Transcript: Rethink Trust 2018, Douglas Beardsley, Interview

so Douglas thanks for amazing talk and I have few questions and first question like what do you think is your role in like blockchain economy and what kind of career paths that bring you here to work in in blockchain are you are you asking my roles personally or so it's up to you maybe like role of the company or all of you so I believe what we're trying to do is build a scalable lock chain based on proof of work proof work is the one thing that we actually know works it's been tried and proven for a decade or more now and so we think that's a really good foundation to build on and we think we can make it scale so we and we think we can build a level one solution that will scale and all the level to scaling solutions will still be perfectly applicable for if you need more performance than you get out of the box with with our chain web blockchain as far as the like career paths I personally got here because I got interested in Haskell about 10 years ago and I just went off and wrote Haskell on my own because I was interested and enjoyed it and eventually was able to get a Haskell job about eight years ago which I was pretty fortunate there were not very many Haskell jobs around at that time and I've been programming Haskell ever since and kadena is all all high school for everything and so it was a natural place for me to come okay cool and now like a lot of hype around blockchain so the question is what do you think what's kind of real business problems that we can solve with blockchain technology so as I mentioned in my talk I feel the core improvement that blockchains gave us was being able to make data tamper proof so applications where it's important to be tamper proof I think are really ideal for blockchain just to use kind of a I don't know pop culture example I saw I saw the the TV show billions where they falsified some evidence records if that evidence had been stored digitally in a blockchain it couldn't be falsified now I don't know whether it's it will be cost effective to use blockchains for that exact example but I think it's a really good illustration of the possibilities if you if you want to have records of a police interview that can't possibly be changed after the fact put them in the blockchain and and you have that so there's that's just one example it may be it may be a little bit more extreme than most because it's law enforcement and and that kind of has a little bit more weight associated with it but I think there are a number of applications that can benefit from not not being able to tamper with data and I can't even begin to think of what all they might be I think one of the one the main characteristics of innovative technologies is you really can't predict where they're gonna be used and and how they're gonna actually work out so so I have no idea but I would focus on like the core things that block chains do that couldn't be done before and one of those things is making things tamper proof okay thanks and you're talking with a lot of like customers or potential customers so what are their qualities about blockchain what is there like expectation about technology so one industry that we're talking to is the supply chain industry and I'm not a supply chain person so I'm definitely out of my element here but my understanding is that there's lots of situations where businesses are coordinating with each other and one business will say oh I shipped this thing and another business will say I took that thing and shipped it for you and they need their records to agree and there are situations where people might have an incentive to tamper with it and blockchains seem like they could be a decent application there any any kind kind of like coordination between multiple entities that don't necessarily want to trust the other entity that's where this blockchain distributed nature you don't have to trust a centralized source I think can become useful okay and like as a engineer as a software engineer who is working with blockchain was the most technical challenge that you face it with blockchain technology oh wow that's a great question I guess just making the the problem that we're trying to solve making a programming language that can allow us to write smart contracts that aren't buggy and that do what we say that's as incredibly difficult and I'm I'm sure that it's gonna take a long time to and many many iterations before we we like start to get closer to the solution but I think that's a really difficult problem and it's it speaks to the the general software problem of you know how do we make correct programs if you compare the software industry to other hard hard engineering disciplines software isn't isn't so great in terms of how reliable our products are and and how how well they work and you know don't break overtime so I think that there's a whole lot of research to be done there to just improve the quality of not only smart contract software but software in general okay and like as engineer what do you think the main skill set of the blockchain specialist should have like it for for example for engineer or business analysts who work in like with a blockchain technology there's there's so many different skills it's hard to harden say any particular set I think just general programming skills are really important you need to need to have if you're gonna work on some like lower level blockchain technology like infrastructure you need things like distributed systems knowledge some database knowledge like we're demonstrating with kadena programming languages we think are a really useful thing to or like area of study to draw from but if you're just using blockchains and writing smart contracts on top of them I would say standard software skills being able to think think critically and and represent a problem as a sequence of steps and have good well-organized code that's clear and easy for other people to read just kind of good logical thinking I would I would not particularly recommend like diving in and labeling yourself as one particular technology expert but be able to to learn and and the the only thing that we know we are gonna be doing is changing and learning new things now because the pace of change is so fast and so you really have to not get stuck in any particular thing that you're comfortable with but be aggressively learning learning new things and willing to adopt new technologies as they become useful and as a community like what can we do like to prevent blockchain winter you know to help business like what to solve real problems with the blockchain that's a good question I think we really need to reduce the the risk associated with all of these things we are trying to do that by creating a language that allows you to build contracts with with more confidence but if people are if there's too much risk then they're not gonna put their money into these contracts and adoptions gonna be slow what we want is we want people to be plain and using and trying new things and it's gonna be I think there's gonna be some growing pains with how the the stakes are high there's lots of money on the line so so there's gonna be that slows things down inherently but we need to figure out ways of getting both we like that stakes are high that's great but we still want to be able to iterate quickly and try new things and experiment and I think those are those are the important characteristics that we need to focus on ok thanks and last question so what do you think about conference so far it's great I actually flew in this morning and so I didn't get here right when it started I got here like later in the morning but I'm really enjoying it it's just a gorgeous space here in Amsterdam I'm liking it a lot ok thank you very much