Cool Technology and the Intelligent Enterprise
Caffeine and Cryptocurrency
Me again! But you guys knew that. I know I said yesterday that we shouldn’t talk to strangers and this guy is probably the reason our moms and dads felt that way. But it takes all kinds to make this crazy world go ‘round. In case you missed one of my blogs in this series, here is a link to catch up. And now …
So, I got up early the other day — early for me is like 8:00am — because I’d promised Charlotte I would meet her for coffee at the Printer’s Row Coffee Company in Lincoln Park. I wanted to hear more about Jack Finney, the guy that Charlotte’s podcast is about, and she wanted to know how things were going with me and Kay. The slogan for Printer’s Row Coffee Company, by the way, is “Born at the Intersection of Art and Science,” so it seemed like the perfect place to talk to Charlotte about her time-travelling Renaissance artist.
The look of Printer’s Row Coffee Company embodies a concept I’ve been struggling with lately. The shop has a simple black-and-white minimalist look to it, but it seems very sophisticated at the same time. Of course, Kay tells me that Leonardo da Vinci never said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Okay. But just the same, it might be true. Making things simple can be very complicated. On the other hand, if there’s such a thing as simple sophistication, this coffee shop has it.
Charlotte and I exchanged hugs and pleasantries and perused the menu. Charlotte ordered some kind of foamy thing with more soy milk than joe, and naturally, I had the Italian roast — black, of course. They don’t grow coffee in Italy, but Italians sure know how to drink it.
As Byron, our barista, (sporting a knit cap, Buddy Holly glasses, and a three-day stubble) made our drinks, I asked Charlotte the question that had kept me up all night. “Do you have any idea what blockchain is?”
“Sort of,” Charlotte replied, “but I’m not sure I can explain it.”
“Sounds like something they’d do to guys down at Cook County Jail.”
“Don’t be dopey,” Byron chimed in, “You don’t do a blockchain, you have a blockchain.”
“What do I do with it when I have it?”
“You give it to someone else.”
“What? It’s like the cooties or something?”
“No. It’s like Bitcoin. You know what Bitcoin is?”
“No.”
“It’s when you sell something that doesn’t exist to someone.”
“Oh. My Uncle Jimmy did that. So, how much time do you get for blockchaining Bitcoins?”
“It’s legal.” Charlotte said, “I think it’s a verification thing. Jack says it’s how time-travel works.”
“Oh yeah. You know that guy that sells duct tape underwear down by the bean? Apparently, he knows Jack and he said the same thing.”
“Sounds legit to me,” Byron said wiping the counter.
Charlotte clammed up for a bit. I hope I didn’t hurt her feelings. She really believed in Jack for a while. She felt some kind of connection with him. Then somehow, she tracked down his mother and came to the conclusion that maybe Jack wasn’t all he’d said he was. I felt bad for her, but I also sensed she wasn’t ready to give up on Jack. In any case, it’s great stuff for her podcast.
“Jack said he had nothing to do with that stunt at the Air and Water Show,” she said. “No one seems to know what that was about, but the guy just disappeared like Jack does from time to time, so who knows?”
“Maybe it was some kind of promotion for that SAPience thing down at McCormick Place. You know anything about that?”
“I’ve seen the Vitruvian Man posters, but that’s about it.”
Then Charlotte asked what was happening with me and Kay, and I talked around it as best I could. I said I was aware that Kay’s way out of my league, but I think she’s the cat’s pajamas. So as long as we’re having fun, we’ll keep having fun.
Then, later that day, I met my old friend, Joe Donovan, near the Merc at one of Chicago’s world-famous restaurants. I had the Quarter Pounder and he had the Filet-O-Fish. He was wearing one of those bright red trading jackets with all those buttons and ID tags on it, and I’m thinking he’ll get mistaken for Ronald McDonald’s long-lost cousin. It wasn’t a sophisticated meal this time, but he did explain blockchain to me.
