A My First Bitcoin Node in Pakistan - Roark Janis - #616

That's freaking awesome.

All right, brilliant.

Yeah, you've given me lots of threads to pull on.

Where to go? First of all, supply chain.

That is obviously something that was, well, not obviously, because people might not have been reading this stuff back in, I think it was like the mid-teens.

I remember reading an article in The Economist on a flight once about how blockchain technology is going to completely redesign the way that we do supply chain management.

And this is the whole bananas on the blockchain FUD, right? It was very compelling at the time, and a lot of people fell for it.

And it did steer a lot of people in the way of blockchain, not Bitcoin, rather than Bitcoin, not blockchain.

And a lot of people started listening to the narratives as well that were coming out about distributed ledger technology, or DLTs, as it was called.

And the idea being...

Shipping, obviously, supply chain management is an absolutely huge industry and so critical to our infrastructure.

Obviously, we're seeing this now with the breakdown of the Straits of Hormuz, and we've seen it as well when the Suez Canal had that strange situation.

strange boating accident a few years ago.

And then of course, like the COVID lockdowns, which just ground everything to a halt.

And then all of a sudden people start understanding how important supply chain management is.

Was that kind of discussion live when you were there about blockchain technology?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean, I was going to conferences, multiple conferences a year with the software company and very much in the mix of all those conversations.

And when they started talking about blockchain, At first, I thought this is really cool because a lot of what we were trying to do in supply chain was to create supply chain visibility among all the supply chain participants, whether they be suppliers, transportation companies, warehouses, customers.

And so the high level idea of a blockchain that's public that can sort of surface all this information sounded like a dream.

In reality, but I had questions from the beginning, like, well, why can't we do that with databases? We use APIs, we have integration.

We can create all this visibility in the supply chain without having to make it public.

I didn't understand technically how a blockchain worked at the time, but it just seemed to me to be an idea that...

It didn't necessarily apply to what we were doing without having dug into it.