 What's up guys? I'm here with my buddy, Hasib. Now Hasib is just a buddy. He just joined the block geeks team and he's our, what do you call yourself? The evangelist. Devangelist. Yeah. Now, DEV, so you're taking evangelists, combining it with developer and you're getting evangelists. He's going to be creating all the courses on block geeks, teaching everybody the technicalities from Ethereum through maybe the IPFS, and just really becoming a good engineer. So Hasib, welcome to the family and welcome to the MIR ROSIC YouTube channel. Awesome. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. So how's it been so far, man? Kind of diving into the blockchain space. Oh, it's like entering the matrix is just so much information, so much to learn. But it's been great. It's been great just learning about the cool things that people are doing around the world with this new innovation platform. Yeah. So what are we talking about today? So today I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the limitations of blockchain and how we're trying to overcome them. Yeah. So we're trying to achieve scale and we want enterprises to use blockchain, but right now one of the major problems is the throughput of even the best block chains like Ethereum, Bitcoin, the throughput is nowhere near comparable to centralized companies like Visa or Mastercard. So one of the questions is how do we get to that scale? How do we get to that throughput? And one of the solutions for that problem is proof of stake versus proof of work. So right now we have this proof of work consensus algorithm on the blockchain, which says, hey, everybody who is mining on the network needs to agree on what the consensus is, needs to agree on. Mining using rigs. Right. Right. So how do you agree on the current state of the world? And so the way proof of work, the way proof of work works is that everyone has to validate it versus in proof of stake, there is a set number of validators, which is smaller than everyone in the network. So you know, you could argue that it's taking away some of the decentralization aspect of blockchain and some security aspects too. Right. But it's doing it for the trade off of, okay, how do we get the throughput higher? Is there also, so since we're on proof of stake versus proof of work, proof of stake, people are actually staking ether on Casper. Right. So instead of in proof of work, where you're actually staking, you know, you're staking. Yeah, I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on A6 and on the mining and renting and everything. Exactly. So you're putting down money. So what they're trying to do is just virtualize all that, because all of that, all of the heat and the mining and electricity that is generated is not not so great for our environment. So proof of stake basically tries to virtualize all that and says, Hey, instead of, you know, spending real money to buy physical hardware, you can spend ether and put it down as like a deposit to be a miner in the network. And also you have slashing conditions, right? So if you put down ether, and correct me if I'm wrong, you put down ether, you stake it and if you're a bad actor, because how I understand it with proof of stake, at least for Casper, maybe this is also for EOS and everyone else who has their own proof of stake model consensus is by default, everyone's a bad actor until you prove yourself otherwise. Right, right. So the entire concept behind decentralization is to assume that everyone cannot be trusted. So how do you conduct business with somebody who can't be trusted? How do you have that intermediary, that software, that middleware to facilitate that? So how does proof of stake... So right now it's roughly let's say 14 transactions a second on Ethereum. And if you have an ERC 20 token, it's like seven transactions. So all these ICOs out there promising all this, but the reality is that actually, we're years away from what they think they can do. Right. Not from just a technical aspect, also from a scaling aspect, from a psychological aspect, like use case scenario aspect, from a security aspect, financial aspect. So that being said, I'm curious, how does proof of stake increase scalability? Well, it reduces the amount of work required to generate a new block. Okay. Right. So the blockchain, the heartbeat of the blockchain is, you know, every... Time between block. Yeah, exactly. So every, it's like a pulse, right? Like every few seconds or few minutes, you generate a block. Yeah. And that block basically requires a bunch of people on the network to agree that this is the true block. This is what the next block hash will be. Yeah. And what it's essentially doing is lowering the amount of people required for that validation. Okay. So that can speed up the validation process. Okay. So we can generate blocks faster and validate transactions faster as a result. Okay. Right. Have they said when they're coming out, Casper? I don't think they've said a full date. I think it's sometime in 2018. I'm interested to see that happen. I'm interested to see how sharding plays out. Right. Right. So one big experiment. I don't know what to expect. I'm not expecting anything. I don't want to set any expectations. I'm going to sit back and relax and see how all these platforms execute on their promises. Okay. So, you know, that's Ethereum. Ethereum states that they can scale. And I'm not too sure the numbers. I think it goes to thousands of transactions a second, once hypothetically. Plasma and all these. Plasma, sharding, et cetera, et cetera. That's one thing. You mentioned other things before. So for this. Yeah. So enterprises also, you know, like a company like Netflix, they also want to use storage on the blockchain, right? But right now, computation and storage on the blockchain is very expensive. And storage is far more expensive than computation. So Ethereum wasn't built to be... Well, that's another thing. I'm glad you got that up. Storing large amount of data on a blockchain doesn't fly. It's the worst ever. Like for the god's sake, even with Bitcoin, they're debating one megabyte to two megabytes. Right. You know what I mean? Like, think about megabytes, right? Right. So the whole idea when people are saying, we're going to store something on the Ethereum blockchain or the big... No. Right. You're not storing anything in the box. Right. So right now it's infeasible to do