Once blockchain finds the right application exponential adoption will follow, Blockchain for Dummies author Tiana Laurence interviewed

What is your background briefly?

There is only really one theme in my life that would tie everything together. I Love technology and believe we can solve any problems we face with it. Bitcoin became my obsession a few years ago. The idea that we could send payment globally with little to no friction was amazing. But mining Bitcoin is very resource intense and challenging. For fun I was mining Bitcoin in my living room, and writing how-to guides. After a few months of heating my house with my bitcoin miner, I started to wonder if there were other things we could do that would allow us to better leverage the network.

After discussing this with a friend and reading a white paper, he had helped author, I sold my company and moved to Texas to help build a new software company. That company was Factom and it is a high capacity blockchain network. We built some of the very first enterprise blockchain software. Not much was known about Bitcoin at the time so I started speaking publicly and writing to try and explain to the general public why the technology was such a game changer. At the time there was a lot of negative press about Bitcoin.

I wanted to help change the narrative and talk about the business and social impact of blockchain. Wiley publishing reached out to me after reading some of my work and asked if I would be interested in writing a book on blockchain. A few months later and with a lot of help from my editors, we published Blockchain for Dummies.

(see both reviews here)

Blockchain For Dummies, 2nd Edition by Tiana Laurence, reviewed

Does it seem like a logical background to what you do now?

Yes, I’m still advocating for blockchain technology, investing in the space, and writing.

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

I have some new ideas about how we can leverage decentralized networks to enable smart IoT devices to negotiate for resources. I’m working on this project now. I also have another book in the works.

In many ways it makes sense to write a 2nd edition as so much has happened since the first edition. Would you agree? Where do you feel we are in terms of the Gartner hype curve in terms of blockchain?

The space moved so fast after the ICO crazy, a lot of money and talent was attracted. Blockchain is still a “backend” software so despite the excitement there were not enough engineers at the time to work on all the projects. The enthusiasm also attracted scam artists. When I wrote Blockchain for Dummies there were only a few dozen projects in the world.

Now there are thousands. It is possible after Facebooks Libra is fully released that there could billions of people using blockchain technology and millions of companies. If we compare this to the progress of the internet, we are still in the early 90’s. Most people know about it, but it is for simple things like chat rooms. Libra could be equivalent to Hotmail + Myspace, an application that most people like and can use.

If you were to do a 3rd edition in a few years time, what would ‘good’ look like if blockchain adoption continues to grow?

I think that we will see governments issuing digital currency on permissioned blockchains. We will also see more companies switching to self-clearing and settling securities. They make a tone of sense and will save companies and regulators a lot of money.

I hope we see more compelling use cases that engage the general public. Blockchain has yet to find an application that drives exponential adoption.

What aspects are you excited about in terms of the roll out of blockchain?

I’m very excited about Libra and the innovations on the Ethereum network. It will be very interesting to see how proof of stake works and sharding the network. If Ethereum is able to accomplish this while maintaining data integrity, mainstream Dapps can become practical.

How can people find out more about you & your work?

@laurencetiana is the best way to catch me

Signed a bunch of my new Blockchain for Dummies books! Thanks @TheScottRob! @shayes! pic.twitter.com/ANjcGGXN4D

— Tiana Laurence (@LaurenceTiana) June 1, 2019

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