Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: What is actually behind blockchain technology, beyond crypto? In Room #859 of the Deep Talk Club, under our overarching theme “Pioneering Spirit with brAIn,” the group digs into decentralized versus centralized networks, real-world use cases from banking to healthcare to elections, and the new challenges — energy cost, self-custody, transparency versus privacy — that come with them. Listen in on the examples that came up and the perspectives that emerged in dialogue…
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
A wonderful good morning to you. Today we continue with blockchain technology, and we want to look at what’s actually behind blockchain technology and what its fields of application are — and we don’t want to talk about crypto in that sense, but really just look at this technology itself, and then see what fields of application exist beyond cryptocurrency, because that’s basically how it became known. What’s often not known, though, is what kind of technology this actually is and in which other areas it can really be deployed. And with that in mind, you’re warmly invited, as every morning, to join us and bring in your own experiences and knowledge and open up different perspectives here. Let me first briefly explain a bit about blockchain itself, with an example, kept fairly simple — this isn’t about all the chaining details and so on. Blockchain, at its core, is about a chain — a chain of information, and so on. We could go really deep into the details, but I don’t think that’s necessary. It’s first about understanding, roughly, the difference compared to other technologies that are classically used elsewhere today. Basically, you could say that while centralized networks are used today to transmit information, data, and transactions, blockchain technology transmits this over a network of independent computers, belonging to people like you and me, scattered all over the world — a so-called decentralized network used for this purpose. Let me illustrate this with an example I also included in our Knowledge Base, and I’ll pick that same one up here. When you send a message to a friend today, that message first goes to a server — WhatsApp, say. The message gets stored there and then, in the next step, goes to the recipient. That means the server being used automatically has your data. In this case, a centralized network is used for data transmission. That’s how it classically happens today with a lot of transactions — whenever we send a message, make a transaction, a money transfer or something like that, it first goes to a server, and from that server it gets forwarded to the recipient. New, innovative technologies like blockchain — and there are comparable alternatives too, it’s not just blockchain anymore, but essentially the same idea — allow the message not to be sent to a central server, but instead to a network of independent computers. In this case, the message gets split up, and each computer takes on a part of the work. That way, no one can access the entire message, so the message arrives securely with the recipient. That’s a decentralized network being used, and the technology behind this system is called blockchain. So, that’s maybe a short explanation for now — kept fairly basic, as I said. It’s not about really understanding the technical details of what’s happening there, but at least, as a layperson, being able to roughly place the connections or differences for yourself. And blockchain technology has increasingly been deployed in various places over the past years — it’s already running in the background today, in many cases without us even noticing. And it’s a technology that will open up entirely new options and fields of application in the future too.
One field of application, even today — there was already a press release back in 2018 announcing that Santander — I think that’s how it’s pronounced — would be introducing a new international payment service called Santander OnePayFX, which is essentially a blockchain-based technology. With this new service, retail customers were supposed to be able to process international transfers on the same day or the next day, and as was announced in the press release back then, Santander, with the introduction of this service, was the first bank to offer a blockchain-based international payment service. I don’t know if that held up over time, whether they really were the first bank to pick that up and so on — I can’t judge that, you’d have to research it more closely. At least there’s still news to be found online, for example a report from 2020 mentioning that Santander and Ripple’s OnePayFX addresses an application that makes international payments via blockchain easier. So something along those lines is running in the background at Santander too. The end user probably doesn’t care all that much, at the end of the day, because we don’t necessarily notice which technologies are behind which services. But what this example nicely shows, and I really like that about it, is that it’s not just some unconventional or exotic things where blockchain gets used, but that banks too are actually engaging with the topic. And at the same time, of course, there are a lot of discussions around blockchain. One of the topics that keeps coming up, for example, is the climate issue, because it takes quite a bit of computing capacity to process this in the background, which then means a corresponding cost, in inverted commas, for the climate too. And if everyone used it, so to speak, that would become a really big issue. That’s why, over the past years, work has already been going on on various alternatives, to see what can be done to use computing capacity differently, to make it accessible differently, so it’s not so climate-damaging, in inverted commas. And there’s been a lot of progress in these areas too. Although we’ll see what ends up prevailing in the end, or how