A short interview (Feb 12, 2018 upload) with Karl Seelig, who describes leaving telecom (RingPlus) to found a blockchain company (Chain BLX) and discusses blockchain use cases beyond cryptocurrencies (IoT, medical/pharmacy prescriptions). He also comments on cryptocurrency market volatility, observing that crypto-driven hype helps marketing but risks dragging down broader blockchain investments if a crash occurs.
Foreign.
My name is Carl Seelig. I founded a company which is in blockchain technology chain blx. We just started the company this year and before this I was the CEO of a telecom called Ring plus, which now I changed to blockchain. Great.
Do you mind if I ask what made you decide to start going into the blockchain industry?
I was listening to technology during the developed products in telecom and I was really interested in this technology. Further inspectation of this technology was showing me opportunities which are outside cryptocurrencies, which is really interesting.
Very cool. How do you think that blockchain is going to further develop and grow and have an impact in 2018?
I think we will see a lot of things in blockchain. We see a lot of launches of cryptocurrencies, but we will also see other things like launches in Internet of Things where blockchain will be used. We will see it most likely in different applications in the medical field where we see that blockchain will be used, for example, for pharmacies, for prescription and so on. So I think it's a new thing. It's just like it was before Internet. Then it was voice over the Internet. Now it's blockchain over the Internet.
Do you think that cryptocurrency's volatility and reputation and all of the rhetoric around it actually hurt the development of blockchain, or do you think it's a force of good that sort of pushes it forwards?
Well, everyone is in the same boat and from a marketing perspective, everyone involved in the blockchain right now takes advantage of the boom in the cryptocurrencies. So everyone tries also when it's far away and just a little part of the business to say I'm involved in blockchain just to take advantage what the cryptocurrencies right now do. But doing this has also the negative thing. When the cryptocurrencies would crash, so will also all the other stocks go down in the blockchain. So it's really important right now for everyone involved in crowd chain to have a strategy. What will happen then? There would be basically a depreciation of the cryptocurrencies.
And do you think that's going to happen?
There is always a market adjustment. Internet stocks went also down in 2000 and we make now more money over the whole Internet than we did ever before. So when I'm a pessimist and I say, yeah, one day the stock market will crash, I'm surely right.
