Rethink Trust 2018: Roman Shaposhnik, Interview
Recording: Rethink Trust 2018: Roman Shaposhnik, Interview
so Roman thanks for your amazing speech like a few questions and like my first question what do you think like is your role in a blockchain now and what kind of career paths I like to bring you here to work with the blockchain well first of all thanks for having me it's really great to be here you know awesome conference you know I really didn't expect it to be such a wild success so thanks for that in terms of you know what we're trying to do like I said in my presentation we're basically trying to build the final missing link to enable cyber-physical systems and if you think about it you know currently the blockchain is all virtual right it we are all sort of in the matrix you know like there's no real connections to the physical world so to give you just one use case that a previous speaker was talking about if you want to have your driving records to be available on a blockchain a big problem is actually securing it but even bigger problem is how do you prove that it is indeed coming from your vehicle that you haven't you know hack the device that's actually recording your speed and acceleration and whatever else and that device is now giving in a bogus numbers how do you prove that the numbers that are actually streaming into the blockchain are true numbers that can be trusted so a piece of technology that could enable that is called Hardware trusted Oracle that is basically a piece of technology that we're trying to build okay thanks and now you see like a lot of hype around blockchain what do you think they're real like customers problems and business problems that you can solve with your product in blockchain I think I'm coming to the blockchain from the enterprise perspective so my view is much closer to that of IBM you know hyper ledger foundation I think if you look at the enterprise's what they all trying to do they're basically trying to figure out how they can optimize their business processes because a lot of them are now involved in transactions that are essentially transactions between multiple parties right so a perfect example of that would be supply chain management right you know if you basically hit trying to build something you have to manage a lot of things you know a lot of parts that are getting into that and trying to sort of do to a centralized system becomes really difficult because then you have to pick somebody in that supply chain who would actually be running the system so all of the companies are trying to figure out how they can involve multiple parties you know they're actually have to be there for the transaction to happen in such a way that they can on one hand not really trust each other because that's not going to happen but on the other hand you know Trust the important parts you know that guarantee that a transaction is going to complete so to me that's probably the biggest use case that I see in the enterprise and I don't really have much insight into you know more of the cryptocurrency or some of the other applications of the blockchain okay thanks and what is it like main technical challenge or maybe another kind of challenge that you face it in my process of working with blockchain I think you know the biggest challenge is basically a lack of talent at this point there's an amazing group of people here but if you collect all of the experts in the blockchain space I think they can actually fit not just into this building but basically into this room right you know it will be pretty packed but they would still fit that's nowhere near enough for the world that we're living in so I think you know we really need to invest in evangelizing and basically trying to bring blockchain to as many developers as we possibly can maybe this is you know some of it is through open source some of it through education some of it may be you know university is finally waking up and actually starting you know blockchain sort of courses you know within their curriculum but I think we really have to solve the issue of not enough people being able to really meaningfully contribute to this technology okay and also my question like next question is connected to is the talents so what do you think the main like skillset that is needed for the blockchain like specialists yeah it's pretty interesting question because it's a very interdisciplinary you know set of skills right because on one hand you have to be a reasonable software engineer right you know you have to be able to write code and you know just just feel comfortable with that but on the other hand you have to be a reasonable cryptographer you know in again I'm not saying you know designing your own cryptographic algorithms I mean that's definitely not required but at least understanding the implications of existing crypto but interestingly enough you also have to be a little bit of an anthropologist because a lot of mechanics that are essentially being built into the blockchain they're in there to manage and mitigate you know trust issues and you actually have to understand you know human nature and human history enough to not step into the mistakes that have been made multiple times before in trying to manage trust and mitigate trust issues so you actually have to be a little bit of a you know student of the history and that's actually why I recommend this book you know called debt the first 5,000 years I think that's a required reading for anybody who is actually getting into the blockchain space okay cool and as a community like what can we do like do not start like blockchain winter-like to support the blockchain and enterprise so I think you know we actually have to support existing efforts like hyper ledger foundation is doing amazing amazing work so I really think IBM for popularizing and you know bringing all these use cases you know to the front of the sort of enterprise understanding of what blockchain is capable of there's a few other options in the open source space you know I would like more blockchain projects to actually be governed in the same way the popular open source project are governed you know and today it's more based on sort of this completely decentralized model we actually seen those governance issues for example with us you know lately where the technology itself is really really nice but the governance is you know could be much improved so I think blockchain community is you know can actually learn a thing or two from the open source communities we've been doing it in the open source you know for a number of years now and when we started we also had no clue how to govern but now we're actually getting there you know we're making making it you know really reasonable to sustain projects as big as Linux kernel right so to me those would be the things that I would recommend doing okay thanks and last question what do you think about recent conference so far I love it like I said I love it I want more of it I will try to invite all of my friends to the next one and please do it in the Bay Area okay thank you very much