“It’s a distributed ledger technology,” he said. “Think of an old-fashioned bookkeeper writing everything down in a big ledger book. The ledger might track anything, but here’s the important thing: in those old ledgers you never erased anything; you just kept turning the pages and adding new stuff. It was completely non-destructive. Now move to the internet age where things get deleted and changed all the time. The first thing you want to do is create a ledger that can’t be tampered with or changed. So, you take batches of data and form ‘blocks.’ Each block has an identifier called a ‘hash’ that’s kind of like an address or time stamp. So, then all the blocks are chained together in chronological sequence. The blocks have this really great encryption on them, so they can never be changed, or removed from the chain. Then copies of the chains are stored throughout a network so that a bunch of people have copies of them, and new blocks can only be added to a chain by a verified consensus of the computers on the network. The strong encryption, the verification, and the lack of any controlling intermediary makes it totally secure.”
“So, what the heck is a Bitcoin?”
“Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. It was the first thing to use a blockchain ledger.”
“So, it’s money, and contrary to rumor, it does exist.”
“Not exactly. There aren’t any real tangible coins, and the exchange of them doesn’t involve any kind of central authority. There’re no banks involved. So yeah, people are buying and selling something that doesn’t exist in the physical world.”
“Wow. That might put piggy bank manufacturers out of business. Is it legal?”
“Yes. Whether or not it’s a good investment, is another matter. Today it was good. Tomorrow, who knows? But blockchain’s not just about currency. Documentation and information such as medical records, educational transcripts, or land deeds, can be shared too.”
“But it’s not something they do down at Cook County Jail.”
“Au contraire!” he said, suddenly lording his high school French over me. “They have 7,000 prisoners rotating in and out of there every day. Not only that, but they have 4,000 officers, 7,000 civilian employees, and who knows how many visitors. Court dates, prisoner transfers, background checks — it’s got to be documentation hell down there. Could they use a verifiable system that prohibited alterations and tampering? You bet. Now think about the Merc. Quick, credible, and verifiable record-keeping is critical in fast-moving markets. My business is futures and I’ve got to tell you, I love the future of blockchain.”
“Speaking of the future, any chance you could use blockchain for time-travel?”
“Time-travel? That’s a new one. But if you’ve got a good elevator pitch, I’ll get you the capital.”
“Not me. Charlotte knows this guy who claims he’s time-traveled from the Renaissance. He says that out in some ethereal plane there’s a transcendent register that records all of existence, and whenever someone mucks with the time-space continuum, it’s marked in this register so there’s no rift in the continuity. I’m not sure what that means, and maybe I got some of that wrong, but I’m thinking we don’t want some Venetian vagabond rifting the time-space continuum. I haven’t been able to find a flux capacitor since Radio Shack went out of business and I’m not sure we’d get back to reality.”
“Nothing is impossible. Technology is changing slower today than it ever will, and faster than it ever has.”
“Yes, but is that technology making things simpler or more complicated?”
“I don’t know if things are simpler or more complicated, but I feel like things are getting better. It seems to me you’re looking for a concrete answer to a philosophical question.”
“Anything wrong with that?”
“I’m not sure, but maybe you should ask a philosopher. Do you know ‘Gentleman Jim Giles, the Genius of Wicker Park’?”
“No.”
“He’s one of those guys who just knows things.”
“What does he do?”
“He just thinks. He’s a consultant on pretty much anything. He’s one of the guys behind that SAPience movement.”
“What is this SAPience movement?”
“I don’t exactly know. But it might be interesting to find out.”
It was terrific to catch up with Charlotte that day. If you want to hear a little more about what she’s up to, you should check out Charlotte’s show on Apple Podcast. In my next blog I meet the “Genius of Wicker Park,” and finally learn what the SAPience movement is.
###
Tony
Blogger Extraordinaire
DISCLAIMER: The Searching for Salaì podcast and the “Cool Technology and the Intelligent Enterprise” blog series are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
[DESCRIPTION]
Tony ferrets out how blockchain helps manage physical and digital assets, record internal transactions, and verify identities by guaranteeing data security.
[KEYWORDS]
SAP Leonardo podcast, Innovation, Digital Transformation, Intelligent Enterprise, Analytics, Big Data, Blockchain, The Cloud, Design Thinking, The Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, Data Intelligence, Digital Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Searching for Salaì, Cool Technology
Comments
Post a Comment