The Blockchain and Us: Interview with Christian Decker, Core Tech Engineer, Blockstream

Transcript

I think blockchain is probably here to stay it's it's happened very seldomly before that we made a discovery and went back and and ignored it completely it's it certainly stepped into the right direction it's it challenges the old way of doing things and by challenging all the old way of doing things it is actually providing a progress my name is Christian Dekker I currently work for block stream corporate on the Lightning Network which aims to solve the

scalability issues for Bitcoin once and for all if we talk about blockchains in general we talk about operations that are distributed to every participant in the network and every participant in the network needs to verify that this operation is valid that it is appliable to the local state and that we can actually confirm it so clearly if everybody in the world suddenly starts buying their coffees with wood bitcoin then we run into a problem that we now have millions and millions of transactions per day that need to be that need to be distributed that need to be verified and that need to be stored

forever now that clearly doesn't scale simply the fact that we need to distribute these massive amounts of data gives us a huge problem there is two tendencies one is we centralize where we have a really powerful intermediary that does the verification and does the modification of this state on behalf of somebody and they can actually throw in some real really strong hardware to do it and the other one is to say hey we need to lighten the load on the on the network itself and this lightining comes mostly in the form of off chain transactions

off chain in this case means that we perform our operations without committing them to to everybody in the world we transfer we perform our transfers offline just between the two participants and once we agree on the final state that we want to commit to only then we go to the to the Bitcoin blockchain and say hey this is the final state please enforce it from now who would have thought that such a technology that came out from nowhere with no backing whatsoever could ever take obvious the established transfer market the established banks and the established way of doing payments why

would people start putting money into Bitcoin itself so that that's that's what I was unsure about it's not the technology part but seeing it grow up is is immensely rewarding starting from a technical interest it has now become one of the one of the really really how should I say this it's it's now one of the most innovative technologies out there it's maybe the technology most people fear and the technology that most people are putting their trust behind so starting from a

toy now became this worldwide movement and what's especially interesting for me is that it was a grassroots movement from the technology sector not not sort of the movement of of established businesses trying to trying to get in to to find a new selling point it's it's it's really a bottom-up movement from from us geeks definitely feels like some of the initiatives and some of the of the companies that are springing up left and right do not have the technical foundation that are required to build

business on top of blockchain or a Bitcoin it some some of these initiatives are to be honest technically impossible and some of these are trivial applications and very few of these are are really true applications of what what blockchain technology and Bitcoin is all about what I what I dislike is this this sprawling use of blockchain as a buzzword as a selling point so to speak if a blockchain gives you really a

true advantage then it's okay you can obviously advertise that as such but if if you're using blockchain just as a moniker to put on your on your product without it actually providing any advantage whatsoever then that's a bit false advertising it's probably not as much as a threat as many people think because it's just attacking one of the one of the services the bank provides the other services like the investment system and the the possibility of accruing interest on top

of your of your savings that's much more interesting to a bank because their that's where the money is made it might be dangerous for services that are actually reliant on on this money transmitting business such business specializing on remittances namely sending money back to back home to your parents if you're an immigrant and an emigrated for work and they are the the actual fees the actual transfer fees for for these remittances are a huge business if you want people to use your

technology you don't only need to show what the advantages are but you also need to educate them about how to secure the security out to what the downsides are and give the whole picture it's it's not it's not a sales pitch it's an educational effort and I think that having approaching the problem from both sides will give us the the best of the the best possible outcome now there's people who simply don't want to take care about their own assets or their own bitcoins or their own state tracking machine and that's fine for that we can

if we can build services that that actually offered this as a service to to customers so and that that's where banks may come back it's always nice to talk to somebody when when you're unsure about something and and being able to trust them that day that they are actually telling you something which is secure or not so banks may come make come back as a service provider on top of the blockchain technology itself that's really hard to say so from a technical point of view it's definitely not a revolution it's an evolution from systems we we knew before from

technology that is between 20 to 30 years old especially one Rika when we talk about distributed computing and distributed systems where it becomes revolutionary is the sort of impact it has the attention it has gotten from big established businesses the the potential for disruption it now has and the huge impact it has on on existing systems so I would probably say it's a hard question it is revolutionary as if if considered together with its impact it

has today there tend to be rumors about this state or that state making Bitcoin completely illegal and banning it tuber for for its population to use but one of the key features of blockchain and Bitcoin is that it's really hard to to control it's outside of of the of the control of any single actor and that includes state so banning the use of Bitcoin may reduce the the use of an endowed state but it will definitely not destroy Bitcoin as a

whole and so I I tend to think that Bitcoin will survive no matter what happens on a per state level so I I think it's going to be a gradual process of adoption it's definitely not going to replace all previous systems that that are there I mean after all caches are really useful too why should we why should we abolish the use of cash and i think that bitcoin is a useful tool and I think the banking system is a useful tool for certain services so adding new tools to our toolbox always

makes us better and the use of one tool might window over time but I don't think will ever replace cash or replace all banks or that Bitcoin is is going to be the only only system that that is going to exist I think we will have Gretl a gradual adoption of Bitcoin over time as people realize the potential of Bitcoin and what it can be used for and I think yeah if we come back to 2020 I think that we will have widespread use of digital currencies in the general population that may also come from the

fact that these these systems become easier to use for everybody everyday transactions and that more and more companies start accepting vehicle I don't think it's that there that there is this enemy that that is to be fought it's it's more of a let's try to build a new system that is that has better trade-offs that has better features that has less downsides and let's make it work there is no opponent in this in this game everybody wants to make progress

and that includes the established businesses as well because they are jumping on on these on these opportunities as well so yeah it's it is actually a huge family that just tries to move forward together I think most of the people who are involved in this are just really fascinated by by the potential and by the technology itself I mean for me it was this discovering this paper was was short of a revelation it's its technical interest that drives me and and most of

the people that that I work with are driven by by this by this technical interest it's it's very interesting to have this sort of impact which is definitely not common for for people that are working on technology it's bigger than than myself and it's and I don't have to I don't have to I can actually contribute by with my personal interest to this bigger thing that is this whole blockchain movement finding that I said that something doesn't work is only the first part of change actually implementing that change

actually providing the tools to enact change that's a really hard part and that needs that needs a lot of effort that needs a lot of smart people sitting together collaborating and making the tools that that help us enact this change and I think that bitcoin is definitely one of the tools that that might might help in that in that regard I mean Bitcoin and blockchain are incredibly useful tools that we that can be used to change a lot of our daily lives but we need to be clear about the

advantages and the disadvantages that that this tool brings with it and we absolutely need to make sure that these systems are secure and usable for everybody to use otherwise we could just go back to our previous system and be done [Music]