EB107 – Gideon Greenspan: The Blockchain Is A New Database Paradigm
Channel: Epicenter Podcast
Date: 2015-11-30

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Gideon Greenspan, a computer scientist and CEO/Founder of the Israeli startup Coin Sciences, joined us for a discussion of their private blockchain platform MultiChain. Besides diving into the popular question of what's the point of a private blockchain, we covered his earlier colored coins implementation as well as his view that blockchains are best understood as a novel database paradigm.

Topics covered included:
- How Gideon got involved in the blockchain space
- Their colored coins implementation MultiSpark and why it failed to get traction
- Why he saw a market for an open-source private blockchain platform and started MultiChain
- What mining diversity is and how it is used for consensus in MultiChain
- How permissions work in MultiChain
- The issues of privacy in blockchains and why you can't have auditability and privacy
- How private blockchains differ from regular distributed databases
- The five criteria to decide if a project needs a blockchain
- The problem he sees with smart contract blockchains

Links mentioned in this episode: 

- Multichain website http://bit.ly/1HAp61D
- Multichain Whitepaper http://bit.ly/1MZE12a
- Colored coin protocol CoinSpark http://bit.ly/1lqg390
- Avoiding the pointless blockchain project: http://bit.ly/1SsbOEP
- Private blockchains are more than 'just' shared databases http://bit.ly/1ToiODm
- Smart contracts: The good, the bad and the lazy http://bit.ly/1SsbTII

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Show notes: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/107
SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/epicenterbitcoin/eb-107


Epicenter Bitcoin is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Sébastien Couture & Meher Roy.
 
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