Michael Juntao Yuan - Building Blockchain Apps

When I recently reconnected with Dr. Michael Yuan, he had just completed successfully fundraising for his blockchain project CyberMiles ($CMT), which later spun off a technology company called Second State. Dr. Yuan was staying at the forefront of blockchain technology and financing. I thought back to the way he had first described the core technical underpinnings of Blockchain for CMT, in a remarkable technical white paper, and how it had resonated with my own middleware architecture experience and understanding at the time. He was speaking a language I understood. Remarkably, the vision he had first laid out is being realized in Second State and applied to the enterprise blockchain markets.

Dr. Yuan was an avid proponent of open source decentralization in the early 2000s, which is how we got to first meet. Open source software had gone from pariah status in late 1999 (a cancer) to the very bedrock of the Internet. By 2008 open source money, as the Bitcoin concept was first called by its semi-anonymous authors, became public. What is remarkable about Bitcoin is that no one owns it, including any corporation or nation-state. It exists as an open source program on the Internet. Cryptocurrencies are the first killer app of open source ledgers as Internet-centric digital stores of value. It bears repeating that Bitcoin is so special in a way because it is not owned or operated by a single entity but in a sense is a decentralized property of the Internet. It is an open source program. The software implementation is under MIT Licenses (open source), which invites anyone with enough power to come, hash it out, and secure the network. As a result, the operators tend to cluster around cheap sources of power around the world because of the peculiar mathematics (the nuances of Bitcoin) required to secure the network. And it has come to pass that stores of value emerged ex-nihilo as open source crypto ledgers, the first killer app of the technology.

The introduction of Ethereum and the concept of smart contracts have revolutionized the crypto financing landscape. Remarkable capital formation dynamics appeared, again ex-nihilism, in the ERC20 realm. The ICO phenomenon has established behind the shadow of a doubt that crypto asset capital markets have the capacity to revolutionize financing in general. It is marking a generational shift. The financial applications of cryptocurrencies are in their infancy; they are only ten years old, and the limits of this Internet money are more psychological than technical.

However, it is perhaps the more philosophical applications of DLTs (Decentralized Ledger Technology) that show even more promise in the future. Take, for example, the notions of (sovereign) identity and medical data attached to said identity. Today we can envision an Internet-centric (meaning decentralized) ID repository of properly secured and private biometric data. Lets not forget that DLTs are distributed Internet-centric secured databases. For all you know, the DLT you are storing data with lives in generic cell phones with cheap algos. Instead of relying on a government to issue and validate identity, we now have within technical reach the notion of internet Identity in many onboarding applications. A video conference with trusted parties is enough to establish identity with a high level of trust. Many startups propose to offer this implementation of identity. To this identity one can attach medical data. This medical data, again philosophically, ultimately belongs to the individual. Technically speaking, distributed ledger technologies allow this to exist and, as a society, to reach for earth-wide, Internet-centric data constructs. The open source future is bright.

As a historical note, advances in society are usually accompanied or even enabled by advances in ledger technology. Accounting, for all its boring reputation, seems to be essential to mankinds progress. For example, in post-Revolution France, Napoleon used centralized ledgers, maintained centrally by a nation-state, written on paper, for the purpose of raising an army. IBM, the iconic American corporation, was born out of the late nineteenth century nationwide census in the United States. Punch cards were developed to tally the people across the vast continent. The counting problem led an engineering feat and the birth of Big Blue. The generations to come will use DLT in a variety of ways we cannot foresee today.