The Blockchain and Us: Interview with Taylor Gerring, Ethereum

Transcript

I think that the special thing in the blockchain is an extension of how we have decided to communicate over the Internet the Internet's done a lot of things to make the world smaller and bring us closer together and I think the blockchain is the next logical step of that my name is Taylor Guerin and I helped co-found aetherium the way I kind of got involved in the blockchain community was at the time I was on a sabbatical from work decided I'd take a year off live off some savings figure out what I want to do it was it was there that I discovered this little

orange icon with a be in the middle said what is this strange thing so I started looking ok Bitcoin interesting that was about 2012 2013 and I haven't left the space since so I just continued further and further down the blockchain rabbit hole if you will and I've been pleasantly surprised and had no reason to crawl my way back out and find another technology you know it's really hard to describe what the fascination of the technology is for me part of the fascination is that we don't yet know exactly what this thing is and yet there was still lots of people gathering around it and I thought

of it is like you know a space rock back and crashed on earth right you'd have a bunch of people that gather around and they're all pleading what is this thing you you don't really know what it is but it's still very interesting so the fact that lots and lots of people were attracted to the blockchain space from a variety of industries not just technology but from very early on energy and insurance and so forth that alone made me know there's something special here even if we don't know exactly what it is yet one thing that I can recall that was very impactful to me actually was one of the first times that I used Bitcoin to pay for a flight online in the past I

had used it to pay back friends for lunch or so forth but when I bought that flight online I realized how much personal information we're giving up just to use a credit card because for a domestic flight really what information of the need my name may be my gender not much else really I don't have to fill out an address form or all these credit card details and it was when I skip that payment method and use something more efficient like cryptocurrency that I realized Wow we spend a lot of extra time filling out shipping forms and all this stuff because why we're using this legacy technology with the internet it's not really the way it should be

obviously there's improvements to make I would prefer to maybe just hold my smartphone up to the screen scan a barcode login grant permission to see my email address then I have no passwords to remember I don't have to manually type in anything so as we get further and further along with the technology I think we'll see more cases of removing friction points on the internet and for common use absolutely feels like a whole new paradigm for changing the world social impact in governance impact his reason for a lot of people getting involved myself included and if I think back to you know the way PayPal was formed and what the goals of PayPal were they also

wanted a digital money but didn't have a tool like blockchain to leverage so they've gotten into a position where they're you know they are sort of digital money in a way but they're very much tied to the old system now that we have something like blockchain if somebody wanted to start a PayPal today they truly could do something that was not possible 10 or 20 years ago and I think that's incredibly important whether it's computer technology or you know a type of tool for farming better it's all technology in terms of the way it helps us work more efficiently these always seem to run into problems where people are either more or less conservative about the impact in either

positive or negative to their life right even looking back to the invention of the car right people were afraid that moving too fast might be detrimental to human society and we've now seen that obviously those claims are unfounded IBEW a lot of critiques of new technology through that lens to try and ensure that it's not just a curmudgeon II approach but actually there's some substance behind their concern one of those certainly with blockchains automation artificial intelligence is you know can we avoid a situation where we have this evil Skynet kind of thing that we don't control and that's why I've been a big proponent of ensuring that our systems are built to meet the

needs of humans and not meet the needs of machines because if we humans don't have a way to turn off the machine we have ceded control to the Machine I think things could go the route of a negative Skynet we want to keep things on a route that's positive for Humanity people don't really want to discuss the Skynet future because it's you know not beneficial it's got a lot of negative connotations so in that sense you know how do we avoid going down that route I think we have to focus on let's use technology to make sure that we have an even distribution of access to goods and resources obviously there's some meritocracy components but also needs to

be partly egalitarian right hardwork should be paid equally across the board and people should have a relatively equal access to resources right now that's not the case we have you know a lot more wealth in some places than others but the efficiency of blockchain and the internet we can bring very impactful technology to communities that did not previously have it and hopefully raise their standards of living through wealth creation one of the big things that I'm excited about is trying to fix some of the problems that we have with the web and Internet largely today so when the web was born the idea was you know you have

an internet of peers and you're trading information and we're all relatively equal in the system today that's clearly not the case and we have you know certain large companies that for better or worse controlling a lot of the information flow across the internet and I don't think this is a healthy scenario to continue the inn or not on blockchains will allow us not just watchings but decentralizing technology generally will allow us to get back to that original vision of the internet that is more flexible is more mesh resilient so aside from inventing new technology like value transfer and making the internet you know just generally more efficient I think that ridi centralizing it will actually help improve the longevity right now there's a lot of

issues with data flows and concern about who controls and owns that data and by moving away from our current model we can maybe you know 'swaj some of those problems I didn't grow up with the internet because I'm a little bit older than that but I definitely grew up with computers and they were a huge influence on my life and as I got a bit older and had the internet and realized how impactful that was you know it changes people lives and has created a lot of wealth in good ways you know people can do things that they could not previously do because the internet connects us so closely so I think this is an incredibly important tool that we have to hold on

to it's like a historical monument or something of that that importance and it may retain you know a transaction of human history at some point if we go down this route of you know blockchains to record our transactions so we have to protect this resource have to make sure it's available for future generations I think anybody would be hard-pressed today to say no we should go back to a pre-internet age might be nice in certain ways if you live out in the forest in a cabin but in other ways it makes it harder to call your brother and say hello and I think in the end that communication is what people really want