Brian Kruger 0:00
Welcome to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge, the fiercely nonpartisan discussion that seeks policy solutions to issues of the day. Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology, health, and finance space. He and his wife Leslie are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors, with a primary focus on medically and educationally underserved children. And welcome to the Common Bridge. Rich’s guest today is Stephen P. Williams, who’s a veteran author who lives in New York City. And he’s written and ghost written many books, including his most recent one “Blockchain: The Next Everything” which he and Rich will be covering today. Steve’s currently completing a book entitled “Everlands” the story of his five-month journey into the heart of America during the summer and fall of COVID 2020. And he’s also working on a documentary from that trip titled “Postcards from the Pandemic.” He was educated at Grinnell College and Stanford and he has an MBA in Sustainability from Bard College. I think you’re really going to enjoy this today. So let’s join Rich Helppie and Stephen P. Williams, in conversation.

Richard Helppie 1:04
Well, Stephen, welcome to the Common Bridge. We’re really delighted that you could be with us today. (Stephen: Thanks. I’m glad to be here.) And your book, “Blockchain: The Next Everything” is such a great compilation about what blockchain is, where it stands today.. it’s kind of an A to Z primer. So whether this is the first time you’re hearing about blockchain or perhaps you’re an investor in Bitcoin or you’re wondering, where else can this technology go, I recommend that you buy the book “Blockchain: The Next Everything” by Stephen P. Williams, and Stephen that’s available at Amazon and other outlets as well?

Stephen P. Williams 1:44
Oh, yeah, it’s available everywhere. So Audio Book and Kindle, Amazon, whatever.

Richard Helppie 1:50
Great. Stephen, a little bit about your background– of course, we have a full bio out at RichardHelppie.com– our listeners like to know a little something about our guests. So where did you start life? And and how did you get to this point of being a writer with these kind of credentials?

Stephen P. Williams 2:05
Well, as you can see, I with the gray hair, I’m I’ve been around a little bit, so I won’t fill you in on every detail. But I was born in Colorado and grew up in Kansas and knew from a very early age that I wanted to be a writer. I had been exposed to a lot of writers through my parents, and somehow it just clicked with me. So I ended up moving to New York after a peripatetic life when I was 26, and I’ve been here ever since working as a writer. And so my, my impetus as a writer has always been– I’m a very curious person, right, and so I’m a real generalist as a writer, and I just explore topics that appealed to me, and I had gone back to school in 2016 or so to get an MBA in Sustainability, which is another thing I’m really interested in. And I came across the word blockchain. And something about it really piqued my interest. And I started looking into it and was fascinated for all the applications for business. I wasn’t so interested at the time in the cryptocurrency, which I’m very interested in now. But– so I just studied and self taught. I mean, there was really no course you could take at that time on blockchains–very early stages. And I decided to write a book because none of the books I read seemed to be friendly enough or helpful enough. They’re either super complex, or, or super, way too simple. So I wrote the book, got to publish, my agent sold it, and the first editor who saw it bought the book, even though he had never heard a word about– he didn’t know anything about blockchain. So I thought that was interesting, because it’s just an intriguing subject.

Richard Helppie 3:52
I was telling you before we went on recording, when I told people well, I’m going to be doing my next show about blockchain, reactions were like, what is it? Never heard of it. As other people go, oh, Bitcoin? And still other people’s like, “Oh, good, because I need to know more about it.” And yeah, and maybe that’s just a good place to start. So what is it you did a great job in the book, by the way, I think, defining things and then you know, the balance– the well, this is the pro side, the con side, these things might happen, and it’s gonna be an exciting future, whichever way it goes. So is there a lay definition of what blockchain is and how it works?

Stephen P. Williams 4:29
Yeah, I would say that first off that the blockchain is basically like those green ledger books that your grandparents might have used at their store to write down… my grandmother was a farmer and she wrote down every single expense or income that she had in these green ledger books. And that’s basically what a blockchain is only it’s it’s digital, it’s on the internet. And it’s immutable, meaning you can’t go back and erase the entries. You can’t change anything. It’s everything’s recorded and public, this is on public blockchains. And so basically, it’s a way of recording information. That sounds really basic and simple, But what it does is it frees up all kinds of applications for business, for society, you know, for money, for all kinds of things, because it allows you to trust what’s happening, without having to have it confirmed by an extra agent, like a banker, or a stockbroker, or an art dealer or a publisher, the information is there in the purist access.

