S1E2: Blockchain Architecture with Kris Bennett

“Not the Podcast we want, but the Podcast we need right now”: The legendary Blockchain Beard Guy, Kris Bennett, talks through his Blockchain Origin story, the basics of Blockchain Architecture, his favourite use cases and key learnings for developing and scaling enterprise platforms. On this show we cover:

- The emergence from Bitcoin to Blockchain Beard Guy

- Use cases in cable TV networks, automotive, aviation, the corona virus and more…

- Introduction to Blockchain architecture (Hyperledger, Ethereum, Corda, Multichain)

- Challenges while going into production and scaling networks

- How to discuss Blockchain with senior stakeholders

- Resources for learning core Blockchain skills

Shout to Blockchain Training Alliance (https://blockchaintrainingalliance.com/) and Chad and Melissa for lending me Kris for an hour!

Kris’ LinkedIn profile can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kbennett2000/

Transcript (Courtesy of Sonix - Apologies for any errors from the AI):

Anthony: Welcome back, everybody, to Blockchain Won't Save the World. I'm really excited for today's guest. He's somebody that I've been following for a long time. He's very well known in blockchain. He's a developer, solutions architect, influencer and an educator. It is Mr. Kris Bennett, also known as the Blockchain Beard Guy. Kris, welcome to the show.

Kris: Thank you so much. For me, this is this is really an honor to be a part of.

Anthony: Not at all. And honestly, Kris, from very early days working in blockchain, some of the videos that resonated best with me or the content resonated best with me was, you know, you add a dash cam and a two hour drive from Denver to the airport or wherever you were heading towards. And just talking practically and pragmatically about blockchain as a technology, decentralization and what it meant for traditional enterprises and governments. And what I really loved about the tone that you took was it was always honest, it was always humble. It was always pragmatic and very, very far away from the hype that we've seen in different evolutions of blockchain, whether that be in the ICO bubble or, you know, what continues to be a lot of content put out saying blockchain will do this, blockchain could do this, blockchain might do that. I want to get away from all that today and maybe do a mini version of your your traditional beard cast, but obviously on on the podcast. So thanks again for doing what you do.

Kris: Oh, of course. Of course. My pleasure and thanks for doing what you do. You know, I think the theme that you're taking with the show, the focus on the pragmatic and cutting through the hype, that's really what we need right now is there's a big lack of that, especially as technologists.

You know, our job is to get excited and enthusiastic about technology. But sometimes we we let that blind us a little bit to some of the pragmatic concerns. So I'm really excited that you're putting out this content and I can't wait to see where it goes.

Anthony: So maybe this isn't the podcast we want, but maybe it's the podcast we need.

Kris: Can't it be both? It is for me.

Anthony: I wish it can be. Maybe only the audience will tell us that. So. So hopefully we're gonna get some good feedback. Chris, I want to start with an introductory question. I don't think in 2020 there any blockchain natives. No one was born into blockchain. It's still a relatively young space. Tell us about how you got into working blockchain technology.

Kris: You know, I kind of had a similar experience that I think a lot of people do. At least I've heard a lot of other people tell this story. And that was for me for the longest time. I heard this word blockchain and I just thought it was another word for Bitcoin.

And so for quite a long time, an embarrassingly long time, I just kind of ignored it. My thinking there was, hey, I get it. It's Bitcoin. It's digital money. Conceptually, it makes sense. But I'm an I.T. guy. I'm a technology guy. I'm not a finance guy. I'm not an accounting guy. And so I kind of dismissed it. And it wasn't until I really dug in and I started to take a look at what's all this blockchain stuff was about. It just it didn't seem to be going away. People didn't stop talking about it. It didn't go away after the news cycle reset. And when I really had this understanding that it was more than Bitcoin, I always talked about it a little bit of a sci fi nerd. But I talk about it in terms of The Matrix. It was the biggest red pill moment of my life. You know, I woke up in there in the ship with Morpheus and the world's just never looked the same. But what really got me excited about blockchain, Anthony, is when I had this realization, what it really was and that Bitcoin was really just the tip of the blockchain iceberg. I got excited because I'd seen all this before, this wave of familiarity rushed over. You know, I'm this big believer that we have to kind of moves in the technology world. We have evolutions. Things get incrementally better, faster, more efficient, cheaper. And that's certainly exciting. But once in a generation, we have revolutionary technologies come along and those are the ones that beat up and redefine so many aspects of the world. And I think blockchain fits into that. So I got real excited because I said, hey, that the last time I saw something like this coming. We called it dot com. We called it the Internet wave. Before that. We call that the P.C. revolution.

And finally, here's this generational change coming along where I'm in a time and place where I'm out there. I'm in the market. I'm in the field. When the Internet came along, I was still in college. You know, it is a little too early for me to do anything. So I decided to jump in with both feet. And it's it's been a wild ride, but I haven't looked back since.

Anthony: And as you look back, Kris, were there any particular stories or examples or Real-World use cases that you saw early as you were flipping from the 'Bitcoin is digital money' to actually this could change the way enterprises and governments work. Do any of those early examples stand out as kind of key learnings for you?

Kris: I know that the one that I think really appealed my eyes back when I started to think about how you apply the technology was years ago, 17, 18 years ago now. I worked with a small company. I won't mention names, but our entire focus was on performing auditing services in the cable television industry so that I never really knew this till I got involved. But the contracts that these cable TV networks draw up with the MSO, the service providers, the cable companies, they are incredibly nuanced and complex. It's just an artifact of the way they do business and neither side has any desire to change that. And so what ends up happening is once a quarter of these cable companies will just kind of take an estimate, put a thumb to the wind, how much they think they owe those networks for the content they're broadcasting and they'll write a check. And so our entire job was just to come in once, twice a year, go through the books, get everything squared up and take a big fat percentage off the top. And at the time I left back in 2004, that was over 20 million dollars a year that that business. So we're doing over $20 million a year in revenue. So there's there's 20 million dollars. Just because you have two participants who have contractual terms so complex they they can't understand how to operate with one another. You know, that's that stood out to me as, hey, here's one use case where you could completely remove this business from from that value chain and put 20 million dollars back into that ecosystem. And when I when I started having those kind of realizations, that's that's when I really knew that the technology had some potential.

