The Ten News Explains Blockchain 🤑
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Season 2: Episode 124 Description
In today's episode: 🤔 What do you give a cryptocurrency that’s always late? A CLOCKchain! 🤑 Ten News Correspondent LizaBanks Campagna is in the studio with Josh Fried the Senior Manager of Business Development at Solana Labs to talk all things Blockchain. ✔️ Tessa Tidbit: in 2010 someone paid 10,000 bitcoins to buy two pizzas, but do you know how much actual money that's worth today? And, test your fake cryptocurrency on today's Trivia on the Ten. ✅
Sources
Bitcoin (BTC) price falls below $26,000 as crypto sell-off intensifies (cnbc.com)
16 Surprising Facts About Cryptocurrency [That Even Some Experts Don’t Know] | FinanceBuzz
OneCoin Definition (investopedia.com)
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TRANSCRIPT:
Bethany Van Delft 0:01
Hey Ryan, what do you do with all those keychains?
Ryan Willard 0:05
Hey Bethany. I'm building my own blockchain from these key chain rings when I start my own cryptocurrency, I'm calling them Ten Coins.
Bethany Van Delft 0:15
I'm not a crypto expert, but I'm pretty sure blockchain is not made from keychains...
Ryan Willard 0:21
Oh, yeah, I knew that it was just a joke.
Pete Musto 0:26
Hey Ryan, here are the 1,000 keychains you asked for. When do I get the 1 million & 10 coins you promised me?
Bethany Van Delft 0:35
Oh boy. I think it's time to do a Ten News Explains: Blockchain. I'm Bethany Van Delft. It's Thursday, June 9th and this is the Ten News.
Various Voices 0:48
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Bethany Van Delft 0:55
Cryptocurrencies took a hit a few weeks ago when one of the stable coins fell so low in value that crypto investors lost about $200 billion. That's right $200 billion. What makes cryptocurrencies possible? LizaBanks Campagna is back for our Ten News Explain series, where she'll sit down with Josh Fried the Senior Manager of Business Development at Solana Labs, and together they're here to break down blockchain. Take it away, LizaBanks.
LizaBanks Campagna 1:32
Hey Ten'ers, I'm back here to explain everything you need to know about cryptocurrency. Last time we talked about Bitcoin and the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto. Today I'll be covering the blockchain. The value of Bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies have gone out a lot since we last talked. Why is crypto gone down in value? In the last few months, people have been getting nervous about their investments and pulling money out of places like cryptocurrency because it's still viewed as a risky asset. What does that mean? Risky asset is a term used to describe investments like cryptocurrency that aren't sure bets that can be valued super high, and then quickly go down, and then back up, back down in a short amount of time. It can be quite a roller coaster. Because cryptocurrency is so new to the world, experts still consider assets like Bitcoin and Aetherium, risky, let's get to the good stuff and talk about the blockchain. The blockchain is kinda like a crystal ball except instead of seeing the future, the crystal ball blockchain will show you the past. The blockchain keeps track and makes a traceable record of every transaction made with cryptocurrency, purchasing an NFT selling Bitcoin sending eath to someone, it all happens on the blockchain. The blockchain refers to a network of computers all around the world that all communicate with each other when transactions happen. When the computers talk to each other in their own special algorithmic language, it leaves a record of the transaction. The blockchain can be used in a lot of different ways beyond just being the destination where transactions happen, the world can harness the power and potential of these computers talking to each other. I talked to Josh Fried, a friend of the Ten News and a blockchain expert. Josh works for Solana Labs, a company that is using blockchain technology to make cryptocurrency transactions faster and less energy-consuming.
Josh Fried 3:22
A blockchain organizes data around the world on computers that no one single person or organization owns. So I like to think of it as as a way to interact with computers and computing that decentralizes ownership. What that means is there's no single point of failure and there's no single owner that controls the data that you're sharing with the blockchain. So if one computer fails, the theory and blockchain live on the all these other computers are sorts of talking to each other to keep that state alive. Solana is another blockchain that was constructed in a very different way. So the way that the Solana blockchain computers talk to each other, allows the Solana blockchain to be very fast and very cheap to transact on. Another way to think about it is when you interact with Facebook or Google, you know, your data is flowing through servers and machines that Facebook or Google owns. And what blockchains enable is a future where you can communicate with other people around the world on computers that nobody owns, or on computers that we all collectively own together. And so it allows for you to own your data and own and, and sort of control how it's used out in the world. Whereas like, the web today is owned by a few single, you know, very At Large companies, and the web of the future might be owned by all of us.
LizaBanks Campagna 5:04
You talked about how Solana Labs is faster and cheaper. One of the things with cryptocurrency and the blockchain is the environmental impact. So what's the environmental impact?
