Devon Read / Blockchain Technology Group

Devon Read on blockchain applications beyond financial remittance

InterviewOctober 19, 20145:33

In this episode

Jay Addison Technical and Media Advisor for CryptoBiz Magazine interviews Devon Read, CEO of Blockchain Technology Group (aka Blocktech), a company with a vision for blockchain applications far beyond financial remittance. Blocktech builds distributed applications, engineers cryptoeconomies, develops hardware, and offers consulting services for businesses looking to start using cryptocurrencies. Projects that are currently underway include an unalterable ledger of history, a truly private tor-based distributed marketplace, a new kind of lower-cost, higher speed media distribution, safe and inexpensive securities and commodities trading, open-source DIY retail hardware, and a coin agnostic ATM. Devon has a background in technology, business and design and over 10 years of leadership experience – from being named a Non-Commissioned Officer of the Year by the US Marine Corps to leading development of an iPad POS solution as well as working in the visual effects industry and as a creative for Apple Inc.

Key takeaways
  • Blocktech's Alexandria project captures Twitter data on the blockchain to create an immutable, searchable historical record that reveals connections users wouldn't otherwise discover.
  • The company monetizes open-source products through Blocktech Financial, a regulated subsidiary offering asset-backed trading on their Altmarket platform to create liquidity and API integration.
  • Blocktech is developing accessible hardware including a DIY cryptocurrency ATM buildable for $500 with Home Depot and Amazon parts and an open-source POS system for merchant adoption.
  • Devon Read emphasizes selecting altcoins based on use case alignment, analyzing factors like emission rates and mining algorithms rather than speculative profit potential.
  • Distributed applications enable micropayments that incentivize global mesh participation in tasks too expensive for centralized systems to offer affordably to consumers.

Transcript

Read the full transcript 1,115 words, auto-generated and lightly edited

this is jay addison from crypto biz magazine we're live in las vegas at the inside bitcoins convention we're with devon reed ceo of blockchain technology devon how are you i'm great thank you very much so what future uses for the blockchain are you most excited about what excites me most is distributed applications the fact that you can take a normal

product or service that is offered by a centralized application and use the nature of the fact that blockchains create the ability to do micro payments to incentivize the whole mesh of the world to participate in doing them so we have one example that we're just showing off at this show called alexandria that takes data from twitter all these volume this volume of information that

the crowd is sharing with the world their wisdom to the world and captures it creates data permanence into the blockchain and then puts a data visualization layer on top so that you can actually learn from it so you can kind of move through time and see what was going on at what particular time and you can trust that is the totality of the information that no

one's messed with it no one's taken away and these are things that are just too expensive to be done by centralized systems in a way that people can actually take it in and so the fact that it changes that relationship making consumers into consumers and producers that blows my mind every day right and that's exciting your company's been

involved with a number of lesser-known altcoins how do you choose which ones to work with it's really about the use case we've we've a number of our people have been involved in bitcoin since 2009 getting into all coins since 2011 or so and trying to kind of draw the connection between the economic aspects of the technology and how they apply

so you can look at things like the emission rate and the just what algorithm it's it's mined with and look at the use case you're trying to apply it to and see how it's going to fit is this a long-term coin is this going to create a lot of money very quickly and then kind of spread out over time or whatever else so it really just comes down to what are we

trying to accomplish with it what are the right aspects that it needs and either build one that is needed for it or find one that the market has already provided and embrace that's exciting what different types of open source hardware are you guys currently developing oh well at the show we're actually showing off our first piece of open source hardware it's an atm

that you can build in your garage with parts from home depot and amazon for 500 bucks in about a week so we're really excited about that people been it kind of opened their eyes a lot about what you can do next project is we call the open pos which is just for you know merchant acceptance and we're doing this just because the way we see it

the easier it is for merchants to be able to accept crypto the wider the net becomes what's been your biggest accomplishment to date really alexandria the idea behind it was relatively simple and seeing it actually work seeing it actually start to grab data and show it to people and like here at the show someone discovered a connection between

ukraine and bitcoin yesterday that they were completely unaware of otherwise and so kind of the possibilities of what can come out of that as far as a permanent record of history that can't be messed with and can just kind of grow and grow and scale based on interest that definitely is what i'm most excited about most most proud of at this time

well how does a company making open source products make money i mean that's a question everybody's going to ask absolutely you know we could try to like work a fee system into each of our distributed apps so we could try to just sell our hardware or whatever we kind of feel like they're against the nature of this overall thing these are open source software

someone can fork it and remove the fee so that really doesn't work so what we kind of realized is we were looking at well how do you actually develop a business model that can support all of these products that we're trying to put out into the world we realize there's a lot of financial tools that could benefit from blockchain technology so we have our

actual first subdivision called block tech financial that is going after finra and fincen certification we want to offer asset back to network so you can actually trade gold silver stock certificates all on the blockchain those all get traded on our market it's called altmarket.com because of that you create a good deal of liquidity within market and now you

can actually turn apis in attach apis into your apps so that when a customer comes along and they're holding bitcoin but they need flooring coin to use alexandria it's it's seamless to them the exchange process rather than going through laborious exchanging that you have to go through now we just say put in whatever you've got the app will take whatever it needs and

that's only possible because we're creating this kind of market making aspect with all market and with all the new money that can come in because of the appeal of being able to trade assets on a network that's very exciting stuff let me ask you a question january 1st 2015 what do you think the price of bitcoin is going to be random guess boy random guess i'm going

to say i love it devon reed ceo of blockchain technology if somebody wants to get a hold of you guys work with you guys use your products how do they get a hold of you blocktech.com or find me on twitter i'm blocktech ceo fantastic thanks conley for your time devon thank you good times this is jay addison from crypto biz magazine live from meckler media's

inside bitcoins conference in las vegas remember to subscribe to crypto biz magazine at cryptobizmag.com follow us on twitter at cryptobizmag thanks for joining us and learn more at cryptobizmagazine.com

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