The Blockchain and Us: Interview with Roger Wattenhofer, Professor in Distributed Systems

Transcript

these are the two ingredients I would say of the blockchain so one ingredient is cryptography and the other ingredient is fault tolerant systems so you want systems which can survive kind of failures by by parts of the system and these two things together my point of view are the blockchain so my name is Roger rotten Hoffer I'm a professor at ETH Zurich my area is roughly distributed systems and since a few years I'm interested in Bitcoin blockchain this kind of area this was always the somewhat academic topic

nobody really cared about these things and from years back I was you know encouraged to attend some FinTech meetings and there it seemed that they have a deep interest in this topic and and I noticed a connection and this is maybe one of the first times in my life as a professor where I actually do something as a professor which turns out to be very interesting from you know I not only academic point of view so I get a lot of requests every day one to talk about this topic or two to chat with companies about this topic people think that the blockchain is exactly equal to Bitcoin and that's one definition which I can live with I don't

I don't mind it but personally I think this is a much older topic this isn't really like 40 years ago in the 80s people started to be interested in build systems which can survive in some sense different types of faults and faults might include something like messages being lost or machines crashing or also in the other extreme like machines behaving maliciously they're trying to you know some machines are kind of like hacked by adversary and you still want to have a system which works this is an old topic in some sense and not very new unfortunately you know he combines two things to have

a fault-tolerant system where you can inject transactions to it and the system will tell you know which transactions happened in what order that's kind of the blockchain and nobody can cheat anymore and say you know but I never wanted to send you this money because it's somewhere in the history of this lecture or of this information exists blockchain is for me or the way my book uses it in some sense is just you know a wrapper which tells you that several people together can agree on what transactions actually happened in which order and you can implement this in various ways and some have advantages

because they are more efficient faster they use less resources some have advantages that you can do it with millions of people some have advantages that you can use the blockchain even if there's really bad guys around which want to corrupt the system and that sort of the spectrum there we researched going into and three searches interested a Bitcoin of course offers things which normal banks wouldn't offer you so far so for instance you have a currency you can trust without trusting anybody in particular somehow so that's something of course which is very exciting for libertarians but that's not why Swiss banks for instance would be interested

in Bitcoin or blockchain they seem to be interested in having this ledger is having this distributed system which is you know fault tolerant and say if in terms of cryptography in security but this is something they could have had many years ago already so I don't know why now you have this maybe they feel that their you know have to be modern that's that's my only guess we can build systems very don't have to trust anybody anymore you can always be sure you get your money back that's a huge advantage over the current system and I for once would

like to go to a bank which offers me this deal right and not the deal that I currently get there I kind of have to trust them the word blockchain might vanish that's probably true some point people call it distributed lecture or just distribute system and that's fine there's a huge hype for the word blockchain right now that's why I called the book block blockchain book however I should say there's something deeper here and that's not a high and the deep thing is that technology will change some kind of industries so people call this this digitalization I don't like the term at all because for me means something else

but I truly believe that you know computing and engineering will change business blockchain definitely or distributed systems I would like to say definitely the change industries you know was never clear to me why we need so many you have so many jobs in Switzerland for instance in in finance and banking I I'm very pessimistic about these jobs and I won't tell my children to study these jobs I think they're better off starting a technical degree math yes engineering something like that and they learn the

tools to build these systems and I think these tool builders will be important in the next decade or so I don't think blockchain is a revolution I think it has been done forever like for 40 years which is really for every computer science in my domain so both parts both ingredients the security and the distribute systems have been around since the 70s basically since the early seventies and this is not a revolution but the revolution in some sense or the evolution is that that jobs will change that something I believe in that jobs will be you know digitized in sometimes

computers will do a lot of the manual labor that we still see in this kind of service domains today that's that's something I believe will be coming and it's of course you know society's job to figure out what to want to do about this and now you can have you dystopian utopia depending on how society decides kind of talk about it and books talk about it from time to time right so there's good books which which look at this and there's movies which make sense in that domain but it's just not the politicians the politicians say new jobs will come for sure and they will replace

all jobs that's the part I'm not so sure about okay but now if you ask people who know a little bit about this it's about 5050 what they say 50% about say new jobs will come and they will replace all jobs and 50% will say that we kind of see a disruption in this in the kind of working society and I'm on the side that I will I believe a disruption at home as soon as the machines are as good as the humans why should they not have the machines decide so this will come this is a bit a different topic this is more the topic of deep learning or artificial intelligence but this will disrupt you

know the society even more than them blockchain of Bitcoin for sure because that's that will replace so many jobs which are basically doing basic work right now white-collar work but but basically computing little things and machines can do amazing things these days already and there you have the development just in the past few years it's the same thing as for the blockchain in some sense it's the past few years which made sure that things are going to come it's already amazing you know if you if you listen to Google's speech synthesis these guys you know I wish we could type this interview

and let the robot talk for me it will be much much better [Music]