ColdFusion - How Blockchain is Already Taking Over (YouTube Competitors, Finance and More)

Starting point is 00:00:00 This video was done in collaboration with Dubai World Trade Center for their future blockchain summit. Hi, welcome to another Cold Fusion video. This episode will be an extension of the last video I did on blockchain. It's becoming increasingly clear that the technology has massive implications for almost all aspects of our lives. Nothing has shown such wide-sweeping promise since the internet or the latest generation of AI. Today, we'll be covering some of the actual projects that are going on currently that take a lot of advantage of blockchain technology. I'm aware that there's other tech like Tangle, but blockchain is the focus of this video. Also, from here on, I want you to completely forget about Bitcoin. Forget about

Starting point is 00:00:49 Bitcoin. Blockchain is so much bigger than that. So this technology has been called many things, the next stage of the internet, a trustless system of value, and the most important technology ever invented. Let's put some perspective on this. But first things first, if you don't know what blockchain actually is, all you need to know is the following, and I'm going to try and avoid the technical terms here. Blockchain is a decentralized, transparent and verifiable system where value, such as ownership titles, medical records, and cryptocurrency, can be exchanged. This value is stored in something called a digital block. The blocks are linked together in such a way that the unique digital identity of the next block is linked to the identity of the previous block,

Starting point is 00:01:33 Hence, blockchain. Blockchain is shared on a peer-to-peer network where a continuously updated ledger keeps track of who owns what. These ledges are secured by mathematics. The entire system is distributed among a network of computers rather than resting with a single provider.

Starting point is 00:01:50 This means that data can't be tampered with without anyone knowing. And finally, there are many different blockchains used for different applications. So to recap, blockchain is a distributed system that's used to exchange value and can't be tampered with. An important concept to know for this video is the idea of smart contracts. Blockchain enables a new class of apps called smart contracts.

Starting point is 00:02:15 Smart contracts basically replace what people would do within any agreement. For example, say you have two parties, party A and party B that agree on some terms. In a smart contract, these terms are written into code. When the conditions have been satisfied, the contract is a contractual. automatically executed. No lawyers, no company that releases held funds, no disputes, no middlemen needed. It's all automatic done exactly as both parties had defined in the agreement. You can take this idea further and link smart contracts together to create an entire company that does things automatically. This is called a decentralized autonomous organization, or Dow. The result eliminates waste,

Starting point is 00:02:55 reduces risk of fraud, and opens up a whole new world of automatic systems. All right, so Now that we're refreshed with the underlying technology, let's take a look at the impact that this is already having on the world. Let's start somewhere very close to me. The creative video community. Currently we have YouTube and Twitch, but I'll be focusing on YouTube here. YouTube, like most other companies, is interested in profit. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong there.

Starting point is 00:03:21 But the way YouTube is being managed leads to some incentives that result in a negative outcome for content creators and users. The two major ones are as follows. Number one, demonetization. YouTube has to run a fine balance between satisfying the creators, the people who populate the site's content, and the advertisers, those who pay YouTube for having people watch the creators' content. Lately, YouTube has been cracking down on content that it finds might damage an advertiser's brand image. This has led to frustration from content creators, as their revenue streams can vanish overnight, seemingly without explanation. Number two, advertising.

Starting point is 00:03:57 A lot of people find advertising distracting and a bit intrusive as advertisers can track your online behavior. Well, advertising is just part and parcel of what you have to deal with with online media. Or is it? There must be a better way. A few blockchain startups are looking to create a better system. First up, we have Vuele. They're providing direct support for creators through a vote-based tipping system through the blockchain.

Starting point is 00:04:22 This cuts out the middleman. Another bonus is that Vuelee is ad-free because the... payments are made instantly, automatically, through smart contracts. The payments are carried out in cryptocurrency tokens, which can be converted into any form of currency that one wishes. Vuelly states that their long-term goal is to evolve into a fully-fledged, decentralized autonomous organization. Vaili, not to get confused with Vuelly, and Flixo, are both similar and run on the Ethereum

Starting point is 00:04:49 blockchain. But in these cases, viewers also get paid to watch. Lino is another such project which just successfully raised 20,000. million dollars in funding. Lino states that they hope to free creators from the suffocating group of YouTube revenue sharing agreements, terms and conditions, and pay people for watching content. Basically, if your content is in high demand, you get rewarded. Simple as that. No more gatekeepers landing viewpoints they don't agree with. Project Lead, Wilson Wee states, quote, we are trying to create a decentralized autonomous video content community so we can cut out the

