchange data how will they communicate on what days they will meet all those rules that they set out is going to be their consensus mechanism so simply put that's the way that's the rule book for that one network so that's that's the consensus mechanism very in very layman terms uh all right and and there are there are over 40 consensus mechanisms that i've read about there may be more a lot of researchers are working on on this particular area all they want is a true and fair way of distributing common knowledge across blockchain networks now if if the consensus mechanism goes bad then what happens is your blockchain network is at risk of simple attacks you know your your majority of your nodes could get compromised and they or some portion of your notes can get compromised and they may be able to post transactions on the blockchain which are not true so that's why the the design of a blockchain is is secured using the consensus mechanisms all right so that's about consensus um i hope it is interesting and not very boring uh if it is you can you can always ask questions right then i'm going to talk a little bit about uh what are the typical blockchain applications so all of us see a lot of things which are going on these days on the internet uh there's definitely an in an ft craze there's also currencies craze there is sort of news which comes every month to maybe two or three times in a month it's getting banned it's not getting banned it's taxable not taxable uh how is it taxable and stuff like that and then our and then there is ipl you know you see big big exchanges sponsoring stuff so so so that's why you know it sort of brings it it brings uh a big question to mind that what is all this capable of what is a blockchain really capable of how are how are people doing all this and still making money so let's talk about three key uh applications of our blockchain okay the so the first thing is storage of digital records so that's the that's the first application actually that is where satoshi started using it where he was trying to use uh blockchains to keep a track of bitcoin transaction so you will be yeah you'll be amazed to know that you know it was it was just a ledger to store to store a record of all transactions of of the bitcoin network and uh and yeah that's the first application that i want to talk about the storage of digital records uh it can also be used for exchanging digital assets called tokens so that's where your nft is kicking that is where your cryptocurrencies kick in uh you know as and when more and more networks kept maturing and more consensus protocols get pouring in and more um brilliant minds on the planet they started putting their heads on to blockchain they created new platforms like ethereum and then and and sort of i have a bias towards that and i'm going to come and come in a bit about why i have a pass towards that but ethereum gave the capability of not just one but two things one was to exchange digital assets to create digital assets which were called tokens and also to execute smart contracts and and smart contracts is i believe a very very smart thing to to happen on the blockchain networks and and it is just self-executing contracts it sounds very very simple to code it maybe a smart contract could be 10 lines or 10 000 lines totally depends on how complex the the use case where you're implementing it is but um smart contracts are like if then else statements but it but it has to it has to be very well thought through it has to be well executed while a new token is getting created so at the genesis block at the first block of any blockchain these smart contracts have to be thought through and also secure so when you when you read about new hacks which happened on a particular protocol on a particular token uh something in the smart contract has gone wrong that's why those those sort of hacks happen so that's where so that's where i see um you know a lot of a lot of real good use cases coming out you know between between exchanging digital assets and and executing smart contracts so yeah what what smart contracts could do you know you could try ground rules you could also you know on a distributed network execute contracts and and monitor compliances uh it could be so again bob and alice if bob and harris had a smart contract between them bob would commit that i will give you 10 bitcoin on tuesday at 5 00 p.m so this smart contract once executed his uh 10 bitcoin will get logged or sorry i should not be saying that maybe 10 ethereum 10 ethereum should get locked so so maybe 10 tokens of the ethereum network they would get logged onto the smart contract and then the smart contract will be programmed to check one common source of information to determine whether it is tuesday 5 pm or not and those sources are called oracles so so once the once that source indicates that it is already tuesday 5 pm that smart contract auto executes uh the transaction to alice's accounts and the 10 and the 10 ether is now transferred to alice's account for some reason if the account does not exist may get lost um but then there may be other conditions which may also result in the ethereum coming back to bob's account all right so you may say the condition was tuesday 5 pm but if the temperature is 31 degrees the temperature is not 31 degrees the heat will come back so that's the kind of stuff you could do with smart contracts and and programmable money so i call it programmable money by the way and that's the way you should be looking at it if programmable money which is programmable tokens that's what cryptocurrency is you could actually create purpose specific tokens as well you could create tokens for students you could say you know you're just getting this you could only spend on books you will not be able to spend it spending apart for example just saying so so that's the kind of stuff which could be done with this programmable money um blockchain brings in some unique capabilities that's definitely something why we're all here today uh to understand all these unique capabilities we've spoken about paradigm shifts uh we spoken about the new age business models we've also spoken about potential applications of um of of blockchains i'm also going to play a small video here actually i missed the use case so this is a small