Richard Helppie 5:40
So if you put something in a blockchain, and you have a code and so that information is locked, and you want to transfer that, to me, that ledger will decrement your ledger, add to my ledger, we don’t need a third party to say who you are, whether there’s enough things in that ledger, or who I am and whether I have a place to receive it, we just go point-to-point or peer-to-peer. Am I getting close to that?

Stephen P. Williams 6:11
Yeah, that’s close, I would say that you do have to have a place to put it… like, if you’re transferring a digital asset. If I’m transferring it to you, you would have to have a place to put that asset and a blockchain would record that it. But that’s the only place you were slightly off there. But yeah, so if I want to, I mean, maybe the easiest way to look at that is with transferring money. So today I transferred some money into that was, let me try I’m gonna try to keep this as simple as possible. When you’re using money on the blockchain, it’s called cryptocurrency.. it’s usually, most people call it Bitcoin. For most, most people are most familiar with that. But there are also others like Ethereum is a very, very important coin. And then there are thousands of other coins. And you can create one yourself if you want to. But when you want to transfer some of that money to someone else, you type in their wallet address. And a wallet is just like a wallet that you keep in your pocket only it’s a digital repository. And it’s all yours, you control it, you have these things called keys that give you access to it. And those are private to you. So you would, you would give me the public key to your wallet. And I would type that into a website and click how much money I wanted to send you. And it would find its way to your wallet. And that transaction would be recorded on the blockchain. So everyone could see it–they might not know it was you and it was me. But everyone can see that that asset went to your wallet. Does that make sense?

Richard Helppie 7:58
That makes all the sense in the world. And with blockchain, I don’t have to send it through Zelle or a wire transfer or a third party.

Stephen P. Williams 8:07
No its all done… so if it’s done, especially through Ethereum, there are Ethereum is or they’re called ether, or the coins. They’re programmable money so that they have things called smart contracts, that you can actually program them to do different things. Like we could say that if you wanted to give me $20 to come on your podcast, then you could set a contract that would pay me as soon as I appeared on, the contract would pay my wallet, and we wouldn’t even have to discuss it. So this morning, I sent some money to an exchange because… or I sent some ether to an exchange because I want to cash it out into dollars to pay taxes on that money, because I earned that money. So I just typed, you know, information from a private wallet that I had, clicked a button, it went through blockchain, was certified by people on that blockchain or machines on that blockchain who guarantee that this transaction is happening. And then it arrives in my account. And the same thing will happen when I trade that in for U.S. dollars– it will all be recorded each step of the way. So that’s a really important function. And it’s, it’s, it’s like a right now, we use our two-step accounting method that was invented in the 16th century in Italy. And this is basically a three-step accounting method because it’s it’s verifiable by another step. That’s a that’s a big innovation.

Richard Helppie 9:49
That is a huge innovation. One of the things that you speak about in your book is about decentralizing control and what a profound shift in thinking as I started imagining all of the different control points, take me through your discovery process as you had that realization of what this is about, and, you know, maybe what could the future look like if blockchain reaches its zenith?

Stephen P. Williams 10:17
So this is what really drew me to the technology. I guess I’m I’m naturally anti-political, not apolitical, but I guess I wouldn’t have to know how I would define myself as a political creature in the United States. But I definitely don’t believe in control, right. I think that people should be pretty free to, to do a lot of things while at the same time, I know that they’re good reasons to wear seatbelts, take vaccines and stuff like that. But the decentralized nature of this, what appealed to me was that they’re in more and more I feel with transactions you have with credit card companies, with, with banks, with art dealers with all kinds of things. They’re, they’re people who are kind of skimming money all along the way. Doesn’t it feel like that if you if you sell a house, you sell a house, you get a friend of mine, sold an apartment recently, and she was with I don’t remember which person in the chain of selling that house, but she noticed they’d made a $4,000 mistake, right? She would have had to pay $4,000 more and it was all because this person wasn’t paying attention. And there are just like, so many people are involved with with handling your money and your property and your digital assets that being decentralized removes a lot of those intermediaries and and people who control you know, the gatekeepers who decide what is good, what is bad. I mean, if you if you use, I don’t mean to just continue talking about money. But if you use like Chase Bank, which I do, they can stop transactions, if they’re suspicious of them, or they can make you go pay taxes on something, you know, that’s because in a way, you lose a lot of your agency. You know, I mean, I think everyone should pay their taxes. I’m not advocating any kind of tax evasion, I think that’s, you know, a community responsibility we have. But so with a decentralized system, instead of having one person in the middle, or one business in the middle, or church, or government or whatever in the middle, that feeds out the rules and tells everyone what is proper and what to do. You have a community of people like you can imagine that like stars in the sky, you look up into the heavens, you see stars everywhere, and then imagine they’re all connected by lines, right. And this is, this is kind of one of the first not a vision, but the first visual interpretation of blockchain that I had early on, you just imagine all those stars connected, and they can all communicate with each other. And they can all make decisions together as a group, rather than just having the Milky Way or the Big Dipper or whatever, make all the decisions. So what that can mean is that there are companies and there are thousands of them already called distributed autonomous organizations. So these are especially popular in something called decentralized finance, which is a rapidly growing part of the digital economy right now.

