Working on the blockchain gang

LXF: It’s hard for me to hear ‘blockchain’ without thinking about cryptocurrencies. At present Bitcoin can handle about six transactions per second, Ethereum (in its current form) can do slightly more, but that’s nothing compared to Visa, which handles thousands every second. Do you see those blockchains evolving so that they could handle a similarly high transaction rate?

Jm: I wouldn’t call myself anywhere within the ballpark of an authority on finance, but I think the most interesting use cases for blockchain are not going to have anything to do with finance. I’ve been around enough to know how new technologies work. At first it seems like it can solve every problem, then you realise there’s some problems it can’t solve and interest wanes, and then you find there’s some things that it is really good at and there’s a resurgence.

I feel like blockchain is just at that point now. I think logistics is going to be one area where it’s going to be huge. The ability to be able to coordinate down your supply chain is something that most companies do in an ad hoc manner today. If they could have a trusted way of managing that, boy, that will blow a lot of things away. There’s just so many problems that would get solved. Logistics and healthcare stick out to me. With healthcare, you want to share your records securely with select people. That’s an interesting problem. There’s also been a couple of good use-cases in government – having a decentralised system for land management, for example. Certainly in the States, and probably here too, you’d traditionally have to go to a county planning office and fight with bureaucracy to get the required permit. Each locale doesn’t necessarily have the greatest way of dealing with that process.

We all got excited over cryptocurrencies, and there’s obviously something to that. But it’s going to be something like the second, third, fourthlargest use case for blockchain.