use case video let's look at let's look at this video uh for a bit i will just look at it for two three minutes and i'm going to tell you what this company was doing [Music] well it's a japanese video i don't understand japanese but you can still read the english which is mentioned there the subtitles [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] okay [Music] [Music] so that's so that's a that's a use case how uh you saw there was a virtual assistant and the assistant was interacting with this person um also enjoying some life experiences like uh having coffee or or exchanging chats so so what this company did and this was this company was an instant success what they did was they started selling um merchandise for this assistant so you could buy clothes for her you could bring her coffee you could do you could all do all sort of stuff um just like a partner you would do it for a partner you spend money on a partner so so this company started they created in cryptocurrency and they started accepting payments and cryptocurrency and that's what that's what made it an instant success because you could buy for example you could buy coffee for 5 cents 10 cents 20 cents and and and there is no payment network in the world which is which could transact which would pass through that kind of money um you know with without spending that that same amount or maybe more so so that's why they said they decided to use cryptocurrencies okay so with that let's move on uh let's move on a bit to the unique capabilities that i already brought up um and yeah i don't see a lot of questions coming in so i hope i'm doing a good job but yeah please feel free guys to to post your questions and i'll take them up at the end of the session allows it doesn't it allows disintermediation uh from third-party trusted entities as i as i mentioned earlier it's giving us an opportunity to make circular business models and eliminate all brokers and enhance safe costs so i'll just give you an example for the the average trade volume of the world is about yeah it's about 180 trillion something and then two percent of that just goes into establishing uh establishing trust between counterparties so that they are able to transact so that's that's very very high you know that's that's a high price to pay for doing business so so imagine if if people could come on to blockchain networks and if you could just trust the network and by way of transacting with a counterparty you are your transaction is secured by the security of the blockchain networks and that's the that's the kind of possibility it is giving of course that it is subject to a lot of regulators and legal issues but but still this is a it's like a gatekeeper you know that's that's that's what you can see here it's programmatically securing everything then there are multiple contributors you know there are multiple contributors and some transactions and they can contribute simultaneously well the way we should look at it is there are multiple non-trusting parties in our transaction and and that is where it brings in a lot of difference because then what i'm sure of while i'm allowing these parties to write to the common database or write to the common transaction which is flowing from one party to the other i'm still not allowing them to touch any entries programmatically not allowing them to touch anything that anybody else on the network has posted plus i can also restrict few rights so i can make sure that my suppliers don't see my surprise don't see my other suppliers my transportation guys don't see my suppliers uh or the prices at which i'm procuring things as of today they do because they carry these noises across the network so that's the kind of controls that we can bring in using using blockchain it creates a robust uh redundancy network of course as i said these nodes act as [Music] you know backups for each other and provided a certain threshold of nodes are present on a network the blockchain network is considered to be safe to transact so there's always for every blockchain network there is there are these threshold networks they are some of the key parameters which we use to evaluate blockchain networks and the health of a blockchain network so you always have to make sure that these there are certain number of nodes which are available to really call this a decentralized network uh but yeah you know that aside it's still giving a lot of resiliency because i don't have to now bother about uh nodes and and and one can only imagine the kind of costs and and efforts which go into managing tier four theory tfo data centers uh well last last one which is it is removing dependency on individuals and the most promotes uh trust amongst contributors i think that was the point i was picking up earlier as well which is if you could trust the network you don't have to spend money on our time and efforts on trusting trusting uh individuals or businesses anymore yeah so that's that's where we are um here is my the consultant in me talking which is uh while we are making blockchain decisions uh of course it cannot fit everything it cannot solve every problem which our business faces uh but yes we definitely have to look at what are the key decision points when we are deciding upon whether to use blockchain or not if we if we are using a blockchain and which platforms to use and uh of course very interestingly what consensus mechanism do we deploy okay so let's go one by one um it's a many-to-many problem defined uh that cannot be solved due to constraints of current technology and user behavior extremely important point uh don't try to force with blockchains that that era is gone that that time of the of the century is already gone where people were trying to force fed blockchain into everything i saw a tweet a very funny one which said blockchain is a solution looking for problems um so so then the second one is does the underlying process or transactions require multiple participants if no go back and reassess question one yeah so as i said earlier non-trusting parties if a transaction requires non-trusting parties and if by virtue of giving the capability of writing simultaneously you are able to speed up a transaction then you should definitely consider blockchain but if you're not if if you're fine then you could