Richard Helppie 13:29
And that’s so you refer to DAO’s…

Stephen P. Williams 13:33
Yeah, DAO. Yeah. Right. Not to be confused with DAO Chinese Daoism, and but it sounds kind of similar. So these are decentralized companies that might not have that would have no controlling authority. Like there’s no one owns them. Everyone who participates in them, owns them. And so you might join a DAO that is purchasing, say, digital art, that’s an easy way to look at it. So they purchase digital art with the idea of making a profit from it just as consortium of gallery dealers might might do that with a physical object. And but to join it, you don’t have to show that Oh, I’m Stephen Williams, and I understand the art world and I was educated here and I did this and all that, all you have to do is show that you have the minimum investment required to enter this DAO. You don’t even need to give your name, you just give your your wallet address, right. And you put your 32 ether tokens or your three bitcoins or whatever, into this fund. And then together you all make decisions, someone will make a proposal. I say we buy this digital Picasso painting, that’s $5 million, and I think it will be worth $20 million in two years. And you guys all decide all the nodes or all the participants in this DAO decide whether or not to buy that as an investment, and then you know, resell it. And so it’s a really interesting way to to do business and it opens business to a lot of people who are not considered qualified right now. You know, to be a certified investor, you have to have a certain amount of liquid assets, you have to basically the government is saying, show us that you’re a big boy, and you can play with the big boys in the financial field. And I think that’s ridiculous. I think it’s absurd. And I think that anyone should be able to invest their money as they see fit, even if it’s just $20. Or if it’s $20 million. And this makes that possible.

Richard Helppie 15:44
It would go a long way toward a more egalitarian society, because so many people are just locked out of, you know, some of the assets that have appreciated greatly in the last couple of years. Now, real estate, fine art are two of those things. You know, I’m talking commercial real estate as well, or investment real estate. There’s so many people just locked out of that, because they can’t put together tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions. But yeah, they think that’d be a pretty good bet. This would be a good way to do that. And you know, one of the things you mentioned in the book, too, that I really thought was a great takeaway– the Facebook business model would be absolutely threatened by blockchain because Facebook couldn’t control what got published, where it got published, and who could see it, it would be the everybody in the the DAO right, am I getting that right?

Stephen P. Williams 16:39
Yeah, yeah, pretty much. I mean, a lot of these things, a lot of the the ideas that I mentioned in the book are hopes, right now. They’re still hopes. And Facebook is actually, you know, heavily interested in blockchain. And it keeps threatening to create its own currency and do different things like that, because they also want to they don’t want to miss out on this. But I would say that, yeah, there are publishing systems being set up right now that allow writers to be paid micro payments for what they do, to distribute their articles and stuff in different ways. But none of them– the big problem, I would say with blockchain cryptocurrency, with the whole shebang right now, is that the user interface is it’s still not easy to use, which I find, like a real tragedy, and in the book, I advocate for bringing more artists, designers and, and systems thinkers into the field to make this stuff accessible. You know, the UX is just not not good for most of these.

Richard Helppie 17:50
So Steven, one of the things that I found fascinating about your book, it’s almost like a chain of custody. You had an example about palm oil nuts and how you knew that things were actually what they were represented, by time they got to the consumer. And look this morning, my wife said, How about salmon? I said, Great. And she said, I can go here. And I said, you know, I’m not sure where they get their– it’s a big box place– I said, but we’ve got a guy local in town, and we know where he sources his and he knows the people that he gets the salmon from. So you know, go to Kevin and get that–I know we pay a little bit more, but we know what we’re getting. So kind of take us through how blockchain solves some of those issues, when you go to the store that you know, you’re getting something from, for example, a sustainable producer versus someone who just stamps sustainably grown on it.