it can actually be used. Because the topic of security is also a big one here. While that works relatively well with blockchain technology in terms of the security aspect — meaning, even when you read news reports about something going wrong, if you research it more closely you’ll keep finding that it’s really more about the human-error component. That people were, for example, too gullible, gave out certain information, and so on. We have that with banks today too, by the way. Whoever doesn’t store their data properly, whoever makes it accessible in some way, whoever gets hacked or too gullibly gives something away over the phone because someone pretends to be, say, a bank employee, gets scammed. Something similar has happened with blockchain technology in the past too, and of course those are the stories the media loves to chase, calling the security of the system into question again and again. I personally don’t know of any case so far where it was actually possible to hack it in a way that led to real misuse due to a flaw in blockchain technology itself. However, with the parallel technologies that exist alongside blockchain, there do still seem to be security gaps at the moment — some of them seem not to be quite as secure. And here you really have to wait and see how things develop. I’m sure solutions will be found. I think what ultimately matters is not whether the thing is called blockchain or some other technology — it’s fundamentally about this kind of technology, moving away from centralization, where data gets transmitted to a server and there’s essentially a middleman who forwards it, and instead outsourcing that to, say, various computers, a decentralized system, so that the information gets broken up into pieces, which in turn makes it possible to eliminate the middleman — which would mean, for example, staying in the banking sector, that the bank would no longer be needed for that. Or, thinking about real estate, in the future you might no longer need a notary to handle a property purchase and sale, and so on. So, that’s maybe as an introduction, and now I’m really curious what you all have to say about the topic. You’re warmly invited to join us and bring in your own experiences, thoughts, and impulses.
Just a quick note again for anyone joining for the first time today: the room is recorded the whole time and gets published afterward. That means joining automatically means you agree to that. And then we have three small room rules. First, a profile photo where you’re clearly recognizable. Then a first and last name and at least one sentence in your bio, to make sure these are serious contributions and not sock-puppet trolls — and in the interest of fairness, that applies equally to everyone. Anyone who doesn’t want that for whatever reason is of course welcome to use the chat. I’ll check in on that from time to time and pick things up from there too. A wonderful good morning, dear Marc — what do you say about the topic?
Good morning. I’d like to open a quick parenthesis and welcome a near-millionaire to this room, and ask you all to pause for a moment and go back 14 years and imagine — if you’d invested one dollar, and a dollar back then was worth 80 cents — we’d all be sitting in this room today, and not because of education or work, we’d all be double millionaires today, to be exact we’d have 24 million in our accounts if we’d invested one dollar back then in this blockchain thing, in Bitcoin. And that became clear to me yesterday, why that’s so exciting. Back then, at 14, I was building my company, and if someone had done a room about blockchain then, I’d have said, get out of here, I’ve got other worries, I need customers, and I’m dealing with other things — and yesterday it suddenly became crystal clear to me again how important it is, fundamentally, to keep your eyes open, to stay curious, because even words you can’t make sense of can end up completely turning your life around, and you shouldn’t now go moping about missed chances, but just to make this clear — if I’d handled things differently back then, and maybe already met Yasemin, we’d all be, no matter where we come from, millionaires today from 80 cents — we’d all have 24, for 80 cents we’d have 24 million. Maybe one of us would have even been bolder and would now, who knows, own their own island. But that always makes it clear to me, going into rooms like this today — years ago I wouldn’t have joined a morning room called Blockchain, because what would I need that for, I don’t even understand the word, and I’ve got other worries. Just as an intro, that’s it.
Yes, wonderful, thank you, thank you so much. And yes, let’s actually make a distinction here — blockchain technology itself might not have made you rich, but rather the investment opportunity of putting money into crypto. But ultimately it’s this blockchain technology that lies behind these cryptocurrencies, and that’s also how it partly became known. But a lot of people got distracted, so to speak, by the discussions that took center stage around crypto, and never engaged at all with what’s actually behind it, or what this technology ultimately means for us. And that’s why today we really want to differentiate again and say, crypto is one example, because it’s well known to many people in this context, but today isn’t actually about the topic of crypto — it’s really about looking at blockchain technology, what fields of application exist, how do you assess it, maybe there’s something you already use where you know this kind of technology is behind it. And otherwise we can also bring in things you might have consumed in the media, for example, as an example or a thought, and gladly discuss it in various directions. So you’re all warmly invited, as I said, to join in and open up different perspectives, so we can look at this together and see which direction the room develops in today. Marc, do you have further examples or thoughts on the topic?
