Blockchain and Crypto: Past, Present, and Future | Douglas Pepe | TEDxRanneySchool

okay well my name is Doug Pepe and I am the proud parent of for Randi students who are sitting there in the audience I'm I'm proud to be here and I'm grateful to have the opportunity to talk about blockchain with you so the topic of my discussion is Bitcoin and blockchain let's have a little show of hands who here in the audience has heard of Bitcoin a lot of people who's actually used it I know you Mike Abood I know you've used it anyone else two three four people okay that's very good this is gonna

be a non-technical discussion where I'm gonna put blockchain into a historical context for you now I'm a lawyer I studied mathematical math macroeconomics I'm a Bitcoin miner I'm not here to talk about the technical aspects of either of those things I want to talk about the past present and future of Bitcoin so let's start with a little bit of history who's this guy anyone know this is actually one of the most important historical figures in the financial world that nobody has ever heard of this guy is father Luca Pacioli he was born in 1447 he

died in 1517 and he was a friar a Renaissance man he was Leonardo da Vinci's math teacher and a pretty smart guy but that's not really what made him important what made him important was that he was the father of modern accounting so what does an accountant from the Renaissance period have to do with blockchain in 1494 Pacioli systematized the concept of a ledger double-entry bookkeeping dry subject not many people care about it well it's really important to us because Pacioli Ledger's are everywhere in modern society and let's give you a little example of this

meet Marty Marnie wants to send a hundred dollar check to his friend Jennifer for Jennifer's birthday that's just a piece of paper Jennifer takes that piece of paper and deposits it in her bank account and through a series of entries in a Pacioli ledger a hundred dollars is transferred from Marty to Jennifer in fact our entire financial system in the modern world is based upon and is in fact only a system of Ledger's most people don't know this money is not something tangible money is in fact an entry on a ledger economists use the phrase

m1 to describe the money supply well m1 includes checking account deposits they're just entries and your money is an unsecured obligation its debt on a banks balance sheet it's an entry on a ledger and that raises a very important question in the post-financial crisis world whose ledger do you trust do you trust Lehman's ledger how about Washington Mutual they failed in 2008 do you trust their ledger Wachovia did you trust their ledger they were sold because they went bankrupt banks fail they've historically failed they fail regularly do you really trust their Ledger's in October of

2008 right in the midst of the financial crisis immediately post Lehman a person came on the scene by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto Satoshi was the founder of Bitcoin and who is this person well the funny thing is nobody knows who Satoshi Motz Satoshi Nakamoto is it's a pseudonym but putting aside that we don't know who Satoshi is what Satoshi did is an economic revolution and I'll tell you about that economic revolution it's called Bitcoin bitcoin is a Pacioli ledger but it's one that's not based on trust it is a trustless ledger bitcoin for everything

you've heard in the papers for everything you've read is just a ledger but unlike Pacioli x' ledgers it requires no trust of any kind the ledger is called a blockchain and a blockchain what it does is it replaces trust with mathematics you don't have to trust Lehman you don't have to trust Wachovia you don't have to trust the Federal Reserve all you have to trust is a mathematical proof Satoshi was the first person to make that mathematical proof work using this trustless ledger Marti can send Bitcoin which has value to Jennifer without trusting anyone and

their transaction once he sends it is locked on this blockchain ledger forever cryptographically and it's done by a decentralized network of computers called miners so what does this decentralized trustless ledger mean for us I like to call it the blockchain revolution close your eyes for a minute and imagine a world where you control your own money not banks where governments cannot eliminate or erode your wealth by printing money backed by debt a world with no inflation a world where tin-pot dictator x' in foreign countries don't control the financial lives of their citizens a world where

you can store all of your wealth every dollar you own on a phone on a thumb drive on a piece of paper and send it to anyone in the world at any time for almost no cost and almost instantly well guess what you live in that world that's what bitcoin does so we've talked a little bit about the past we've talked a little bit about the present let's talk a little bit about the future blockchain is not limited to finance it's not eliminated limited to banking future use cases of blockchain are about as broad as

your imagination voting systems patents chain of titles wills and trusts big day that cloud storage anything that requires a database or a ledger can be put on the blockchain but the difference is on the blockchain you don't have to trust the Facebook's of the world you don't have to trust the Amazon's of the world you don't have to trust Internet service providers it's done out of trustless basis and the most important for present purposes is computing let me tell you a little bit about fearing etherium is a decentralized trustless global computer it's a lot of

words but what it does is it puts programs on the blockchain called smart contracts and those programs run autonomously they run without anybody controlling people are calling this web 3.0 now think about that what can aetherium do what can this web 3.0 do what can this global decentralized computer that resides everywhere and nowhere do well it's pretty much as broad as your imagination the possibilities are endless this is the future where we go from here is really up to all of our imaginations thank you very much for the opportunity [Applause]