Interview with Gideon Greenspan CEO Multichain

we connect everything - ubloquity

Gideon is the founder and CEO of Multichain, he started coding as a child and selling his software in high school. He has built a number of successful websites, including Copyscape, a leading plagiarism search engine, and Web Sudoku, the most popular sudoku online.
Gideon has a BA and PhD in Computer Science (Cambridge and Technion) and an MA in Philosophy (London). He is now a regular lecturer on software entrepreneurship in his home town of Tel Aviv, Israel. Rather refreshingly for the founder of a blockchain platform company, Gideon's most popular blog is titled: Avoiding the pointless blockchain project - written in 2015!
He first became interested in blockchain technology with the arrival of Bitcoin, which made him realise as a website owner he could transact directly with his customers removing the middleman - the credit card networks or PayPal.
He then started having ideas about using the underlying technology to transact other items across the blockchain network. Which led to the development of his first product Coin Spark - it probably came a bit early for customers and the technology at the time, but led onto the creation of Multichain.
Multichain is a piece of software that allows people to build blockchain. Rather than having to build the whole system from scratch, companies can use Multichain to build their own applications on top of the software. As a result they don't need to worry about the 'technical innards' of how blockchains work.
He believes there are things that blockchains can do, and things they can't do. For instance a blockchain is very good at creating a shared repository of information, which is shared between multiple organisations, and which no individual organisation can take charge of to corrupt the data or delete the data.
So if you think about all the participants in a supply chain, they're all dealing with the same goods at different stages in those goods life. And they're all writing information about what's happening to those goods. And some of them are reading that information. The blockchain enables them to create a kind of shared infrastructure, where they're all writing to the same conceptual place and all reading from the same conceptual place.
For Gideon what's crucial and unique about blockchains, is that the infrastructure created is not under the control of any one individual participant in that supply chain. It's something which they all share together and which no individual participant can control and therefore corrupt or mess with.
We tackle the issue of energy consumption for blockchains, and how it differs depending on whether the blockchain is open or closed. Bitcoin is an open platform and as the value of the currency increases, people are prepared to expend more and more energy to mine the coins. The complex computational challenge is also required to ensure no one individual can take charge of the network.
However the method of consensus for a small, closed network is different, you don't need to have an energy intensive problem solve.
Multichain when used in production, for a permissions network, which isn't fully open to the whole world, is extremely low in terms of energy costs. And it's essentially no more than any regular database. But that's because it is a permissions network. That's because it's not open to the whole wor

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