Yes, of course. That was just meant to raise awareness about openness. And I’ll point the finger at myself here too — how, when we’re open, and how life sometimes plays out, that life and opportunity have nothing to do with where we come from, who we know, and so on, but simply with ourselves, with how open we are, how we think about things. And that became so suddenly clear to me yesterday — that back then I wasn’t far enough along in my personal development to just openly engage with something and take a look at it. I called my son yesterday, and sometimes you don’t understand your kids. And that’s not because they speak some youth slang — my son studied business informatics, and I didn’t even understand his thesis, so I just asked him. I said, hey, we’re talking about blockchain tomorrow, explain it to me, but please spare me the programming. You’ve already done that just now, dear Yasemin. So I can’t tell you how it works. I also can’t say anything about the security aspect, because I’m simply not an IT expert. What I did take away from the conversation is that people who work with computers say the advantages of this blockchain technology are, first, speed, then data integrity — which for me would mean, okay, if the data is intact, then at least there’s no problem with security there — then the reliability of the network, because, as you already mentioned, dear Yasemin, we don’t just have the data on one computer, everyone essentially has access to the information, and the transparency of the data, that data is traceable — and I’ll just say, relatively so. That’s just what I’ve heard, it’s not applied knowledge, just secondhand knowledge, that transparency is also very, very high with this technology.
Yes, thank you, thank you so much, and ultimately there are a lot of very different fields of application. Let me pick up a few examples from the past. In information technology, for example, I once picked up an example — Mindbox IT Services GmbH, founded in 2009 and headquartered in New Zealand, offers a decentralized cloud backend where you can store files. While some files are stored locally, others, encrypted parts of your files, are kept on multiple nodes around the world. Because the data is fragmented and encrypted in small packets, this solution bypasses the usual security problems of cloud storage. According to the website, it’s the world’s first network storage that, for example, generates crypto — and how exactly that works is, you don’t just store your own data, you also allow other users to use your free storage space, and in return you receive so-called Sia coins, which can also be used to pay for backups of your own data. So that’s one example. Then we have an example in communication — Status Research & Development GmbH, based in Switzerland, developed the first decentralized chat app. Alongside using various applications and chat functions, Status also offers the ability to transfer money directly from person to person, for example. And we’ll just have to see how that develops further in the coming years — speaking from the perspective of back then, Status closed a successful funding round of around 95 million dollars. That information is already a few years old now. In public administration, Estonia is, in many respects, maybe a showcase example — though that’s again a value judgment, you can interpret or judge that however you like. When it comes to digitalization and the use of blockchain technologies, they, for example, have been able to vote online since 2005. Since 2011, casting a vote by SMS, text message, has even been possible. And you can see that the interplay of digitalization and blockchain technology is already being used in various contexts to leverage existing possibilities with an eye to transparency and security. E-government applications, eTaxes for tax filing, and eHealth for providing health data are just some examples of blockchain-based fields of application in Estonia. Yes, those were a few more examples, and then maybe we can look beyond that too — if you can think of examples for today where this is all used, we can gladly pick those up too. Or of course we can also look ahead to the future, what can we imagine becoming possible with this blockchain technology or comparable technologies, what the pros and cons are, and what effects it ultimately brings with it.
And Jürgen also shared a link in the chat leading to a press article — a Swiss municipality accepts tax payments in Bitcoin, I find that exciting too, you can take a look at that too. And then, briefly, on the comment in the chat about whether others also have trouble seeing our house in the main view — actually, it should still be visible to you once the room is open, just not before the room opens. Today I think I was in about a minute past eight, so it might be related to that, that it wasn’t immediately visible to you. But what can definitely help is, once the rooms get shared, you have the option to click on that and say, I’ll take part in that — I think it’s easier to spot that way. But it really has gotten a bit more complicated with this switch from clubs to houses. I get that impression too, and I just wanted to share that with you at this point. And with that, Jürgen has just joined — I’m really curious, let me bring him in right away, and then we can draw cross-connections again. Good morning, dear Jürgen, what do you say about the topic?