Stephen P. Williams 18:47
So yeah, that’s a great question and a really interesting aspect of blockchain. I want to start, though, by saying that you can tell a lie and put it on a blockchain. Blockchain does not correct–doesn’t make evil people good, doesn’t make lies the truth. You know, it does not detect any of that. It’s a very amoral system. It’s just technology. So that said, though, it does leave room for good actors, certified people to record the source of their goods and to have that pass through the chain of the supply chain. So for instance, and the idea I had was a palm oil producer who is you know, making environmentally safe palm oil– often it’s a very destructive enterprise– could certify that their palm oil is environmentally sensitive is good for the environment, and record that on the blockchain and that batch of palm oil can be traced all the way through the blockchain. I mean all the way through the supply chain to the store where you buy it, and you could check on your phone to see where it came from. And it does rely on the trust you have in the blockchain being accurate. But it also relies on trusting partners who are participating in that blockchain. So there’s still room for, you know, bad actors. But it’s it’s much more difficult. Plus, if a supplier were to make a false claim, that false claim would be permanently recorded on the blockchain. So their nefarious nature would be permanent, people would see it anytime. So I think it’s really interesting that way. Walmart right now uses blockchain to trace the source of lettuce that that they sell, and what they and other other goods. What they hope is that this allows them, there was a romaine lettuce scare a couple of years ago when (Rich: Listeria) Yeah, listeria and half the country was told not to eat romaine lettuce, from what from Walmart or from a certain supplier. And with blockchain, rather than having to ban the entire production of romaine lettuce for a certain period of time, you’d be able to look at the packaging, to find the source of that lettuce. I mean, Walmart would do this and find the source of that lettuce and shut that down and quit selling those particular items. So it can be very helpful in a lot of different situations like that.

Richard Helppie 21:28
We touched a little bit earlier on, you know, the Facebook business model, that, you know, really lets the Facebook company decide whether they like my photo, whether they like what I have to say, whether they like my source, it’s a centralized power, and that we’re seeing, you know, the edges of that begin to fray a bit, right now. Not to get into the whole thing about who deserves to be deplatformed or not, but you and I could agree to join a blockchain of our own to exchange our updates of our lives and our family photos and such if we wish to or to discuss, you know, politics or the economy or anything we wish to, and anybody that we let into that blockchain would be able to do that. And we didn’t have to answer to a central authority, which I thought was a fascinating part of your writing.

Stephen P. Williams 22:19
Yeah, you know, I think what you’re what you’re saying is true. And the the thing you you brought up a point that I think is really important, there are private blockchains, private enterprise blockchains and public blockchains. So in the case of doing a social media app, you’d probably want to be using a public blockchain so that their private blockchains do have control. So whoever sets them up, can control who enters and who doesn’t. But a public blockchain, you know, would definitely allow for people to express their opinions and and have some accountability for what they’re saying. I fear that the human nature with social media might get in the way of a beautiful social media site, even if it’s on blockchain. That’s that’s my idea. And there haven’t been any that have really taken off so far. Again, I think it’s a lot of it with a user experience. It’s hard to, to use these things, and you have to have some knowledge of coins and tokens.

Richard Helppie 23:20
Yeah, look, I understand is that every time a new technology is introduced into society, it takes a while before we find out what’s polite and what’s impolite about it, and, you know, where can be abused, and like, I don’t know this to be true, but I’m wondering if in a day of our grandfathers or great grandfather’s, you know, calling on the telephone for an appointment might have just been really poor manners, you know, should have been, you know, Dear Mr. Williams, I should like to call on you at two o’clock next, next Tuesday. And you would write back, it’s something like that. But who knows. Another part of the book that I enjoyed so much, is that you did contrast you know, what could be the upside with what could be the downside, which could be you know, something that just kind of loses steam and ends. One of the things you talk about is a D app, or a DAPP or a distributed application. Having no intermediary or broker, we talked a little bit earlier about fractionalized ownership, preserving the truth, exchanging money, letting people own their own data. The one thing in there that I wasn’t clear about was the personal ID–that how do we know who’s putting what into the blockchain? I mean, could I just get but could I be identified eight different ways on the same blockchain? Or would there be some control that they know it’s me?