just do distributed ledger you could just do uh peer-to-peer databases that's also fine you know you don't have to go blockchains and maybe this is a subject for discussion on some other webinar but but yes there is a a sort of a degree of difference between distributed ledgers and blockchains and then there are some people who are advertising themselves as blockchain killers also so yeah i'm not picking them up here is there a trust issue between the various participants in the process or transaction which is not currently uh or not addressed by existing intermediaries yeah so so banks for example for in here and they and they are the ones who sort of give guarantees and they they are the they are in the business of providing trust for a business transaction and and up to 20 of their annual revenues are made out of just these services and that's why you know back in the day they were the ones who who are first feeling threatened about this new kind of technology coming in and people starting to trust code more than the banks so but then eventually they realize that yeah they they can't coexist and and and you as you would see a lot of banks made super products and superb investments uh into into many many platforms you know var three quarter for example is is uh is a very successful platform um [Music] okay the next one is the impact of resolving this problem statement core to the business with very high impact on top or bottom line of the company if no go back to question number one very very important is it making financial sense to solve this uh i i remember there was a client again i can't name them but they wanted us to design of course they wanted to do a poc they wanted to show it to the to their own management first but the first application they wanted us wanted us to design was uh i want to design a meeting room booking app using blockchain so meeting room booking is not a big issue for our company of course cause a lot of uh efficiency issues but there's no company who would spend a lot of money on just doing that but they spend some money and they want to do a poc of can we do asset management this is like an asset and and can we do this can we do part ownership and stuff like that so so um so yeah very important assess the feasibility assess the financial impact of of such a change very important aspect to note here is you know you also have to look at the changes which will come into your because every company has a technology that they they've already invested tons of money on to designing their existing systems so they have to look at the technical deficits inside the company and the systems uh which have been designed redesigned or procured and whether have they what is at the end of the life so all that stuff so so when you start thinking of a blockchain solution don't start thinking of it as in vacuum start thinking of it as uh fitting into an existing running existing and running company and that means that you also have to look at the upstream and the downstream systems you know if this is a new system which comes in or get another system gets replaced what happens to systems which are feeding in data or taking data from the system so upstream and downstream systems um and the last one is what is the complexity of the solution required the level of encryption the level of distribution etcetera so as i said you know this is these are technology decisions which need to be taken while we are designing blockchains uh we have to sort of uh strike a balance between you know security ease of use and costs and speed etc so all of those parameters have to be kept in mind while technology stack is being being designed for for any blockchain networks uh yeah so with that uh you know it i'm sort of at the end of my presentation um please keep posting your questions i do see numbers going up i've not seen the questions yet but uh i will come to those uh so what i'm going to leave you is with one notion very important uh which is what blockchain is not i think a lot of people are telling you out there what blockchain is but let's also sort of clarify what blockchain is not and i hope that sort of helps you uh build your thoughts around around this technology okay so blockchain isn't just bitcoin i think it's pretty clear it's not just cryptocurrencies also it's pretty clear keep that in mind if your friends friends tell you that bring them to this video then there is uh blockchain isn't an automation solution it cannot automate anything it's a data technology it's it's it's how you store it that's how you design a network uh it is not automation there can be automation it can work with automation but this in itself is not automation blockchain isn't a workflow it's like a corollary to that to the earlier one it's not a workflow blockchain isn't the solution or a product absolutely so if people are saying i'm investing in blockchain they are bluffing they don't understand it there are tons of people out there who've mentioned even on linkedin and i'm an investor in blockchain it does not really make sense it's like saying i'm i'm an investor in java it's like a technology so so please be very well versed very very conversant with all these facts all right um coming to the next one which is blockchain isn't necessary necessarily a shadow or written solution most of the times you would see that blockchain is operating under the world but not always and there are so what i've personally seen in my my own experience with working with some clients and also with some startups the value which blockchain networks are driving are delivering to its customers um that is something which the customers look forward to they don't really care what goes under the network where's the magic but when you start telling people the magic is here then they realize okay yes and that works a lot with investors okay the second thing is and when i say investors these are not crypto investors these are investors and these are institutional investors and startups uh the other thing which is very important is you know utilizing blockchain especially public blockchains to design your business and to transact with your customers may come with some technology dependencies like for them to own a wallet now you have to assess whether your customers own a wallet or not or are