The Next Radical Internet Transformation: How Blockchain Technology is Transforming Business, Governments, Computing, and Security Models

Speaker: Mark Mueller-Eberstein, CEO & Founder at Adgetec Corporation, Professor at Rutgers University, Senior Research Fellow at QIIR

Moderator: Toufi Saliba, CEO, PrivacyShell and Chair of the ACM PB Conference Committee

Warning: These are notes taken live. Errors and omissions will occur. No responsibility whatsoever.

• intro: old enough to remember the discussions in the early 90s about how the internet would change mail services – completely forgetting shopping, entertainment and others
• Blockchain solves the problem of transferring value between Internet users without a third party
• goes beyond the financial industry, can handle any kind of transaction
• most of the world has access to a mobile phone, only about 20% has access to the banking system
• Blockchain is the banking industry’s Uber movement
• Blockchain much wider than Bitcoin, will facilitate new business models.
• Blockchain transfers rather than copies digital assets, making sure there is only one instance of it.
  • settlement process: no clearing houses or central exchanges
  • peer-to-peer transfers, validation by network
• Example: WeChat taking over payments in China, no link to banks
• many commercial or government services are basically “databases” that are centrally managed, with one central point of failure
• Blockchain allows a distributed ledger, information put in cannot be changed
  • Estonia thinking about a Blockchain in case of hacking or occupation
• public (open), private and government blockchains
• allows new services to existing customers, lots of inefficiencies up for grabs
  • estate records, voting, domain control, escrow, etc…
  • iPayYou allows use of Bitcoin
  • Walt Disney looking at Blockchain (DragonChain) for internal transfers, also use it for tracking supply chain to their cruise ships. Opensourced it.
• 80% of Bitcoin mining done in China
• regulation comes with a cost
• Shenzhen want to be Blockchain Tech capital
• 6-level security model, developed by William Mougayar (goes through it in detail: transaction, account, programming, distributed organizations, network (51% attacks, perhaps as low as 30%, smaller blockchains more vulnerable), governance)
• Ethereum blockchain focusing on smart contracts: Hard forked in 2016, DAO issue where somebody hacked DAO code to siphon off money, hacking the program using the blockchain (not the blockchain),
• credit card transaction can take up to 30 days, with disputes and everthing, Blockchain is almost instant
• How “real” is blockchain technology
  • Goldman-Sachs invested $500m+
  • 15% of top global banks intend to roll out full-scale, commercial blockchain
  • etc.
• what is holding it back?
  • difficult to use, understand, buy in; perception of risk and legality
  • difficult to see value for the individual
• questions:
  • what are the incentives and adoption models?
    • different philosophies: computing power must be made available in the network: industrial mining vs. BitTorrent model, the amount of computing provided will be important, if we can find a model where just a little bit from every mobile phone is required
  • what are the hard costs of Blockchain?
    • you can google the costs. There are other approaches being developed, will post some links
  • can Blockchain be compromized by a virus?
    • theoretically, yes. Bitcoin is 10 years without, open source means verification (change is happening slowly because of code inspection)
    • comes back to incentive and governance model
• and that was that…recording will be at webinar.acm.org in a few days.