Josh Fried 5:14
Yeah. So that's a great question. So, because Solana is a blockchain that has a different method of maintaining itself, it's very environmentally efficient, and it has a very low impact on the environment. So doing a single transaction on Solana is the equivalent of doing two to three Google searches. Some of the other blockchains are many, many, many orders of magnitude more energy. Use energy use what much more energy than Solana. But Solana is energy efficiency comes from the way that it maintains sort of its itself. It's not, we're not requiring computers to do very complex mathematical equations in order to keep the blockchain alive. We figured out a way to do it so that it's very energy efficient. And again, two to three Google searches are equal to one Solana transaction.
LizaBanks Campagna 6:13
What role do kids have in the future of blockchain? And then the kind of a two-part question Where do you think in their lives currently, and maybe in the future, would they interact with the blockchain on a day-to-day basis?
Josh Fried 6:26
I think there are many ways that blockchain can impact kids’ lives in the future. One example I think about is video games. Where today, if you play a video game and you earn items in the game, you don't get to take them with you when you move on to the next game. But NF T's are nonfungible tokens. They give you a sense of ownership of the digital items that you use on the blockchain. So you could be playing a video game and earn a sword by playing that game and take that with you as an NF T into the next game that you want to play that has blockchain capabilities. The other thing is, and this is what I work on, it's Ilana, I think we're going to have a future where people will pay with cryptocurrencies, everywhere that Visa or MasterCard or credit cards are accepted today. So the blockchain that I work on has fees that are next to nothing less than a penny. And so you may be able to enter a store and you know, buy a boba tea and pay with cryptocurrency rather than your credit card or debit card.
Bethany Van Delft 7:27
Thanks, LizaBanks and Josh. Tessa, got any fun facts about blockchain?
Tessa Flannery 7:36
I do. So blockchain is necessary to have a cryptocurrency. But do you know what's the first thing someone bought with crypto? Pizza? Really? Yep. In 2010 Someone paid 10,000 bitcoins to buy two pizzas. Those 10,000 Bitcoins are now worth around $300 million. So that's a pretty pricey pizza. Also, what do you give a cryptocurrency? That's always late. What o'clock chain?
Bethany Van Delft 8:08
That's a good one, Tessa. Now let's go to Ten News head writer Ryan Willard for your rundown.
Ryan Willard 8:21
Thank you, Bethany. I'm Ryan. And here's your rundown. The results of the June 7th primary elections are in primary elections held across the US to determine who will get to be on the ballot and November's general election. A big one that we are watching is the race for mayor of Los Angeles, California where US Democratic Rep Karen Bass will face Republican billionaire Rick Caruso. If bass wins she would be LA's first female mayor and the second black person to hold that office. Wow. Perrine. Logan won the 2022 Scripps National Spelling Bee in the first-ever spell-off, Hermione Logan, a 14-year-old from San Antonio, Texas faced Vikram Raju in the historic spell-off where each contestant had to spell as many words as possible in 90 seconds. Rajiv spelled 15 out of 19 words correctly while Logan got 21 out of 26 correct. For winning the spelling bee Logan received a trophy and $50,000 Holy moly, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has gotten its first Muslim superhero. Miss Marvel has debuted on Disney plus whose title character is Kamala Khan, a 16-year-old Pakistani American teenager whose favorite superhero is Captain Marvel. The Miss Marvel comic debuted in 2014, and it seems that her origin story and powers will be different in the Disney Plus series, Kamala Khan is played by Eemaan Villani in her first acting role ever. I'm Ryan Willard, that was your rundown. Back to you, Bethany.
Bethany Van Delft 9:52
What's that over there? I think it's a...
Various Voices 9:54
What, what, what's the big idea?
Bethany Van Delft 9:58
Trivia on the Ten. Most cryptocurrencies are legitimate but risky investments, and there have been quite a few scams. Criminals can and do fake cryptocurrencies to steal money from people. One famous crypto scam managed to take $4 billion from people all over the world. Do you know what the name of that fake currency is? Is it a) one coin? c) rigid axiom or c) camel coin? Did you guess it? The answer is A. One coin was a fake cryptocurrency founded by Rusha Ignatova who up and disappeared when authorities investigated the company. For years the company tricked people by pretending to be a legitimate cryptocurrency. But the coins couldn't be used to purchase anything. And there was no blockchain in place, which as you know, is what makes cryptocurrency possible. Oh, geez, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Yep. That's all we've got today. But before we go, here's a quick note for the grownups. Thanks for listening to the Ten News. Look out for our new episodes on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and extras on Saturdays. The Ten News is a coproduction of Small But Mighty Media and Next Chapter Podcasts and is distributed by iHeartRadio. The Ten News creative team is busy buying pizza with Bitcoin and includes Tracey Crooks, Pete Musto, Ryan Willard, Adam Barnard, and Tessa Flannery. LizaBanks Campagna contributed to this episode. Our production director is Jeremiah Tittle and our executive producers are Donald Albright and show creator Tracy Leeds Kaplan. I'm Bethany Van Delft, and thanks for listening to the Ten News. Call me a fuddy-duddy but I'm just gonna stick to good old cash money. Oh, what was that? I could get Ethereum for how much do you take Venmo?
