Gideon Greenspan: MultiBit – The Blockchain is a New Database Paradigm

Gideon Greenspan, a computer scientist and CEO/Founder of the Israeli startup Coin Sciences, joined us for a discussion of their private blockchain platform MultiChain. Besides diving into the popular question of what’s the point of a private blockchain, we covered his earlier colored coins implementation as well as his view that blockchains are best understood as a novel database paradigm.

Topics covered in this episode:

• How Gideon got involved in the blockchain space
• Their colored coins implementation MultiSpark and why it failed to get traction
• Why he saw a market for an open-source private blockchain platform and started MultiChain
• What mining diversity is and how it is used for consensus in MultiChain
• How permissions work in MultiChain
• The issues of privacy in blockchains and why you can’t have auditability and privacy
• How private blockchains differ from regular distributed databases
• The five criteria to decide if a project needs a blockchain
• The problem he sees with smart contract blockchains

Episode links:

• Multichain website
• Multichain Whitepaper
• Colored coin protocol CoinSpark
• Avoiding the pointless blockchain project
• Private blockchains are more than 'just' shared databases
• Smart contracts: The good, the bad and the lazy

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/107