they tech savvy enough to be kept to be able to hold a wallet and manage it and not lose it so so just be very very sure of of that as well so that's why i said that it's not always under the word it may be out there and your customers need to know it and and they need to be able to handle this all right um blockchain is not a major technology all right [Music] it's the most controversial one that's why it's at the end uh well this is this is my personal opinion it is not mature to the extent um [Music] to the actually no no platform is perfect uh that's that should have been the better better statement here but blockchain as a technology is evolving uh you know as i said earlier there are transaction speed issues or there are gas free issues and now all of these are promised to be solved all right so with new updates ethereum is solving some things bitcoin is not changing at all it remains the same if you need to change something you fork it you create a new network a new currency and start using that but uh ethereum as a technology has been changing it's transforming itself and and so are other platforms so so so yeah it's not perfect it is evolving and and and so is the case with most of the newest technologies uh the adoption curves have gone through the roof so and and that is why so faster adoption means faster rejection as well so that's why a lot of people tried some stuff really fast and failed really fast and then started blabbering about it because now you know what now you can write stuff on linkedin and facebook but but then um there are some serious players out there which are creating fantastic blockchain solutions and fantastic blockchain platforms for others others to build solutions and uh and they are constantly listening to feedback developer feedback and they are incorporating changes uh every day so so so yeah just just watch out so subscribe to certain sources which can give you good updates on which which technology platforms are evolving which technology platforms are uh creating uh creating newer newer implementations and stuff like that yeah so that's it from my side for today for today's session um you can keep in touch with me and get involved in the initiatives that i'm part of i'm i'm the co-chair of the technical steering committee of baseline protocol which is a new protocol uh getting created for system synchronization so you can synchronize two systems using a technology called zero knowledge proofs so it is absolutely secure you're not sending data you're just sharing proofs uh it is using blockchain as a common frame of reference like we use gmt as a common frame of reference for time across the across the time zones so that's baseline there's also enterprise ethereum alliance and the regional head for enterprise genome alliance it's the home for enterprise ethereum that just means that this is one non-profit which is being run by one of the co-founders of ethereum jolobin and and and he um he's sort of driving adoption for corporates so you would have also read about ethereum foundation which works primarily with developers and eea which is enterprise theorem alliance works with corporates to to get them on board and guide them on using ethereum technology there's a qr code to my linkedin profile that's where i'm most active that's the super easy way to reach me ask me questions or uh yeah discuss topics anyways um so yeah let's let's keep in touch and and thank you all back to you uh team from manipal uh if there is can we go on to the q a yeah thank you simrat for this highly interesting session today you helped us understand about blockchains and also shared how the technology ecosystem has evolved especially in business as compared to traditional technology you also took us through common blockchain applications and shared benefits of adopting blockchain you specified key factors a business must consider before adopting this technology and to end you also counted some common assumptions about blockchain thank you it's time to address some of the questions from our participants uh will you take it up or should i uh will it be okay if i can read it to you one by one sure i can take it up uh do you want me to project it on the screen uh no you can read it out uh some rat and you know and address it as well yeah okay sure thank you so the first yeah the first one is uh okay interesting question uh nitin uh how how is one single ledger maintained in blockchain if there is no central server then every uh every has one big copy of a big transaction yeah so probably you mean every node has a big copy of all transactions well that is correct uh in in in some kind of blockchains that is correct that every node has a copy of all transactions but as i said the transactions are encrypted or the data being exchanged between these nodes it is replicated across all nodes and all nodes always be in sync but the node where the data sits it can only access the data which belongs to this node so it cannot access it it will just sit on a on let's say 20 gb of data but probably it will only have access to 200 mbs of data which is signed with their with their public key so that's how that's how security used to operate that's how bitcoin uh blockchain operates but that's not the case with all blockchains uh and you know in my opinion for example and this is extremely important design consideration if you're designing a blockchain network never put data on the blockchain keep data aside you can push put hashes or proofs so encrypt your data put the hashes on the blockchain you could do that you could timestamp it you could use blockchain for serialization of transactions but don't use blockchain for storing data that's not that's not the right use of blockchain or please don't come talk to me sorry i'm totally against it um can blockchains be used for fungible items as well yes absolutely this can be used for fungible tokens as well so that's why that's why i said uh while you're designing um your your tokens you can actually pick up the right smart contract templates and you can pick up the right protocols also to create these tokens and this could be fungible as well as non-fungible tokens so both are a possibility using using blockchain um then we have it's safe or not in india okay so this is not a this is not restricted