Hello and welcome to the ThoughtWorks Beacon podcast. I'm Prasana Pense. I'm Neil Ford. And I'm Johnny LaRoy.

In this episode, we will discuss blockchain and how it differs from Bitcoin and what the future holds for blockchain.

All right. Thanks, Prasana. So when people hear about blockchain, they inevitably think about Bitcoin because those two things

are sort of intertwined in people's minds because Bitcoin is the first real public implementation

of blockchain. And right now in the press, there's a lot of controversy around Bitcoin,

both as a very volatile commodity like pork bellies or frozen concentrated orange juice,

but also because there's a lot of infighting within the Bitcoin community.

There are three proposals now about how to change Bitcoin.

And I'll let you do some research on that and not bore you about that because mostly what

we're talking about here is blockchain.

And I think Bitcoin is really just a good example of kind of the hubris of technologists, because a currency is a very complex thing.

It is a technology, but it's also a lot of social constructs and political implications.

And you can't divorce the technical aspects of

a currency from all the other things that make currency work in society. And the problems

you're seeing with Bitcoin right now have absolutely nothing to do with the viability of blockchain

as an algorithm, but has everything to do with all the non-technical aspects of

currency and how messy that is in the real world. And to make cryptocurrencies work, we're

going to have to solve both the technical and all the political problems. And so what I'm

really doing here is divorcing Bitcoin from blockchain because blockchain as a technology

has some really fascinating

and powerful applications, which is what this podcast is really about.

When you think about blockchain, I have a definition of blockchain which you may not have

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