Good morning, dear Yasemin, good morning, dear Marc, and everyone else in the room. First, on the last topic — dear Yasemin, I definitely have to shut my phone down and restart it, and then the room shows up for me. So the tap you mentioned as an option doesn’t open the room for me — absolutely strange, and I really don’t know why. I’ve tried everything. But it seems to work for others, so it must be something on my end. On our topic, I’d like to say, thank you very much, Marc, you put a lot of things really well, and you too, dear Yasemin. Before getting into fields of application — I’m deliberately not talking about Bitcoin today, as you specified, and trying to keep it general. You mentioned, dear Yasemin, that one of the advantages, and I think Marc mentioned it too, is that we no longer need intermediaries — brokers, for example in payment transactions, banks, and other subfields — this advantage of peer-to-peer, if I pay for something, I pay directly to Yasemin, without having to involve my bank. I see the elimination of intermediaries with a certain caveat, let’s put it that way, because whatever I place on the blockchain as an asset — as a value, an instruction, or an object, whatever you want to call it — a token has to be created, which, because of the advantage blockchain offers, namely security, has to be encrypted. And this encryption is handled, or the offer to carry out this encryption, is a highly complex mathematical process that all users in the network can carry out simultaneously, and whoever completes this complex work first creates a token, under which this asset, this value, then continues to be passed along the blockchain. My question to you — am I right or wrong about this? Basically, isn’t that also an intermediary — an intermediary that makes the whole blockchain and tokenization process, as it’s called, possible in the first place? If nobody succeeds in carrying out this encryption, I can’t use the blockchain. That’s my input on this topic. Thanks for listening.
Yes, exciting questions, definitely worth discussing. You can look at it from different angles. On the one hand, you could equate it with a kind of intermediary. But in a sense it isn’t one — take the example of a bank, there you have a specialist, so to speak. Here, it’s not a specialist. It’s completely independent of the process being carried out. That means, regardless of the context, if a blockchain is operating in the background, you don’t need the assurances of an intermediary who knows the industry and therefore knows the framework conditions. What’s happening here, essentially, is a coding process, a so-called key. This key — the process behind it is called mining — can basically be carried out on any computer, completely independent of whether I’m a private user, whether I know the industry, or whatever. And the fees are, in inverted commas, also standardized. The miner who found the code does get a share, but it’s significantly smaller than with many other transactions or settlements we’d use instead of blockchain, because there are also regulations on one side, how many percent applies, and that can vary a lot depending on what it’s about — especially in the real estate context, for example, it’s regulated. So for this code — and initially it’s irrelevant what context it’s in — this process takes place, and there isn’t really one intermediary in that sense, just the key being searched for and found. But essentially, and this is the exciting part of what happens in the background, the message, whatever kind of message or transaction it is, gets spread across all sorts of computers. So the principle behind the system is different. But you could still say there’s still an intermediary present, just not the classic kind of intermediary. What do you say to that, Marc, if you’d like to share your opinion too — and then Jürgen can follow up again.
I haven’t gone that deep into the subject matter, and I’ll admit it — the only thing I can program is the alarm clock on my phone, and it wakes me up every morning, and that’s where my programming skills end. I approached the topic from the other side — I asked my son yesterday, hey, this blockchain thing, do I even need it, where do we encounter it, and please don’t explain the details, I just want to know what’s coming my way so I can understand it in broad strokes. And I can only give one example there, for instance in healthcare — that’s definitely coming our way. In healthcare it’s like this: in the future, when we’re at the doctor’s, we all have the problem that we start over every time. We go to the doctor, and he doesn’t know my history, doesn’t know which other doctor I’ve seen, and so on — that makes a diagnosis incredibly hard. And in healthcare, blockchain could also mean — I can’t say anything about the security aspect, but it could mean that, supposedly, the owner of the data, probably my health insurance provider, could determine which of all the doctors — because the knowledge would then be stored in a decentralized way, spread across a lot of servers — but you could still say, this one may see it, that one may see it. So I couldn’t see Jürgen’s data, or Sebastian’s either, but certain people would have access to certain data, and I thought, okay, that would be an advantage. And a second example I brought along is ID documents. We all still carry a driver’s license, a passport, and blockchain can also help improve our identity management there. That means, we all have, if we have an iPhone, a wallet on our phone where we already have flight tickets, and surely the time will come when none of us needs a driver’s license or ID card anymore, because we carry that on our phone too. There too, blockchain helps make sure the identity is really true and verified, and so on. Those were just two application examples, without being able to say they’re a hundred percent secure, because I lack the technical understanding for that.
Yes, thank you, thank you so much. Sebastian has just joined too — Sebastian, you’re following up on Jürgen’s question, so I’d like to bring you in, and then play back to Jürgen. If you’re talking about new fields of application or don’t address Jürgen’s question, I’d rather give Jürgen the chance first.