by geographies uh nodes can be anywhere so so that's why uh it's it's it's um yeah it's hard to say whether it's it's safe or not in india because uh the security of the of the blockchain network actually relies on the security of the nodes and the consensus protocol etc deployed if if your question was towards cryptocurrency sorry i'm not going to address it [Music] okay what is uh an existing accessible business application of blockchain that is just today that we may not know is is blockchain based okay that's a good question um let me think there are some b2b applications which i know about but i'm not sure if the company that i was working for has made that news public it was being used in oil and gas oil trading actually trading of oil battles so i can't reveal names but it was also being used for high frequency trading of uh forex so so that's also one of the cool use cases which which are solving so so yeah i think it it so for companies to offer it to its customers um it sort of became a challenge because regulators were involved and a lot of uh bad press was involved about cryptocurrencies and in blockchain people used to think cryptocurrencies blockchain blockchain's cryptocurrency so that's why a lot of public applications could not see light of the day but b2b applications was way faster if two parties decide to transact in a certain way they were able to implement stuff so so yeah there are there are some businesses which are using uh blockchain technology for trading etc um what skill does one require for becoming a blockchain developer that's a cool question vagish so you should you should follow career paths i'm sure well this is the manipul may be part of one of those uh one of those courses uh uh so end of the day you know as i said it's it's it's easy stuff um it's smart stuff put together to form this new technology so so end of the day you have to be uh to be really sharp at server side programming i think that's something really important uh pick up a language like uh solidity or go and then you'll be you'll be sorted to write smart contracts and create your own tokens etc so those those are the kind of stuff and and and yeah i know i know if you follow baseline protocol baseline hyphen protocol.org
go to that website and get involved there's a slack group and which is full of developers who've taken up blockchain at various stages of their careers in fact just few days back i was hosting i do a weekly live show as well on youtube which is the baseline show and um i was hosting three core developers from from baseline and they were telling i was asking them and they used to work with gm uh in the past general motors and they were recently hired by consensus mesh which is probably the biggest blockchain company in the world and i was asking them that how how how old is your career in blockchain so he said that you know what i'm a full stack developer with three to four years experience and i've just known blockchain for eight months and i can't even tell you uh the salary packages that they're at so amazing stuff so this is the right time as i said when i started my session that this is the right time to enter uh and acquire these skills and and kudos to all of you if you're doing it so follow a path uh pick up programming pick up so you could be anybody you know look at the entire ecosystem not don't just look at programming as a skill to acquire to become an expert on blockchain you could do business you could do economics you could do marketing you could do content writing etc so there are tons of ways to to make money in this space of course there are different degrees of of uh of money that you will make doing stuff okay um then there is okay good question bye shall we one day which is it's not totally reliable as of now but do you think at some point it will be used everywhere for working by working more on it i think adoption i think it's yet to see uh adoption uh like the kinds of let's say node.js or java but and that's and that's why i say that the opportunity is still there but it will not go everywhere because as i said earlier it is not a technology which should be used or or can be used everywhere and it does not make sense to replace every database out there with blockchain so um so yeah i think there has to be a prudent uh use case or business case behind and doing something on blockchains but yes definitely if to to answer part of your question there is tons of uh ground to cover in terms of adoption can blockchain be had well the same principles of a server being had applied to blockchain nodes but the important part is the only way of hacking a blockchain especially a public blockchain is doing a civil attack which is which means that you know in very crude terms if i if i hack mult if i hack majority of the nodes on a network then i may do something which is which i'm not allowed to do then they would believe so for example 51 if i had 51 nodes on a particular network then i may be able to be able to post transactions which i was not authorized to post or make people believe that the thing that i'm saying is true because i own 51 of the network so so that is why uh people rely on larger blockchain networks which have got thousands of nodes and and it's really it's practically impossible to to hack all of those or 50 51 percent bits um so that's the so that's the thing uh even if one node gets compromised all it can do is it can play around with its own data it cannot do anything with anybody else's data okay do you see these technologies replacing currencies of country and come up with one globally exchangeable currency maybe okay that's what you mean to write okay cool so yeah it's a good question the cbdc's or central bank digital currencies is just one application of blockchain uh blockchains which i see i also wrote an article few days back for economic times on cbdc's and and the benefits that it brings uh there were there's tons of news out there which where rba governments are talking about it and and stuff so uh yes it does has have a lot of value but i don't see it to be practical to to deploy a global cbdc or one currency across the globe uh i think crypto currencies on the other hand are already serving that purpose so there will not be one government accepted currency across the world that's