Stephen P. Williams 24:49
Well, so you’re, you’re identified by a code, by a long string of numbers, right. You aren’t identified by your name. You can associate your name with that code so that it’s public that people know that that’s you, or you can keep it anonymous. Most people keep it anonymous. On my wallet, the wallet that I use, my name is not associated with it. But…and for no particular reason, honestly, you can do investigative work and figure out who is making transactions, though. Like you can, like every transaction is recorded on the blockchain, various blockchains for the Ethereum blockchain, you can go to ethercast.com and look at what everything that is, is published on the blockchain, right? So you can see that this one wallet is doing this transaction, it’s also doing another transaction with this other person, and if you’re smart, you know, private eye type of person, you can figure out eventually who that person is behind that wallet. So there are ways to, you know, to get around it, and figure out who’s doing what, for sure.

Richard Helppie 25:59
One thing that I think we ought to talk about is some of the like, the decentralized financing systems and the whole issue like what’s money? And is this a better way to do money and means of exchange? And I think you mentioned something, am I getting the acronym, right? NFT’s? What are those?

Stephen P. Williams 26:21
Well, these are just an incredible technology that first became known to me about three years ago, two and a half, three years ago. And what it is, is it’s a way of establishing digital ownership of a digital property, you can also apply to physical properties. But I’ll stick to digital for right now. So that means that you can own the, it’s a it’s a hard thing for people to grasp, I think at first, for many people. Let’s say that I have, I create a work of art online, right? It’s a bunch of lines and colors. And, anyone can copy it, because you can do a screen grab of that picture and copy it and claim matures and everything. But if I register that as an NFT, on the blockchain, then there’s a record that this is the first use of that digital image, right? It’s almost like an artist’s proof where they might have 100 different prints of the exact same artwork, and they label them one, two, three, four or five, you can prove that you own number one. So a lot of people have serious doubts that anyone will value that form of ownership, that owning the first of an image that anyone could reproduce is valuable. But this year has been proven to be extraordinarily valuable. And people the NFT market in artworks, is has exploded– billions of dollars are being spent on this stuff. There was one artwork that sold by a guy named Beeple for $69 million at Sotheby’s, that was an NFT. And so it’s a really interesting way to register artworks. It’s also a way just to give objects and digital assets identities, and so people are using NFT’s. Also, if you want me to explain NFT’s a little more, I don’t want to jump ahead.

Richard Helppie 28:25
No please, maybe a little bit indepth, because I’m tracking you, that the NFT is– represents an object almost like a copyright. And I do have a– I’m going to put this question in a case as part of the same answer, you know, like music. And so if I wrote a song, and I said, Look, I want to know, this is my song, no one’s going to steal it, or make a derivative work from it, I want to be able to put it out there and prove that I was the guy that made it. (Stephen: Right.) Is that kind of where we’re going with these things?

Stephen P. Williams 28:56
That could that’s definitely a use case. And that would be time stamped and noted on the blockchain. Yeah. So it’s a it’s a way of showing– of securing provenance of any, you know, any object. Now provenance is determined by pieces of paper, lawyers offices, a manila envelope traveling around the world, you know, it’s, it’s when you think about this really like very old fashioned. So if you can, if you can have an object registered on a blockchain, no one can challenge it, that it was that you put that there at a certain point. You know, it’s it’s immutable, it’s all there. And with physical objects, there are ways of photographing objects or artwork that will capture that object in a 360 degree view. And you you attach that to a code which is registered on the blockchain– the actual object or image is not registered on the blockchain– then if somebody tries to claim that they own that, you could have the same camera look at their objects and would be able to tell you if it was the same one that you registered or if they had made a counterfeit. Now counterfeit in our world right now, some people estimate that 50% of artwork sold is counterfeit. So it’s a huge issue and something that people kind of accept, you know, in the art world, and the ways that you get like paintings certified is by going to experts who might be influenced by other collectors. I mean, it’s it’s all a, it’s… our systems are not as solid as we think, you know, and blockchain is kind of exposing that, I think, in a lot of ways.

