THE MISUNDERSTOOD POTENTIAL OF BLOCKCHAIN

1 .The Misunderstood Potential of Blockchain Bill Wettingfeld | CTO of TRIdigital 

2 .Who am I? • I’ve been the CTO at TRIdigital Marketing for the past 2.5 years. Giovanni Sanguily introduced me to the channel, and I haven’t looked back since. I’ve used my approach to give TRIdigital the visibility it needed to bring value to its customers every day. This led to new revenue streams for TRIdigital, as well as a new business venture in Honey. • I’m also a nerd. 

3 .What will we be going over today? • A History Lesson • What is “Blockchain Technology”? • Requirements of a Blockchain Solution • The Potential • The Takeaway • Q&A 

4 .A History Lesson How do you prove that you wrote a physical document? • Send yourself the document in a sealed envelope • Chronological line entries in a notebook How about a digital document? Not so obvious… There are three problems to solve: • How do you timestamp the data? • How do you ensure the data didn’t change? • How do you ensure the timestamp didn’t change? In 1991, Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta chose to run the document through a cryptographic hashing algorithm to produce a unique ID. Changing the document by a single bit would produce a completely different ID. This ID would then be sent to a timestamping service, greatly simplifying the process. This would inspire solutions derived for Bitcoin in the 2008 whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto. 

5 .What is “Blockchain Technology”? Blockchain is distributed ledger of records (“blocks”) that contains: • Cryptographic hash of the previous record • Data • Index • Timestamp • Nonce • Hash of the current record 

6 .Block 0 Block 2 Index: 0 Index: 2 Timestamp: 17:15 1/1/2017 Timestamp: 17:19 1/1/2017 Data: “block0data” Data: “block2data” Hash: 0xea34ad..55 Hash: 0x9327eb1b..36a21 Previous Hash: 0 Previous Hash: 0xf6e1da2..deb Block 1 Index: 1 Timestamp: 17:17 1/1/2017 Data: “block1data” Hash: 0xf6e1da2..deb Previous Hash: 0xea34ad..55 

7 .In other words… An extremely inefficient database that multiple parties have access to where you aren’t allowed to roll back your mistakes. GOOD LUCK 

8 .Requirements of a Blockchain Solution 

9 .Immutable The data recorded should never be changed. Why are we using blockchain if not for this explicit purpose? 

10 .Distributed If it isn’t distributed between at least two parties, then it is trivial to recreate the blockchain whenever you see fit. This breaks our immutability. 

11 .System of Record It should act as an authoritative source for the data it holds. After all, everyone involved has access now. 

12 .Things not required • Visibility of the data (document timestamping service) • Publicly accessible (auditing service for a business) 

13 .The Potential The greatest potential comes from transparent auditing, especially in areas where transparency has been weak and fraud has been strong. • Financing • Healthcare • Shipping • Legal • Identity 

14 .The Takeaway • No one knows how blockchain technology will culminate into usefulness. So far, the strongest use case has been digital currency. All other examples are proof-of-concept at best. • Don’t get tricked by the hype of how blockchain technology will change the world we live in. It’s just a difficult-to-use database. • It will not help you provide better services to your clients… But it is cool to think about. 

15 .Q & A 

16 .Thank You Bill Wettingfeld CTO of TRIdigital bill@tridigitalmarketing.com @-- @ william-wettingfeld-06b82237