Joe Hall interviews Blockstream CEO Adam Back while playing Jenga. Back explains how Blockstream's satellite broadcasts blockchain data anonymously, lets you sync a full node in one to two weeks, and uses error-correction so you can reassemble it from partial broadcasts.
To make sure.
No, no.
Oops.
Hi, it's Joe hall with Cointelegraph. I like to play games and I think bitcoiners do too. So I thought I'd interview Adam Back, CEO and co founder of Blockstream and one of the few people so cited in the bitcoin white paper. But while playing Jenga. Jenga is a game where you put blocks on top of the other in a chain. So I thought he might be quite good at it.
Very good. And what about the future? What does the future hold for Adam Back?
Yeah, so I think bitcoin is like, very fertile ground for applied R and D and it covers lots of interrelated topics for people with, you know, mathematical, computer science, programming. That's all interesting to me. So. Yeah, just more.
More bitcoin, more bitcoin.
Bitcoin is like more blocks. Yeah, I don't know. We're getting there, aren't we? There's nothing really moving here.
Yeah, These three here look ripe. Like maybe that one.
Oh, okay. Like that one looks.
Look at then that's creating a very unstable structure at the top.
Yeah.
Steady hands. You know, you've seen the space. Whoa. You've seen the space evolve and develop over the past, what, 13, 14 years. What advice would you give to someone that's, you know, picking up and learning, you know, the new generation, the Gen Zs, approaching bitcoin, or Boomer Coin as some of them like to call it. What advice would you give to these guys that are starting out?
Well, I think a good way to get involved is to sort of try to contribute to something as a volunteer and you learn things and you get to interact with people. And then after a while, people might, you know, you might be able to get a job on the basis of that. It's kind of weight. And that could be across many different things, you know, like user interface or documentation or educational materials. So there's lots of different things you can do. So kind of running out of options here, but this is like a bit hard to get anything that's stiff out, Topple it over process, but.
Little bit sweaty under here. Okay. And we haven't spoke about Blockstream yet. Obviously you're very busy with satellite projects putting bitcoin in space. Why? Why do we need bitcoin in space?
There's a few reasons. One is because it's cool and you can.
Why do anything, right?
Yeah. And another is that, you know, when you connect a bitcoin node to the Internet, it's a peer to peer network. So it's kind of naturally advertising to anybody that tries to. Whoa. That's a bit surprising.
Now I've seen it all.
I mean, wow. The whole thing is resting on one and it's off center too.
Give up lock picking, start jenggering. You know, this is the real blockchain.
Yeah. And so you get some kind of privacy because the receiving is anonymous orphan blocks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need to get some more blockchain or bitcoin puns into this. This guy here just seems like he's doing nothing. No, he's useful. Okay. You'll see things differently after a while, haven't you.
I mean, there are things higher up, but the problem is it's got so unstable that you probably knock it off train. Right.
Well, that's it. This one here is. So we're going to put bitcoin in space because it's cool.
Yeah. And I mean, it gives you some privacy because you can receive the data anonymously because it's broadcast and basically nobody can tell you're receiving it. So that's good for privacy. It's good for companies because, you know, they really need to make.
No shit. No shit.
Oh, shit. Oops. Well, it was like basically tapped out. Right. There wasn't much options left.
Wrecked. Well played, Adam. I mean, I expected to lose there with the man that is, you know, building blocks better than most people.
Yeah. So, yeah, it's like the satellite is good for companies to have redundant Internet connection to make sure they're on the right blockchain if there's a local network issue or if a router is hacked to selectively prevent blocks passing through. And it also lowers the cost of staying of being on the network. So for emerging markets, the cost of an Internet connection fast enough to keep up with bitcoin is actually expensive compared to salaries. Whereas to us, we don't think too much about it because we've got high speed 3G, 4G on phones and high speed Internet and it doesn't cost that much relative to salaries. So it reduces that cost because receiving the bulk data is free. In the update we did a few years ago, we added more bandwidth and more compression and set it up so that you could sync a node from scratch by the satellite. It takes a week or two, but actually fetches all the history as well and reassembles it. And there's some pretty cool kind of tech in there in terms of error correction and redundancy so you can jump in and receive enough of these chunks so that you don't have to wait for a repetition. You just receive parts, and you can miss some parts. And there's a kind of redundancy code that allows you to reassemble the original from any sort of subset of these parts.
I think we should probably leave it there. What do you think? Okay, cool. That's a wrap.