No, in that case I’d say, go ahead, I’ll pick up right after. Could you repeat that please, I couldn’t quite hear it — so, first answer Jürgen’s question, and then I’ll pick up with the topic of why blockchain matters, or is exciting, for everyone listening. Thanks.
Okay, wonderful, thank you. Jürgen?
I don’t want to hold Sebastian up — I can only nod along to everything you said, dear Yasemin, and you too, Marc, from real-world experience, and I’ll gladly hand over to Sebastian. Up to you.
Yes, well, I just joined. Good morning everyone first of all, and on the topic of blockchain — I have to say I got to know this topic a while back, let me think, five to seven years ago, when my wife did her Executive MBA in Frankfurt, that was around 2015, so almost seven years ago, and back then Frankfurt School was already developing and continuing work on blockchain with its students in the business and finance department, and there are still ongoing courses, evening events, seminars you can join. So even this topic is actually quite prominent here in Frankfurt among all the fintechs. And yes, what Marc said, mostly there are financial instruments behind it, or documentary instruments, so to speak — being able to protect certificates that you can then store and link to each other and mutually verify. And a lot of people steered clear of it, that only picked up a bit — I’ll say more actively — once the topic of cryptocurrencies came along, and it became a lot more visible really in 21/22 when this hype came along with NFTs — these things I always call digital stamps or digital seals. A lot of people always picture some kind of images, but ultimately what’s behind it is always some kind of blockchain technology, to verify something, cross-check it, and store it somewhere so it’s tamper-proof. And that’s why I’ve actually engaged more intensively with the topic since 2022, also with how NFTs work and how you use this blockchain technology — there are different chains, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and so on, chains that exist, so to speak, in the background, and I looked into that, just with ideas like, what would happen if I actually digitally deposited and certified my own diploma, my master’s certificate, or a book or some e-book I made — because all of that is going to come in the future. It’s just that we’re currently on these rollercoasters, these hype cycles, where it sometimes gets hyped and sometimes doesn’t. And then there are a lot of chains, a lot of blockchains, and that’s why not that many people understand it yet. And I can just recommend reading a few books on the topic — Mike Hager, who’s done a lot with NFTs, describes it very, very simply and vividly in his books. Anyone who wants to have a bit of fun reading should check out the books on NFTs and blockchain, they’re easy to find. I’ll just leave that as a short impulse from my side — I’ve used blockchains myself.
Yes, thank you, thank you so much. And NFTs are then another new area, so to speak, and we’ll look at that more closely another time too, so I don’t want to go too deep into it here. But since you brought it up, regardless of going into explanations of it — as I said, we’ll take a closer look at that topic too — it also opens up, for example, the possibility of offering art or things like that digitally, and here too it’s exactly these technologies running in the background, and there are various platforms where, for example, an artist can offer art or other assets that then get put up for sale and are typically delivered in purely digital form. And that’s really, really exciting — it makes clear that there really are a lot of fields involved. Whether we look at insurance, energy, or things like smart city systems, which are also talked about — we’ll take a closer look at that too. So there are a lot, a lot of fields of application where this is actually being used more and more.
On insurance, I’d like to bring in another example — I think it’s a really nice one too, where these kinds of solutions or technologies get used in the background. That concerns, for example, a company based in San Francisco called Zendrive — I don’t know how many of you know it, I had the opportunity a few years ago to get to know this company up close and get some insight into it. And it’s about various innovative systems running in the background, for example to measure and assess driving behavior using smartphones, to enable better risk management for insurers — that’s one example. The data also gets fed in and, in the case of an accident, for example, gets transmitted directly to the insurer. This can, for example, speed up claims reporting and claims processing. And they’ve been very, very strongly involved in this for years, and it keeps getting expanded further. And elsewhere too, not just in the USA, this topic is being picked up and the advantages of how it can be used are being looked at. I mean, especially for insurers, this is really exciting from that perspective too, because you know how it is today — an accident happens somehow, and then there are witness statements, maybe disputes or something like that. So this simplifies certain things in one place or another. Jürgen, you wanted to follow up on this directly.
