Blockchain and Bitcoin: Just a Fad?

Finding Genius Podcast

Richard Jacobs

Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.4 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2017

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Radia Perlman has been designing network and routing protocols for a long time. In the early days, they were pretty fragile. It's been Perlman's work that's made these protocols robust and scalable. She's literally written the book on these topics, now in a 2nd edition. It's this perspective Perlman brings to "Blockchain," which has been hyped as the biggest contribution to computing since the Internet.
It's hard to define a buzzword like "Blockchain." You could define it as something as vague and general as "a combination of computers networking," which doesn't make it any different from the computing we've been doing for decades. Perlman simply defines "Blockchain" as data that's arranged in chains of blocks. Every chain has a "hash," which is especially difficult to compute. It's difficulty is its only security assumption. But how safe is that really? Find out in this podcast.
Here's a few things you'll find out:

* What the downsides of blockchain technology are
* Why Blockchain and Bitcoin could be over-hyped
* What the dangers of Bitcoin could be

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Almost Here, Around the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs.
0:08.0	Future technologies are always to transform our lives for better or worse or the focus of this podcast.
0:13.7	Almost here means these technologies are now here and starting to be used.
0:18.2	We're just around the corner.
0:19.8	From Bitcoin to artificial intelligence 3d printing
0:22.7	blockchain virtual reality and more hi this is richard jacobs with future tech podcast and my guest
0:29.7	today is radia parmen and as we discussed previously before i started the recording radio has a lot of
0:37.2	credentials she's been around working with blockchain uh previously before I started the recording, Radia has a lot of credentials.
0:37.9	She's been around working with blockchain essentially for a long time.
0:43.9	So instead of me giving a skewed or possibly not Best Light introduction, I'm going to let her do it.
0:50.3	So Radia, thank you for coming. How are you doing?
0:52.6	Oh, fine.
0:53.6	Yeah.
0:55.7	So, yeah, if you would, for listeners, before we get into the topic, thank you for coming. How you do it? Oh, fine. Yeah. So yeah, if you would for listeners,
1:00.1	before we get into the topic, would you give them, you know, a little bit about your background and what you do and who you are? Okay. Well, I have been designing network protocols for a long time.
1:08.5	So I've done spanning tree that changed Ethernet
1:13.8	from being a single link into fairly large networks.
1:17.9	I did routing protocols that enable a network to self-configure
1:24.3	and be really robust.
1:27.0	Early routing protocols were very, very fragile,
1:30.2	and I made them much easier to manage and robust and scalable.
1:40.3	The particular blockchain stuff really came out of one of the chapters of my book, which
	...

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