Richard Helppie 30:51
I’d like to really comment about that, you know, it can’t detect a lie. But if something is put in with an observation, and it’s a it’s a source of truth, whether it’s financial, you know, music, artwork, what have you, then there’s going to be verifiability, all the way through, you know, whether you know, food, something along the supply chain, you then you talk in your book about the concept of trust and trustless being the same, which I thought was a great point that you made. Would you just share with our listeners and viewers– that concept is a great, great phrasing, by the way in the book, again, it’s a “Blockchain: The Next Everything” is the book. I’m of course, we’re talking to the author, Stephen Williams. Stephen, what about trust and trustless? Are the same? How could that be?

Stephen P. Williams 31:42
That’s a concept that took me… took me a few days to kind of be comfortable with and basically what it means is, if something is trustworthy, you don’t even have to think about trust. Right? If it’s a guaranteed trustworthy thing, then trust becomes meaningless because it is what it is, right? Unlike with a human being, you might have to everyday reassess whether that person is trustworthy.

Richard Helppie 32:09
Indeed, and you talked about blockchains and brands, and blockchain and the way they’re using it in Shanghai, and some really fascinating ways that helps people understand whether the brand is keeping their integrity again I invite people to read the book. One area I want to into today, if we could, is voting. And what I know about voting, again, we use a very archaic way of validating that that is a legitimate voter signature, you know, from a time when people you know, maybe live their whole lives within seven miles of their birthplace, and you knew that, you know, that’s Rich Helppie, that’s Stephen P. Williams, and they sign it, yeah, I’ve already seen you on the books. We’re trying to apply that in a highly mobile society, that’s much greater. And we’re not sure of the counts, or we’ve been led to believe by some parties that the counts aren’t good and so forth. Back around last Christmas, Kahlil Byrd was on the Common Bridge talking about voting systems. And he referenced the company VOATZ, V-O-A-T-Z, about the early work they’re doing with voting with blockchain. You also brought up VOATZ the company, again V-O-A-T-Z and that the military is trying it for some people deployed outside the country…nd then there’s been some preliminary voting in Estonia and a referendum in Colombia. Can you just talk to us a little bit? What’s the promise or potential of using blockchain for voting?

Stephen P. Williams 33:48
Well, I think the potential and it is promising potential. It’s not reality yet, I don’t think, but and I thought about a lot during this all this turmoil over our recent election. Because basically, it seems like there are a lot of people who don’t trust the current system. So with blockchain, if you if you vote using your identifier, you can always check on the blockchain and see how your vote was cast. It is immutable, it can’t be changed. Now there are a lot of aspects of it that are very, very secure. So that’s the promise of it is that people could simply vote using their telephone or their computer, it would be very easy. Everything would be totaled immediately. You know, you could do the you wouldn’t have to wait weeks to find out who won. So all that is really great. The problem with it is that people don’t trust– I don’t think trust blockchains yet– the general public. It’s hard to use the interfaces, even the votes interfaces, I think you have to take some steps to be able to do that. Already, if people are saying that it’s difficult for some people to, you know, to have an ID or to show up at a certain time, or you know, there are all kinds of impediments. I don’t know that you want to be adding impediments right now to that. So there are some drawbacks. Some people say that it opens the system to being hacked. And, you know, the voting system, which is a fear that a lot of people already have. So I think it shows incredible promise, I wouldn’t be surprised if within five or 10 years, we we are voting that way. But I think for now, it seems to me that the best solution is to have paper ballots that can be counted and confirmed, just given the level of paranoia that people have.

Richard Helppie 35:43
And there’s certainly no short supply of paranoia. But I do like what the story in your book about the military that were offshored to be able to vote in a West Virginia election. (Stephen: Yeah, it’s great.) You know, identified with their thumbprint, so you’re registered on your blockchain with your thumbprint, which, you know, everybody can can get one of those, the votes can be verified. And you know, the ID goes one direction the vote goes another– you can see your ballot and see how it was recorded. Nobody can see that that’s your ballotm but they can see that you did vote. The votes would be tallied instantly, there couldn’t be voter fraud. But it does require technology, it requires access to high speed internet. Again, I think the promise is there, I think the bigger question is going to be do we have the will to get to elections with that level of integrity.

Stephen P. Williams 36:39
I think we will honestly. And if you look at this infrastructure bill, which looks like it’s going to go into pass– there’s something really great in that which is trying to provide high speed internet access to rural areas in the United States. And imagine what a transformation that will be, for people using blockchain, for people voting, for cryptocurrency, for everything like that, when somebody in rural Idaho has access to high speed internet, I think it’s going to change everything. And that seems like it will happen in the next few years.