that. Infeasible. It's too expensive to do that, right? So what people do is they come up with work rounds, right? Like, instead of storing the MP3, they'll store a hash. A hash. So that it's a fixed size and they know how much space it's going to take. But if you're trying to build something like Netflix, where, you know, you're distributing video to millions of users around the world, you can't build that entirely on the blockchain right now. So some of the solutions that we've come up with to actually store data in a decentralized way, right? Because we want this to be decentralized. Like if we have a storage system like S3 or Dropbox, and we all start using that, right, that still kind of defeats the purpose. Because it's centralized, it can be attacked and, you know, it can cause damage to other networks that are dependent on it, right? So some solutions to this are IPFS and storage, which provide decentralized storage solutions. So instead of your data being stored, you know, on a server farm, your data is distributed across the world. And that sort of redundancy guarantees that, okay, you won't lose your data. And you can still be pretty confident that it'll be there and anyone else who wants to access it can access it. So these storage solutions are far cheaper than storing data on the actual blockchain itself. So what people are doing is, you know, using the hash to maybe reference a file on IPFS. So that's a common word. IPFS works around, correct me if I'm wrong, they're just hashing data from, they're just connecting data into one big hash. Right. So what they're doing is, you know, instead of having, you know, really long URLs to reference like an image, for instance, they're just having, you know, small hashes that uniquely identify a file on the web. Got you. Okay. Yeah. Cool. So yeah, that's that's one of the problems with blockchain. Another problem today is, you know, bringing in data from the real world online into the blockchain. Like, how do you do that? You can't, the blockchain won't automatically know things that are happening. It's a massive problem onboarding problem. Huge, right? So you need to figure out how to inject that data into the blockchain. How do you tell it that? Hey, you know, like Haseeb shipped Amir like a pencil. How does the blockchain know that Amir actually got that pencil? Right. Right now, the blockchain can't figure it out by itself. Right. So we need to tell it. And, you know, some ways that we have of telling it that is, you know, maybe in our transaction, we have a third verifier who approves that. Okay. Like Amir indeed got the pencil and, you know, we don't even need to get to a third person. That can only be in the case of, you know, a dispute where, you know, someone says that, you know, the transaction didn't go through. We can have a third party verifier. But, you know, if we, if we have some sort of trust between each other, we can say that, okay, like I've received the pencil, this transaction is complete and I can receive my money. So where do you think, like, what's possible? Where do you think, like, do you think we're like two to four years away from, like, fixing these scalability issues, like truly understanding that we've scaled it to this many users and this much financial input into this ecosystem? Yeah, it's kind of hard to say, like, it was going to be two years or four years. But I think, I think over the next, let's say five years, I think, I think we'll start seeing the scale that we need to be, you know, enterprise-level scalability. So then all these crazy startups have been these days raising millions and millions of dollars. Right, right. Like, to me, you know, unscalability promises, you know, God bless them for trying, you know what I mean? But, like, there's what you want and then there's reality. Right. I want to be an NBA basketball player. I'm six on the dot. I can't jump for shit. You know what I mean? So that's reality. Right. And it'll probably take me five years to increase my fucking hoops by an inch or two, right? It's not now. It's not now. I can't sell myself as an NBA superstar. Right. So, you know, all these startups, you know, raising 20, 30, 40, 50 million dollars on these ICOs, promising these technological euphoria solutions for everything. But in reality, is the technology can do that? Is this a white paper? No beta, no alpha, no nothing. Right. Right. Most of these are just ideas, right? And that's one of the downsides of, like, an innovation platform, like Ethereum, right? It enables funding of, you know, weird and wacky ideas that may not get traditional funding, but you can also... Man, I'm down for weird and wacky ideas. But as a theorem as a foundation, I think we need more foundations as opposed to ICOs. Right. If the whole point is R&D research, which exists think tanks, but the bureaucracy behind functioning and running a think tank, it's ludicrous, right? There's a lot of red tape and paperwork. But hey, if the whole purpose is to expedite and accelerate the advancements of the technology, then why don't we create more foundations? Right. I'm not expecting a return from the foundation. Hell, I'll throw money into R&D if that's going to be better, but you can't profit off it. Right. This is for everybody. This infrastructure, no patent or anything. Anybody on the fucking planet can use this technology. Right. And I also don't believe in companies like building core infrastructure and saying that they're going to solve scalability problems and then asking for ICO to do that. Like, that doesn't sit well with me and I think the larger community as well. Cool. Any last thoughts? All that being said, even though we do have issues, that's what makes this exciting. If it just everything just worked, we wouldn't have things to work on. That's right. It's a very exciting field, regardless of some of the challenges that we're facing, but we have some of the best minds working on it. That's right. Awesome. Well, guys, if you want to find more about Haseeb, check out Blocking. Also, if you're looking for any training when it comes to Ethereum coding, maybe even IPFS, like really upping your level as an engineer, as a coder, even as a non-technical person, visit Blocking.com where we offer online training. All right, guys, if you want to leave a comment, please do below and we'll make sure to answer them. Have a great day. Peace. Thank you.