Yes, thank you very much, dear Yasemin. Not directly on your example, admittedly, but I’d like to add a second point regarding the overall process, and also what Sebastian raised, the topic of NFTs or Bitcoin, or rather assets that get passed on or made available via blockchain. The essential preceding step — and with this I’d also like to try to draw a connection to our topic of the world of work — the preceding step must definitely be that I prove the existence and rightful ownership of this asset. So if I tokenize a share, I have to somehow prove to a potential buyer that I actually own this asset, or if I want to sell a house, which is already partly being managed via blockchain in some Swiss municipalities, that means — and in many cases this is done through a special purpose vehicle — I have to make sure that everything needed to prove this asset I want to transfer is also included documentarily in this blockchain. A very simple example: I want to sell my house, and then I basically need to provide a land registry extract to prove that I’m actually the owner. And here I’d like to draw the loop back to the world of work. What that means for me is that, as a key consequence of this blockchain technology, the standard work that’s still currently done by hand in many administrations and public offices — and by hand I mean it’s found somewhere in a hanging file register, or as a photocopy in the land registry extract — the people doing that work will, in the future, need to be trained on this technology, need to be able to work with blockchain and increasingly shape the work process electronically. For me, that’s a huge challenge, especially in public administration, that I see there. Thanks for listening.
Yes, thank you, thank you so much, and here we should really also distinguish between a certain initial effort that will also exist, in order to increasingly bring the first pieces of data, respectively, into the system, if there’s an overarching system used for that. That means, these proof-related processes — once something has been processed via blockchain and registered once, that proof can then be provided via the blockchain itself. So we then have the corresponding coding and encryption and so on, so the proof can also be shown through that. But before any asset can even get onto the blockchain, so to speak, there also needs to be some kind of oversight, or framework conditions, to begin with — what does it all need to contain? Especially with examples like real estate, where that’s relevant too — it’s not simply, in quotation marks, a bread sale or something like that, but really about the fact that if certain requirements aren’t met, then it’s not fully completed, and accordingly new challenges arise here too. So we have, on the one hand, depending on which area we’re looking at, a kind of initial challenge that arises in this context. And on the other hand, once it’s initially in place, it will certainly get easier. But — and here comes another “but” — you’d have to look at and think through, does it still need various, are there maybe technologies that get used for property acquisition or sale, so that some kind of control, let’s call it that, is still in place? Or how does that actually work then? Can you really use just any technology in the background as a private individual? Theoretically, yes, possibly. But is that sensible then, or is it also sensible to still think this through in terms of safeguards that don’t arise from the fallibility of the technology itself, but rather because people are acting here too. And it doesn’t even have to be that someone deliberately misuses or exploits it — it could also just be that mistakes happen because someone isn’t familiar with it or something like that. And how do you deal with that? Jürgen?
Yes, a very good statement, dear Yasemin. From my own environment, from banking, I can only say the following — absolutely correct, that’s the next subfield of the world of work that’s changing significantly, already changing right now, and that is, in my area, supervision — banking and insurance regulatory supervision — and, with a bit of a grin on my face, I can say: the German regulatory level regarding the use and deployment of blockchain technologies is considered the most advanced in the world. You can see that positively or negatively, but there too — and that hits exactly the point you’re making — new fields of work are emerging through this new technology, existing fields of work are being modified with new demands, and that of course opens up opportunities too. And allow me a lighthearted remark — as with many other topics, also with the “broad masses,” in inverted commas, one should rather focus on what advantages it brings, namely the huge advantage that this technology too contributes significantly to our theme, Pioneering Spirit with Brain, to moving forward — a really important aspect and contribution to security and further development. And I think that’s, in my view, one of the biggest advantages of blockchain. Thank you, thank you so much. Marc, Sebastian, do you have further aspects you’d like to add?
