Transcript of Mark Pascall's presentation
So, my name is Mark Pascall. I'm the founder of blockchainslabs.nz. And so our mission statement is to empower organisations to create decentralised solutions with global impacts. So mostly we're independent. We spend most of our time education, there's a lot of conference presentations, consulting, and build services based in Auckland and Wellington with a few people around the globe now. We also run two international conferences, Ethereum.nz last year, and this year, theblockchain.nz where we managed to get some awesome speakers, including Andreas Antonopolous and Vitalik Buterin the creator of Ethereum, down here, among 24 other people.
And so now most of our work is actually writing smart contracts, blockchain based software for overseas companies. We're riding the whole ICO wave at the moment. So some of you may have heard of an ICO, Initial Coin Offering. Essentially, it's democratised capital raising. And in the last six months has transformed the world of capital raising.
So one of our clients, for example, status.im, they raised 100,000,000 in three hours, almost brought Ethereum network to a standstill, and had 20,000 people participate in that capital raise. And their ICO is going on all over the place now. So it's one of the disruptors that the blockchain has enabled. I personally spend a lot of time presenting, so if any of you are around tomorrow, I'm presenting for the Institute of Directors on this whole topic about the blockchain and the more disruptive parts of it.
So for better or for worse, we do believe blockchain is much more, and I think Justin sort of mentioned this — I think the blockchain, it's on this hype cycle. I think Gartner's put it somewhere pretty high up the hype cycle at the moment. But we do believe it's much bigger than a new technology, than a new architecture. It's a fundamental way to rethink how we operate as organisations, and as a society. And I will just spend — I'll try and condense my blockchain explanation into one minute. I know for some people, it is still a slight mystery as to what this thing is.
So it's actually not that hard. It's a database. But it's not a centralised database, which is what most of our banks and in fact, our entire global commerce system are made up of centralised systems that they have lots of expensive firewalls and security people around to stop the data getting out. A blockchain database is simply a long ledger. It's a list of transactions, in the case of Bitcoin. But it is de-centralized.
There is no central point. It is a peer to peer system, a bit like BitTorrent. Some of you may have used BitTorrent for file sharing. Nobody can shut down BitTorrents because there are nodes in the network and you need to shut down all the nodes, and you've essentially got to shut down the internet. So it's this amazing database that is de-centralised, and that gives it two key properties. One, that it is not controlled by any person, organisation, government, anything. It's controlled by the community.
The community decides which direction it goes. And the other thing, its tamper proof. It is unhackable, unstoppable, immutable. So bitcoin is the first and best known blockchain. And so when I give you a bitcoin, all we're doing is both agreeing to update this database that we both trust cannot be hacked, cannot be stopped.
But bitcoin is contentious, and the Fintech space is one part of the blockchain story. But for many of us it’s much wider than that. It’s about decentralised information. And really the second generation of blockchain, which really started with concepts like Ethereum. So Ethereum is a new blockchain. So it woke up about a year and a half ago, but is fundamentally different from the first generation blockchains like bitcoin, because Ethereum is programmable.
So you can write business rules. You can put complex logic. And if you can put that logic onto this immutable unstoppable system as well, that's called a smart contract. So you've got a set of rules, you post them on, and nobody can stop that code from running. It will run as programmed. That's what a smart contract is.
And again, it sounds like a simple concept, but you can start to imagine a world where you've got Uber without Uber. You've got Airbnb without Airbnb. Blockchain can in theory start to disrupt the new disruptors, because you can start to take out the middleman. These things can be re architected.
So we think this is a huge opportunity for New Zealand to be a leader and not a follower, and so we're busy trying to lobby government, both at the senior officials at the agencies, but also right up to, I got fortunate enough to chat to Bill English the other day. So he's actually a big proponent of the data commons project, and I discussed that with him. So datacommons.org.nz, report was written I think last year by a guy called James Mansell. Really interesting project where they started to think about how we can rethink how government data is shared.
We put the data into the commons, and the blockchain is an ideal use case for that. Other things going on in New Zealand, at EHF, Edmund Hillary Fellowship, that's had its first cohort. It's a partnership with the Department of Immigration and the private sector to bring people over to New Zealand who can make global impact. And we know those guys very well because they sit very close to us in Wellington. And so their first cohort of 50 people, I think there's seven or eight blockchain, big name blockchain names.
One of the biggest in the world is part of that cohort. They are all coming over in October. And so they're very excited about bringing those people to New Zealand and helping to make this a leader in the space. So the blockchain, as far as government is concerned, is I think, really exciting.
One of the key things, as Justin mentioned, is identity, because we now live in a global village. We need a global identity system. And the blockchain, for the first time in history, we have a mechanism to do that. And once we've got identity, we can start doing things like health records on the blockchain. We can start doing qualifications, anything that needs to have this authoritative source of truth that crosses geopolitical boundaries. So I think that's why people are getting very excited about it.
So we've been working with Pia and we've actually built a prototype as part the last Lab Plus using something called uPort. So uPort is an alpha version of a blockchain based identity system. So we set out to prove that with uPort, even in its early stages, a user could install a uPort app — and you can do this, so we've Matt coming, one of my guys coming over at 3:00 with a laptop and you can demo it. So you can instal the uPort app and you can hold it up at this website which we built as a prototype. And you have control. You allow, by holding up your camera and QR code, you give that website the ability to know something about you for a finite amount of time. So that website then registers you, and it then configures itself and changes the menu and shows your picture. But it's an example of a de-centralised — there's no login required, no centralised, no agency who you have to log in to. It's you giving access to your bit of information.
And you take that concept through to health records, I should be able to walk into a GP in Sydney and give that GP access to some of my health records. Me, I control that, and I decide to turn that off later on. So that's where we hope it can be a fundamental shift from centralised systems, siloed systems, which are always going to be a problem. They're always going to be a target of hackers, and silos, and data synchronising systems, moving away to decentralised systems, user controlled. And so that's where we see, I think there's going to be a lot of movement in government. So yes, we'll be demoing the uPort thing later on, so feel free to come up to play OK, thanks. That's me.