Richard Helppie 37:12
I share your enthusiasm for that kind of a world. And when we think about the pace of change, it’s not something we can imagine. I may have mentioned this on the show before but when the Wright brothers flew, all four of my grandparents were alive. And two of them were adults. Wow. When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, all four of them were still alive. I don’t think they said” oh, you know that the Wright brothers flew 30 yards, six feet off the ground, so I guess we’re going to the moon!” And here we are with this pace of change, screaming along with a nascent technology that may give rise to a much better world. And certainly there will be bad actors that try to exploit it. But I think the more we learn about it, the better chance we have of a good outcome.

Stephen P. Williams 38:00
For sure. I mean, we’re at the infant stage of you know, digital technology and blockchain. And I remember, in the 90s, I was walking on Fifth Avenue, I looked up, I saw a bus that had a, it had a URL, you know, like an address, and another address on the side of it. And I had no idea what I was looking at. And I was so excited by that, because I knew it was something really important. And it took many years for that to be– for the worldwide web to become an everyday thing. And I think that’s true with blockchain too. And in a few more years, you won’t even.. you’ll be using it, but you won’t, you won’t be conscious of it. It won’t be a big thing. Nobody’s going to be selling orange juice produced on the blockchain or something like that. It’ll just be in the background doing a lot of lot of good things.

Richard Helppie 38:49
Yeah, and one of the earlier points you made in your book was that, you know, Amazon Web Services now have a build your own blockchain, right? It’s such great technology, there’s going to be like anything new, there’ll be some things that won’t work. And we’ll have some really remarkable successes. And I share your feeling because as I’m reaching this stage of life, and you know, as I go, Hey, you need a QR code dad, or grandpa. All right, I’ve got that. But the pace that it moves is really remarkable. And think about an age now where we want to watch a movie in our home, and we have long digital libraries, and if it doesn’t, like start instantly, we’re amazed. (Stephen: We’re throwing yeah, throwing popcorn at the TV.) Yeah, exactly. So that was an unimaginable situation during my lifetime. Steven, this has been a great conversation. And again, I do want to recommend the book it’s a read that you can do in bite sized chunks, I read it on Kindle. I understand in print it’s about 188 pages. We’ll have a graphic up about the book. And I just encourage my readers to become educated about this very exciting technology. Because eventually, if not already, there’s going to be political forces, and there’s going to be reporting organizations that are going to try to scare you, because the other guys are going to use it to harm you. And this and if you understand it, you’ll know to shut out all that noise, of course, a very important part of what we do on the Common Bridge. Get educated, stay away from the partisanship, stay away from the talking points and become your own independent thinker. (Stephen: sovereign citizen is what I like to call it.) And it is possible if we put these tools together for use for the Common Bridge for the common interests amongst us. And there’s far less that divides us than unites us. And we need to be talking to each other. And this is another great technology to do that with. Stephen, we could probably go on for a couple hours. But what is it that we didn’t cover today that we probably should have before we wrap up today?

Stephen P. Williams 41:06
That people who invested in ether or cryptocurrency about a year ago would have made so much money by this month that it would astound them. I would just encourage people to look at the the way that cryptocurrency goes up and down but steadily up– the main cryptocurrency and I think it’s really interesting. And again, it’s accessible to everyone you can invest 15 cents in cryptocurrency and you don’t have to invest $100,000. (Rich: any closing thoughts for our audience today?) Yeah, one very important thought is, there are environmental consequences to blockchain and cryptocurrency and some chains are moving very rapidly. And some chains are already there, to reducing electricity consumption by 90%. Ethereum is probably the best example of that right now. So you do have choices you can make that are more beneficial to society than other choices.

Richard Helppie 42:06
Very important point. (Stephen: Really important) You know, given what we’re dealing with now, with climate and climate action, we’ve had a couple of climatologists on the Common Bridge, and they’ve laid out what they think the common interest is and how we can deal with these issues today. This is Rich Helppie with our guest, Stephen P. Williams, author of “Blockchain: The Next Everything” and until next time, Rich Helppie signing off on the Common Bridge– the Common Bridge, of course available on wherever you get your podcasts, YouTube TV, as well as RichardHelppie.com. So long, everyone see you next time.

Brian Kruger 42:48
You have been listening to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge podcast. Recording and post production provided by Stunt3 Multimedia. All rights are reserved by Richard Helppie. For more information, visit RichardHelppie.com.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai