Gavin Wood joined the show to talk about Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, The DAO, Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), what could you build with Ethereum, and the future of digital currency. Gavin Wood is Founder of Ethereum, creator of the Solidity contract language, and Founder of Ethcore — the company that created Parity, an open source Ethereum client.
Gavin Wood: Okay, so you’ve got crowdfunding that was like a VC fund that anyone could contribute to. So you can obviously have that down and just say, “Right, well actually, rather than being able to choose any project, it’s for one particular project and you can crowdfund that.” So you can basically state, “I plan on spending the money on XYZ, and there will be some potential for maybe you to make money from this XYZ in this way, and I want money from you to do this.” And you can create a contract that will allow you to accept people’s money and spend it over some particular period of time on some particular things, with perhaps some particular set of judges that will say, “Actually, they’re not getting these milestones completed in time, we’re going to stop the funding and return the money to the funders.” That’s one example of something that you can program on this.
[01:05:49.02] Just thinking slightly more crazily, pushing it out there a bit, what about a game of chess? A game of chess, except when you take a piece you actually lose money, or you gain money. So you’re essentially placing money onto the chessboard and you’re saying, “Right, well every piece on the board is actually worth something, and the winner is the one inevitably that takes the pieces that are most valuable.”
That’s something that you just couldn’t do, I mean certainly not easily. You’d have to create a business and register it with Paypal, because Paypal needs to trust that you are not KYC or AML -thats “know your customer” and “anti money-laundering”- for those who aren’t familiar with these financial terms. So it has to do all sorts of business processes, meatspace processes before you can work with money, before you can work with value. Even though it’s all just software, but we still have these processes that you have to go through to set up these trust roots. With a system like Ethereum, it’s literally just software; you don’t have to do that anymore.
Value is a fundamental primitive of the language that you’re coding this stuff in, so it’s actually trivial. It’s completely trivial. It’s as trivial as incrementing an integer, to send money in Ethereum. It’s super, super easy.
Imagine a game of chess here where you can make money off your opponent across the internet, by being a good chess player. So maybe something like Mechanical Turk, or one of the other matchmaking services that allows you to find someone who does work, and you can say “Right, we’re gonna have this third party who will decide whether you’ve done the work.” Say I want some design work, or I want some copywriting work, and we’ll have a third party, a nominated party that we can both agree on, that basically says whether the copywriting or the design is of a sufficient quality to be paid. Then you can place the payment in Escrow, so you can have an Escrow system on this. Then, the payment gets made if and only if the work is done.
So that’s something that can be done, again, very easily. There’s no need to integrate it into any payment services, there’s no need to register a company or do anything like that. It all happens in software, no meatspace complications.
Okay, another example… Let’s think about asset tracking. Let’s think about the way the world works, the way that supply chains work. I buy a pair of trainers in a shop - how do I know where the trainers came from? I mean, I could look at the label and maybe it says “Made in China”, but it’s very difficult to know which bits came together from which places, where it went on its way, what the intermediate owners were, where the raw materials themselves came from… This information just gets lost. And why does it get lost? It’s not necessarily lost because the people who are handling it want it to be lost, it’s just really hard to put it somewhere that’s secure, that isn’t mutable by some administrator, and that is ubiquitous, is global enough such that all of the various different people along the line can place their records in the database.
Effectively, what it needs is a really strong, secure, shared internet-based database, and that database hasn’t been around. If it had been around, we wouldn’t need things like The Fair Trade or the Soil Association; we would just have it all online.
These kinds of asset shadowing - that’s what we call them, because it’s sort of like taking an asset and placing it in some sort of shadow, like a pairing on the internet, on the blockchain, these kinds of asset shadowing things don’t really exist yet, but it’s exactly the sort of thing that the blockchain would really excel at doing, because it is this database with very strong logic guarantees, with very strong security, so you can be certain that authenticated users really are authenticated, and it’s ubiquitous - it’s everywhere on the internet. It’s open and free, and that’s really great for allowing third parties to create custom solutions and make their own dime on the back of this technology.
I don’t know if that will help give you a better idea about where this stuff can go.