that's just my opinion maybe leaders meet somewhere and they decide that yeah we need to do this but um but yeah in my in my opinion although if you if you look at any cryptocurrency which is like bitcoin or ethereum you you can actually see it's a global currency anybody could transact with anybody else and there are certain global platforms i've seen i've recently er seen a global platform which is uh working with freelancers and it is helping people get work and get paid in cryptocurrency across the globe okay uh i'll just you know in the interest of time should i just pick up one question now uh yes i'm wrapping maybe pick up another two or three questions yeah all right okay so let's look at uh clarify on fungibility alex uh clarify on fungible i think that is so it's very clear simple concept uh fungibility and non-fungibility uh there are uh hundred bucks in your bank account versus the hundred bucks in your pocket in term in let's say one rupee notes just taking an example okay so 100 bucks in your in your bank account uh you cannot separate one rupee from another rupee while they're sitting in your bank account if you make a payment to somebody of one rupee one rupee digitally you will go to that person's account now you don't know what is the serial number or sequence number of that that that one rupee which isn't sitting in your background but if you have notes if you have currency notes they all carry a serial number so they're all unique okay so there they they are also that one one dollar node or one rupee note which which you are holding in your hand is unique because it is numbered and there is only one such node you know in the in the ideal scenario so so so that is non-function okay because you cannot put two nodes together and say you know what they have now combined there i can't differentiate one from the other on the other hand if you put if they were you know one rupee in your bank account and you add another one rupee in your background it will become two rupees and then you will not be able to segregate which one was there earlier and which one came later on so that's the difference between there's a very crude way of explaining fungibility uh to to someone yeah so so the the key difference being uniqueness uh if i can differentiate one from the other it's non-fungible if i cannot differentiate one from the other it is fungible that means it can be combined to form an aggregate yeah okay then we have uh wakisha not picking up your questions sort of an advanced question i'm told that this is for this sort of a basic course uh so i'm not picking up staking yet but yeah we could definitely have a chat if you think on linkedin uh what else all right what sort of federal government do you see to be rising out of the areas such as blockchain or currencies do you have any such friends anywhere now or presently yeah well just to answer this i think all governments are considering uh you know various ways in which they can control or tax cryptos across the world or you know there is there are friendly states like wyoming in the us which have created the various laws for for blockchain and crypto companies they've even created laws for a dao model of a company a decentralized autonomous organization yeah that's a discussion for someone today what if blockchain is approved and used in any organization will make better for management or for consumer uh absolutely i think that's why and and if you if you choose the right use case if you uh pick up i i didn't talk about maybe a couple of use cases uh here one use case i showed in the video so the consumer was having a good time while spending cryptocurrency on a virtual assistant uh the other can be traceability i've seen a lot of traceability initiatives for example ibm food trust has gone live many many years ago and they're they're actually providing traceability of food so when i claim that a certain food is originating from certain places uh they actually give blockchain based proofs to make sure to to give me that confidence that yeah this is genuinely coming commercial so for example salmon uh i'm paying for norwegian salmon but am i getting norwegian salmon is is that salmon really sourced from from norway and can i get uh you know what was the temperature it actually displays all that stuff you know what was the temperature of the ocean while that fish was it was caught and is it fresh when was it caught and stuff like that if i'm having coffee sitting in a starbucks i want to tip the farmer who who found that coffee somewhere in africa i can even do that using blockchain technology today just kind of qr code tip the farmer 10 cents raising reaching a place small place in africa will still make a difference to that guy right so that's the um that's the kind of use cases people are already implementing uh tons of tons of action is happening actually uh i i personally see a lot of value being already realized or captured on the b2b side okay regulatory invention interventions yeah absolutely so there are tons of regulators who are working on various aspects of of blockchain technology but yes as i said i cannot recreate blockchain because blockchain is just a technology if a regulator comes and says i'm regulating blockchain that means they're saying i'm regulating java or i'm regulating sql stuff like that so they cannot do that they can just regulate one application of it maybe cryptocurrencies maybe nfts but they cannot regulate that one technology okay you can still keep creating more and more applications uh depending on their use cases um okay what do you think will be the next big thing in blockchain implementation for users um yeah good question okay um well i see many big things happening uh as we talk i think play toward gaming is something which is really putting back a lot of value in the hands of the users uh people were anyway spending time watching videos or playing games and now they can earn cryptocurrencies doing just that so that's a beautiful thing to happen for users uh there is tons of uh there are there are tons of companies which are also working on uh you know as i said earlier there are tons of companies who are working on you know designing platforms like upwork and and and passing on you know work from various parts of the world and getting
2022-04-08