Go ahead, Sebastian, then Marc. Yes, the topic of blockchain, that’s also a kind of double world. What do I want to store transparently and securely, and what do I want to store securely but nobody should see it — and that’s naturally a two-sided story. Blockchain, what you currently read about with all the crypto stuff, that first served, in part, to create a certain degree of transparency, but of course some people hide behind this blockchain. Ultimately, a blockchain generates, let’s call it, an address, a kind of house number, which is very individual and also well protected through the coding. But you can generate so many of these blockchain addresses that you can barely identify the owner behind them anymore. And anyone who’s just taking their first steps in blockchain technology will find that you fairly quickly need a kind of wallet, this address, and then it multiplies. Those become these digital safes or digital folders, and it gets relatively confusing pretty quickly. It’s a bit like building several safes into your apartment, some transparent, some not, and if you lose the key or something, you have to deal with that too. So a lot of interdependencies are forming right now, and that’s relatively hard to learn even for adults — I don’t know how students, all those between 18 and 30, whether they’re learning all this a bit more fluently in school. But I’m already somewhat overwhelmed by it. Then there are digital crypto elements too, things like ledgers — those are digital hardware encryption mechanisms you set aside to protect these assets. And the simplest thing, really, if you look at it nationally, for Germany, would be to launch a pilot project where you simply say, everyone has a passport number and everyone has a social security number. If you started with that step and established this technology publicly but reasonably securely, then everyone would have access to their own collection of assets, but that would of course also be viewable. That’s how it is here in Germany with all the offices, for example with apartments or real estate — I can’t, here in this region, I’m currently in this beautiful patch of forest, there are gardens here, I have no way of finding out who owns this piece of land, I’m interested in this asset, I can’t just walk to the municipal office and say, well, I’d be interested to know who owns this right now, who put this on the blockchain, I’m interested in the purchase price and when the last transfer happened. That’s also information kept in files at the municipality and the land registry office, and you can’t just get at that easily either. So we have a conflict here between what’s transparent, what’s public, and how things get stored, and all these little islands that form. Every different organization and office chooses its own blockchain, so to speak, and to get that running at all you need a bit of fuel, and that of course creates energy costs, transfer costs, and that of course also generates costs that are ultimately money — and everyone’s learning that pretty quickly right now. What’s actually happening right now is that these fuel costs for triggering blockchain transactions have become exorbitantly high over the last four weeks. You could compare it to the postage stamp suddenly getting very expensive to send a blockchain letter. Just another impulse there.
Yes, thank you, thank you so much, and regardless of this clarity-versus-confusion aspect you raised, I think it’s also really relevant to mention, especially when we talk about wallets and things like that, all these numbers that get assigned — that’s also then the responsibility of the owner, so to speak, to actually store the data somehow for themselves, in whatever form. Sometimes, especially with wallets, ideally not even on the computer, because there’s the risk it could get hacked, and so on. So challenges arise here too, and you’ve probably already come across one or another story about this in the media — if you no longer have certain access numbers, there’s no central place, especially with this technology, where you can say, hey, I lost something, can I get that reissued, or something — instead you simply no longer have access. And those are challenges that arise here too. So really, in a lot of places, there are still a lot of question marks, things we need to look at for the future — how do you deal with that? And does it really have to lie entirely in personal responsibility, or do we still need some kind of, in inverted commas, security frameworks, functions, or whatever, to some extent in the interest of self-protection? Or do we really hand over the responsibility entirely into our own hands? And what’s the price I might pay for that, if something happens? And you know this already, even today with data on a computer or something — if, I don’t know, the backups aren’t in proper order, if the computer burns out, or say, even if you’d stored it on paper at home in a safe, that’s not immune to a fire or something similar either, which means that if I haven’t secured it two, three, five times over, across different channels, levels, manually and digitally or non-digitally or something, I could run into problems here too — and with digital storage that’s always something to treat with caution too. So you can see, this is a fairly complex topic too. On the one hand we have a lot of advantages that come from it, the more we use it — so we can already imagine that you can really do a lot with it and that it can make a lot of things easier. At the same time, we have what Jürgen mentioned earlier, the modification and transformation of jobs and tasks because of this, and we have new challenges arising with it too. And that’s going to require a lot of discussion, and also some real-world experience, mistakes actually being made first, so we can learn from them. Marc, you wanted to follow up too.
Yes, I’d like to jump again, just briefly, away from crypto and technology, and just mention application examples, without discussing what would happen — without going too deep into the technical details. As an application example, I understood, for instance with insurance, which you already mentioned, dear Yasemin — I once had an accident in Italy, and I could have settled that in Italy right away, and the hotel owner could have handed me cash from his insurance and said, the damage is settled. Then I drive to Germany and report a claim there too on my car, and claim the same damage a second time. In the future you could prevent that with this kind of blockchain technology, because the insurance owner could release certain data and say, hey Marc, that bumper, that’s strange, you’ve reported the same damage on your bumper twice within a week. The second example I want to bring up is supply chain management, and what possibilities that opens up. Imagine you go to the supermarket, and every food manufacturer says, sure, my cow is happy, this is really organic produce. There too, this technology makes it possible to trace the supply chain back to its origin — where does the cow come from, where does the meat come from? There too, the owner releases the data, and the end consumer would eventually have the option, with this technology, to say, is this really from that organic farm, does the cow really come from that region? And the third application example, if you think about elections — even with elections it could be possible to use blockchain technology to verify whether my vote was even cast at all. That means my vote can’t be falsified, it doesn’t disappear. You could make elections more secure too. Those were just three more examples, without discussing, please, whether that’s technically feasible and where the problems are — just to look at what’s possible in the first place.