Starting point is 00:05:23 middleman and don't have the conflict of interest between the users and the content creators. Dube is yet another blockchain video site but it's been up and running for over a year. So this is all good and interesting to see, but my worry with this is user fragmentation. Initially I think there's going to be a tussle for which platform to use, but eventually user adoption will force an equilibrium and the best system will come out on top. Also, seeing that the Ethereum blockchain couldn't even run CryptoKitties without slowing down, I'll say we're still a ways away from an Ethereum blockchain YouTube competitor. But regardless, I think that these ideas

Starting point is 00:05:57 are a better way of doing things and will likely be the future of user-based online video creation. And besides, other blockchain such as Cardano could provide more stability. Okay, so let's zoom out a little bit and take a wider look at the impact blockchain is having. So we'll get to the dizzying array of current blockchain projects, but first, let's take a look at every peter. This is basically a blockchain version of Wikipedia, and it's more interesting than it sounds. I sat down to have a chat with the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, who was part of the new project.

Starting point is 00:06:27 You can think of it as a distributed database sort of written for the blockchain, essentially. So it goes hand in hand with the blockchain, or at least with the kind of blockchain that we have, which is based on EOS. EOS will be one of the two main content blockchains platforms. I could go on about that for a long time, and there's many different aspects because there's a lot of different advantages to the blockchain. But what the blockchain does is it opens up the possibility of having a truly credible peer-to-peer network of encyclopedias. Again, it's open source, and the content is open content.

Starting point is 00:07:18 But what if we collect all of those articles, or at least links to all of those articles in one place, and then we make them all rateable? So somebody could go to a page about Australia, right? And there's a dozen articles about Australia there, and you read them through, and you give your rating of each article. A bunch of other people do that. The best rises to the top, the best article, according to everybody in the system, is bound to be pretty darn good. But what if the people who are doing the rating also share information about themselves, your nationality, your politics, your religion, your academic specializations, your philosophy, whatever.

Starting point is 00:08:05 And then you could look at the articles about Australia and slice them and dice them in different ways. What do the Australians think is the best article about Australia? What about the Americans? Or let's talk about something more interesting. What about the topic of jihad? Imagine, I don't know, a hundred different articles about jihad. Why would there be a hundred? because as soon as this sort of thing is created, there is a competition.

Starting point is 00:08:31 So people start competing to write the best article. So you can imagine the best articles according to Saudi Arabians or according to Libyans. What about according to all Muslims? Or how about Muslims who identify as moderate Muslims? Or how about Muslims who identify as traditional Muslims? Or what about American conservatives or American Democrats? Right? You would be able to compare different points of view on a topic like jihad,

Starting point is 00:09:07 and that could potentially create a huge amount of understanding that just doesn't exist. It heightens the level of the conversation. That's the point. And Wikipedia doesn't do it. Wikipedia doesn't allow it. They have only one article about the topic. Because there's only one community.

Starting point is 00:09:27 Yes, of course it's possible, and people enjoy getting themselves into bubbles and internet silos. But I think you're not going to be able to avoid other points of view in today's world. So if you have a competition to represent the best that is known on a given subject, now you have tools to engage in that debate much, much better than you can. and a regime of fake news and sensationalistic media of all sorts. So, restoring global empathy by making people see things from the other point of view is absolutely awesome and very commendable. I'm wishing Larry and the team all the best for this project.

Starting point is 00:10:11 All right, so let's take a look at the wider aspects here. First, government. Dubai. Dubai has set its sights on becoming the world's first blockchain-powered state. In 2016, representatives of 30 government departments formed a committee dedicated to investigating the opportunities across health records, shipping, business registration, and more. It's estimated that the blockchain will amount to $1.5 billion in savings per year. Much of this enhanced productivity will stem from moving to a paperless government,

Starting point is 00:10:42 with blockchain document processing removing around 100 million paper transactions a year. Dubai World Trade Center is actually flying me out to the future blockchain summit, one of the world's biggest blockchain conferences to see what things are really like on the ground. I'll be reporting back, hopefully live over this channel. The conference is a collaboration between Smart Dubai, a government entity exploring new technologies, and the Dubai World Trade Center. Estonia. The Estonian government has partnered with Ericsson on a blockchain initiative

Starting point is 00:11:12 to create a new data center where all public records are stored on the blockchain. South Korea. Samsung, of course, is creating blockchain solutions. for the South Korean government, which will be put to use in public safety and transport applications. The UK government is also working on blockchain technology for pension payments. Cybersecurity Guard Time is a company creating keyless signature systems using the blockchain. It is currently being already used to secure the health records of 1 million Estonian citizens.

