Put your brain into the Blockchain! | An Interview with Crystal Rose

I'm Crystal Rose, the CEO and co founder of Sensei and I've been in technology my whole life. I started coding when I was 11. I was taught through an AOL chat room anonymously how to code HTML to start. And I've learned computer languages more than human languages. My first company was a digital agency and from there I learned that social media was rocking the world, started a social media platform and I've since moved on to deeper technology, machine learning and AI with a primary goal of connecting all of the world's humans together. I think today more than ever, it's becoming easier to leverage technology and even build businesses on top of it without understanding the underlying protocols too deeply. We have so many companies building infrastructure that allow you to easily plug in. Certainly the Internet is a great source for figuring things out and even trying it yourself. Coding is actually really easy. So trying to use something Open source from GitHub and do something for yourself the first time gives you a lot of insight. One of my favorite things to do is have designers actually code their designs for the first time through front end coding, just to see how the process goes. I think in terms of blockchain, it's important to really talk to the people behind it and a lot of them are very accessible. Look at the telegram groups or any other group that's happening, the forums and just really connect directly to the people. That's the best way to learn. The human brain is really just a computer. It's a data storage device, it's hardware. We have inputs and outputs and eventually we will be looking at the brain like a node on a system. Every single human has a database of information on their shoulders that's like a warehouse and hopefully soon we can all connect. I like to talk about the brain on the blockchain because I think, I think that there are things that you want an immutable record for and there are things that you really want to have as true information that's validated eventually as nodes on a network. As we all connect together, we'll have to have a system where we can have that kind of trust. So to me, that's my passion now. I've always wanted to connect all of the humans and help them to become better and level up. And now we have that opportunity in a much, much bigger way with the combination of AI and blockchain. Adoption in this space while we're moving really fast is still very slow because it's very hard for consumers to use. We are somewhere around 1% of the total mobile population who's currently using digital currency, at least in known users. So, you know, that looks something like 50 million. Earlier this year it was about 5 million. And these are studies done by MIT and Cambridge. And you know, still it's extremely hard to quantify. I think that the space is going to move incredibly fast, as we've seen even this year alone. Yesterday, bitcoin hit over 10,000 USD. And I think that that's showing us that we certainly have traction and the system is going to keep moving forward. I'd like to see more people be able to adopt it faster. So for the consumer applications that are out there, I think it's important that more developers get on board with building bots. We at Sense have an API that we've opened up, so we opened our entire underlying technology. We're moving from a centralized company to a decentralized company, giving away all of the technology we've built over the last three years because we want to encourage more people to build on top of it. So if more companies can open source, if more developers can come on board, and if more consumers can start using the applications, we're going to see the world radically transform in a very positive way. Bitcoin is really interesting. I look at it personally as my savings account. It's kind of perceived to be digital gold for some people. I think it's done a really good job of being a store of value. It's done less of a good job of being a functional technology that we can build on top of, like Ethereum with smart contracts. So I think continue to fork is okay, we'll talk about that. Maybe contentious forking, not so good, but as it continues to evolve and move on, a lot of people have issues with forking. I think forking is a good thing. I think a great man once said that all forking leads to spooning. No, actually that was in Brock Pierce's talk. But really all forking. We wouldn't be here if there were not forks. Every human is a result of forking, so I think that that's one thing that keeps driving it forward. Really though, this is a 2017 was the era of altcoins and to see so many ICOs happening on top of Ethereum. Ethereum's best application is the ico. Really fascinating to see what's happening. Rounding out the end of the year. I think we're at $3 billion now about invested into ICOs and really I don't know how many of them would be on Bitcoin. So let's Keep Bitcoin as that store of value and let's keep building on other protocols and other chains and build our own chains to make something functional. I have a repository of white papers. I'm going to tell you something really geeky about my a part of the White Paper Club. The White Paper Club is like a book club where we get together for coffee and we read white papers. Because I think it's really important that people are understanding the ideas that are out there. I love the big visions. I think it's amazing that we have so many huge visionaries. There are a lot of theoretical things, but let's not forget the white papers that existed a while ago. So I was just reading one recently for a product I really want. It's from 2006. Somebody wrote a white paper on a decentralized calendar application. And that sounds super baseline. It's a really, really simple app and it's probably not something that people want to run an ICO over. But I think that the thing is we don't need a world of infrastructure and protocols. Eventually the infrastructure is going to get built, eventually the roads are going to be there, and eventually the buildings will be on top of those as well. So the developers who are working on things that seemingly are small, the applications of the future, please get everything decentral. We need decentralized calendars and to do lists, we need better email. I think if there's one ICO I really want to see and something I will put down my coins for today, it would be a better system of email communication. It's always fascinating to me to explain blockchain. I feel like it's kind of like trying to tell somebody who uses a website what TCPIP is. It's almost unnecessary to a point. I've had a lot of interesting experiences. I think that the word cryptocurrency has probably gotten me the funniest looks. And going through my own ICO has drawn a lot of attention from my entire network. Everybody that I've known throughout my entire life. People from junior high have come forward and distant cousins sending me messages on Facebook. And that process has been really funny because I'm realizing that I am in a bubble of intelligent people who are all in this space who know about it deeply and the rest of the world has very little idea. So you start at the base layer of what is cryptocurrency? And even that word alone seems a little bit scary. I think it might go away like the word webmaster, just from the reactions that we get so I'm having a really good time getting the world to understand blockchain and crypto a little bit more.