Crypto Watch

Crypto Watch is a blockchain interview program from TheConstantInvestor.com, hosted by Alan Kohler, and it treats the technology as a business question first. Who is building it, who pays for it, and when will it be ready? The price talk mostly waits until the end. Kohler introduces Iagon, represented by Dr. Navjit Dhaliwal, as a bid to challenge Amazon, IBM, Google and Microsoft with a distributed network of storage and computer processing. The Iagon conversation includes a pointed complaint: many recent projects promised a lot during their sales and then fell short, run by teams stronger on the technical side than the business side. IBM's Rupert Colchester presents the IBM Food Trust as a set of modules sold by subscription, with trace and certification among them, and names Walmart, Nestle and Golden State Foods. Kohler follows up with the shopper's question: does the customer at the store pay as well? With Nick Armstrong of Identitii, the conversation starts from the company's ASX listing and share price. It then moves to ledger records that are unlocked with a key and show only what the sending bank permits, and to SWIFT, the network banks use to communicate with one another. Australian institutions come up often. A double header on the Australian national blockchain pairs Dr Mark Staples of CSIRO's Data61, who sketches a path from pilot projects to general availability, with Natasha Blicher of Herbert Smith Freehills, who rejects the idea that it is simply a blockchain for the law. Dirk Bauer of the University of WA Business School, whose school is about to launch a summer school on blockchain, compares ledger consensus with the way Wikipedia entries get edited until people agree. Kohler then tests where the analogy breaks, noting that a blockchain generally records transactions. Jordan Michaelides of CoinJar calls institutional crypto volume still really small, in Australia and globally. Asked whether Bitcoin is winning out over Bitcoin Cash, he says the prices suggest nothing to him right now and that the use case is what counts. Then comes Saeed Sidaoui's weekly wrap-up, a scorecard rather than a conversation. He reports the average move of the same group of major coins, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin, and picks out standouts, such as a Binance listing lifting a smaller project or Bitcoin Cash rising ahead of a hard fork. His adjectives add a little opinion: gains are massive or lovely, and one slide is brutal. Those figures belong to the week they were read, so they record a moment and are no guide to today. For a concrete business example, start with 'A blockchain for tracking food: IBM Food Trust'. For the concept itself, 'What do blockchain and Wikipedia have in common?' covers the basics. The payoff is plain explanation from people close to the projects, with a market scorecard at the end.