Sam Brown: Hello everyone, I'm Sam Brown. I'm an associate in Wragge Lawrence Graham & Co's Tech team. I am here with Lui Smyth whose UK lead at CoinJar - Australia's largest Bitcoin wallet and exchange. So Louis, tell me, could Bitcoins ever replace conventional money or payment systems?
Lui Smyth: Well, good question. Could Bitcoin replace all our money? It's conceivable - the system could potentially evolve to the point where it could support that level of transaction and it is possible that there would be economic incentives in place that would make it worthwhile in terms of it being a cheaper system. However, it is highly unlikely. The idea that running all your transactions globally for seven billion people through a single database would be the most efficient way to do business seems implausible, at best, but what we will see is Bitcoin and the Bitcoin related technologies being used in interesting ways in different payment systems and that might mean blockchain style management information and might mean non-blockchain digital tokens circulating in a similar way to the way we see Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a sign of things to come, we think and I mean at CoinJar part of our expectation is that we will see a rich ecosystem of different digital tokens thing like money and things that are less like money, like point systems and so on, evolving in the future.
Sam Brown: If the blockchain is a permanent record of all transactions that have ever been completed at what point does its size make it unworkable as a decentralised system? Is it possible to scale it to a major payment network or will it run into transaction of volume issues?
Lui Smyth: This is something we kind of need a crystal ball to comment on this properly. What we do know is, at the moment, with the current community the blockchain is 28 gigabytes in size and it grows about a gigabyte per month and people point to that and they say 'well if we have a thousand times more people using that then the blockchain surely would be huge and how do we handle a blockchain that size?'. Well gigabyte is a volume of data that used to sound huge and now it sounds manageable and we would anticipate that in the future, a gigabyte would be handled the way we currently treat a megabyte and just to get some context CERN, the large Hadron collider in a physics lab underneath Switzerland and France that produces 25 million gigabytes of data per day so huge volumes of data and if there is a need to handle those kind of volumes, as there is in CERN, then its accommodated. So if a Bitcoin blockchain had to scale to the kind of size needed for a mass adoption, then it would look very different. You are not going to see people running nodes in their bedrooms anymore, realistically, but you would see people running nodes in offices and server-farms and so on because as long as there are people finding the system useful, then there are people who are going to be able to provide the necessary infrastructure.
Sam Brown: Actually that is a very interesting point you make, as you said as, as we move away from people running the servers in their bedroom towards a more centralised server farm how does that fit with Bitcoin's libertarian roots?
Lui Smyth: The early internet looked very libertarian. It was very different to the internet that we now know and love (and we loved the early internet as well), but the early internet was built a lot more on goodwill and it was built a lot more on kind of optimism and novelty. So we do not run our own email service anymore. Instead, we have also outsourced that to Google and in exchange they have turned our data into a product and you can argue that is bad but still revolutionary compared to the way we were sending information before by post and so, sure, Bitcoin and digital currencies are likely to be compromised from their original ideals, but that does not take away from the fact that they bring huge benefits and they will do a lot of good potentially.
Sam Brown: Thank you for listening. I hope you found that interesting and useful. If you do have any further questions please do not hesitate to get in contact with any one of our Tech team.