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

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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, Almost Here, Round the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs.
0:08.0	Future Technologies Hoyts to transform our lives for better or worse are the focus of this podcast.
0:13.7	Almost here means these technologies are now here and
0:16.8	starting to be used.
0:18.2	We're just around the corner.
0:19.8	From Bitcoin to artificial intelligence,
0:22.1	3D printing, blockchain, virtual reality, and more.
0:25.9	Hi, this is Richard Jacobs with Future Tech Podcast, and my guest today is Radio
0:30.9	Parliament.
0:32.0	And as we discussed previously before I started the recording
0:35.4	Radia has a lot of credentials she's been around working with blockchain
0:40.7	essentially for a long time so instead of me getting a skewed or
0:46.3	you know possibly not best light introduction I'm gonna let her do it so Radia thank
0:51.0	you for coming how you doing oh fine yeah so yeah if you
0:55.0	would for listeners before we get into the topic would you give them you know a little bit
0:59.0	about your background and and what you do and who you are. Okay, well, I have been designing network protocols
1:07.0	for a long time.
1:08.6	So I've done spanning tree that changed Ethernet from being a single link into fairly large networks.
1:17.0	I did routing protocols that enable a network to self-configure and be really robust. Early routing
1:27.8	protocols were very, very fragile and I made them much easier to manage and robust and yeah and scalable.
1:40.0	The particular block chain stuff really came out of one of the chapters of my book, which I have two textbooks, one's on layers two and three of networking, and the other is on network security and cryptography, and I do have co-authors on that.
2:00.0	So when I was doing a chapter for the third edition, which is not yet out, and still probably
	...

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