Starting point is 00:11:43 Guard Time is also working with DARPA, Lockheed Martin and Erickson. Healthcare The company Gem is a startup working. with the Centre for Disease Control. They're going to put disease outbreak data onto the blockchain which is hoped to increase the effectiveness of disaster relief and response. A company called Simply Vital Health has a couple of blockchain-related projects going on. One of them tracks the progress of patients after they leave the hospital and another one provides decentralized blockchain patient records. MIT is spearheading a project called MedReck. It's a blockchain project designed to manage

Starting point is 00:12:19 authentication, confidentiality and data sharing of medical records. and is already up and running in Israel. Financial Services Barclays Bank has launched a number of blockchain initiatives involving tracking financial transactions and combating fraud. Barclays state, quote, our belief is that the blockchain is a fundamental part of the new operating system for the planet, end quote.

Starting point is 00:12:43 Manufacturing and industrial. Geo-Coin. India's biggest conglomerate, Reliance Industries, has said that it's developing a blockchain-based supply chain logistics platform along with its own cryptocurrency, GeoCoin. Transactive Grid is an interesting project based in Brooklyn that allows members to locally produce and sell energy. The goal is to reduce the cost involved with energy distribution. Storage.io is distributed and encrypted cloud storage which allows members to share and used

Starting point is 00:13:13 hard drive space. Retail OpenBazaar is a company that's attempting to build a decentralized market where goods and services can be traded with no middleman. Real estate. Ubiquity is a startup that's creating a blockchain-driven system for tracking the completed legal process, which usually creates friction and expense in the real estate transfer. Transport. Arcade City is an application which aims to beat Uber at their own game, basically bringing

Starting point is 00:13:41 ridesharing to the blockchain. So that is just a fraction of what is going on in the blockchain space. It's becoming clear that a shift is taking place. Some big players can see that this is a viable option in the future and are getting on board so that they don't miss out. For example, IBM alone is working on 400 different blockchain projects with 63 clients. So almost at the end of the video, but one last thing I want to touch on is who is the biggest winner for blockchain? It's early days, but it seems that blockchain's biggest winners will be those who want to cut out middlemen. For example, for information and content creation services, this seems to entail the Wild West days of the internet.

Starting point is 00:14:21 where there was more freedom to see what you want to see without it being controlled and moderated by a governing party. But cutting out the middlemen goes a lot further in developing nations. For example, blockchain is starting to take on the task of bridging a poverty gap around the world. With blockchain, as long as you have access to a smartphone, you'll have a way to conveniently access money. Additionally, blockchain is a decentralized system, which means that you don't get charged to transfer money the way you would with a typical financial institution. The former usually deters businesses from reaching certain regions of the world and serving opportunities for developing countries. For example, and this next statistics shocked me, last year, the total amount of cost to send money to sub-Saharan Africa was over $30 billion.

Starting point is 00:15:07 This is according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. So $30 billion in frictional losses just by having middlemen. A platform called BitPisa directly aims to solve this problem through blockchain technology, and I'm sure there will be. many other projects on the way. So this alone, leaving all other things equal, that is, the same amount of money flowing from well-off nations to poor nations as is today. Many tens of billions of dollars can be generated by just using blockchain. So, with that, that rounds out the end of this video. Let me know what you guys think about blockchain. Has this video widened your perspective a little bit? I personally think that it's very early days, but in the next five to ten years,

Starting point is 00:15:45 blockchain, or a similar technology, will be ubiquitous. Let me not. your thoughts in the comment section below. This has been Degogo, you'll be watching Cold Fusion, and I'll see you again soon for the next video. Cheers guys, have a good one. Cold Fusion.

ColdFusion - How Blockchain is Already Taking Over (YouTube Competitors, Finance and More)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.