Yes, wonderful, thank you, thank you so much. And to add to that a bit further, in the energy sector too there’s the possibility to use it accordingly, to distribute electricity even better, to control it better, to get even better control, maybe also to operate renewable energy completely differently, with solar energy and so on, to feed it back in, and things like that — this is used for that too. Or, we briefly touched on this earlier, the topic of smart city systems — as I said, we’ll go into that topic more intensively another time, but we’ve at least mentioned it here in this context — meaning these are holistic development concepts with technical, economic, and social innovations at the forefront, and with the help of blockchain technology, connections can be made accordingly to use resources more efficiently, for example. Whether that’s in traffic, something like road traffic utilization, for example, to reduce traffic jams, and so on — so there’s the possibility here to network various things together in a way that allows resources to be handled quite differently, which, from a resource perspective, would again be something positive, also with a view to climate, if we don’t have, in the background, as with blockchain, a technology that itself consumes a lot of computing capacity. So, as I said, there’s still work to be done here, and so on — this is certainly not the final, golden solution yet. What matters, I think, and this is the principle, is at least having understood the technology at a basic level — essentially, moving away from this centralized approach with a middleman toward decentralized control, which makes it possible to handle information, capital assets, or general assets differently, to make things provable in different ways, and in various fields, not just assets but also administration, road traffic, energy — so many, many fields where this can really be sensibly deployed. And that’s true regardless of whether it ends up being called blockchain — there are various systems already in use in the background today, and the question is, which one will prevail? Maybe it’s not even just one, but maybe, conceptually similar, different named systems that exist for, say, insurance, another for energy, another for I don’t know what. We’ll just have to keep watching how that develops further.
What matters is making clear that — because over the past few days we’ve covered robotics and AI and things like that — blockchain technology is also just one technology, and we talked about how this is about the interplay of technologies at this point, and that’s what makes the whole thing so exciting under this overarching theme, Pioneering Spirit with Brain, understanding these connections. It’s not one technology or one innovative development that happened in the background here — it only becomes really exciting when you look at the interplay. On the one hand very complex and tied to challenges, so to speak, and on the other hand a lot of opportunities that arise from it too. And with that in mind, tomorrow we’ll continue with the Internet of Things, IoT — that’s about data collection and how that’s ultimately used, or fields of deployment, application areas, and so on. What does that mean, what are the effects of networking and data collection and connectivity? We’ll continue talking about that tomorrow, why that plays such a big role in this context too. And with that, given the time, I’d like to wrap up here for today by moving into the closing round, and I’m looking forward to opening up another door tomorrow, so to speak, to bring in another aspect of this interplay. Marc, Jürgen, Sebastian, in that order please.
Dear Yasemin, being open and curious is incredibly exciting for me, without immediately having to become, or be, an expert. And if someone had told me a year ago that I’d end up talking about blockchain, I’d have said, what are you smoking?
Wonderful, thank you, Jürgen. Yes, thank you all for your contributions. I’m, in inverted commas, a bit confused by the last two contributions, from you, Sebastian, and Yasemin — but I don’t want to spread that out further, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s topic, the Internet of Things, and curious what we’ll discuss there. Thank you, and have a nice day.
Thank you, thank you so much. Sebastian.
Yes, I can only say, blockchain is a foundational technology — you know this from the whole strategy or innovation curve — and it’s going to stay, it’s just that many people won’t see it, so look forward to the next five years, the term definitely isn’t going away. But what comes next, I don’t know myself. Best regards, and we’ll talk again tomorrow.
Yes, thank you, thank you so much. Well, there’s nothing left for me to add, and I’m looking forward to hopefully welcoming you all again tomorrow with the Internet of Things — what’s actually behind IoT, and what possibilities for networking and automation arise from it in everyday life? We want to take a deeper look at that tomorrow, and with that I’m looking forward to working on this topic with you again tomorrow morning at eight. Until then.