Anthony: I think that sounds like a pretty good aha moment. And it's it's usually the ones that most relatable. It's when somebody says, you know, if we can digitize all of the data from the ocean, we'll be able to monetize things that we've never done before and create abundance for civilization henceforth. And used to say, OK, oceans, data, civilization. I hear you. I get it, but I don't get it. But actually, if you can anchor it back to something that you're familiar with, a place that you've worked or a problem that's that's kind of familiar to you or those around you, I think it becomes a much more relatable story. So I want to I want to also ask a little bit more about the blockchain big guy origin story, if you will, because you've kind of been in technology for a very long time. And it's quite a leap from the dark and dingy worlds of I.T. developments and managing and operating systems into the limelight, the spotlights, the invitations to conferences and setting up entirely new businesses into this technology that's only been around for a few years. Talk us through how you got that.

Kris: A long commute is the short answer to that. So my wife and I, we live in a small town, Elizabeth, Colorado. It's about forty five miles southeast of Denver. So it's to go downtown depending on traffic. It's anywhere between 60, 90 minutes each way. And at the time, R office was downtown, my previous company. So I had a good two to three hours a day where I was just in the car. And you very quickly get out of the city and everything out here is just flat, straight two lane country roads. In fact, when I started doing the videos that the two most common questions I got were, what kind of car is that?

People always want to know that. But then more entertainingly, how come there are no turns? I just watch these videos and you're just driving in this straight line. Well, that's that's eastern Colorado. So I had time to fill in really where this started is. I found so many times professionally I was answering the same questions over and over and over with customers and clients. And they were very, very good questions. And it's kind of started to surprise me that more of this practical information wasn't out there. So I'd kind of been toying with the idea of putting together some videos, addressing some of these these general topics. And this was about the time that I had my red pill realization with blockchain. So it was kind of the convergence of those two ideas one day. And I just kind of had a thought driving home, hey, I should just stick a GoPro on the window and just talk about some of this stuff and post a video on LinkedIn and see where it goes. So gave it a try one day and honestly, the blockchain appeared. It was just kind of a spontaneous moment. It wasn't anything I thought of. I just started recording that first video and I thought, hey, here's here's kind of a thing to call myself. So I gave it a try. And honestly, I wasn't expecting this content to go anywhere.

So I posted a few videos on LinkedIn. And just to the support that I got, the feedback that I got from the community was great. Really, really kind of seemed to be providing value to folks. And the rest is kind of history. It was a great way to fill in the latter part of the drive there. And it was really a great way to connect with other people. I hope you'll have a similar experience here with your podcast. But one thing I found is when you have this focus on the pragmatic, it becomes really, really easy to generate content because you share your thoughts and it opens up a discussion.

There's so many people come out and want to share their stories and their approaches and their techniques. So it snowballs pretty easily and it becomes very, very simple to pick them up with content topics, ideas, just because of the great community out there.

Anthony: Thanks for that, Kris. I mean, that's the pro tip for anybody looking to get into blockchain is if you want to become an influencer, if you want to build a following move a long way outside of a town and find some really straight roads.

Kris: I would actually say the true advice is there's a guy named Samson Williams. You need to connect with. And then what you do is you just steal all of his good ideas and take credit for it. I mean, if we're really cutting to the meat of how to get into the influencer game, I think that's the quickest route to success.

Anthony: I'm a big fan of Samson and we've shared a number of wonderful moments together. And I'm curious to get him on the podcast, but I think, you know, he's definitely for season two. I'm not looking at the future rather the now. And Samson is currently promoting a book, I think, around blockchain and space, which may be a little bit further away from the core tenets of what I'm hoping this podcast is for now. But but I wish him luck up there and I'm sure he's going to do good things.

Kris: Yeah, I sure. For anyone who doesn't know, Samson this is probably a mysterious conversation, but the thought of him floating around in space just delights me. I love that.

Anthony: That's an image that I think I definitely didn't need, but it's one that I could I could imagine is going to happen at some stage for sure. Kris, let's get a level down now. So actually, from where you found yourself talking about blockchain and why you thought it was interesting, you actually pivoted away from delivery to an extent actually to focusing on education and training. And I guess you saw that there was a bit of a gap in the market or you thought that this is not being done well. And so actually, you know, one of the main things that I know you for is when I was working at Deloitte, you trained 50 of our global blockchain leaders, architects, developers, business analysts over the course of two days in an a small box in Dublin, which was fantastic. And I'm hoping we can do kind of a microcosm of that training. Obviously I don't want to give away the secret sauce. But one of the things that people have asked is what's the basic architecture or what what are the basic components of a blockchain network? So maybe we take Hyperledger or Ethereum, or any of the ones that you prefer talking to. What are the what are the main things that we need to know about?

Kris: Yeah, it's it's a really, really good question Anthony, I think I would just start off my answer by saying to folks who are just getting involved in blockchain understand that the blockchain is a very, very broad term and there are a lot of different architectures and approaches that fit under that umbrella. And of course, there's there's a lot of controversy and debate within the community about what actually constitutes a blockchain.

But on one end of the spectrum, we have, public permissionless platforms, the platforms like bitcoins or Ethereum. And these are typically true peer to peer networks.

So we have nodes or miners on the network and they are all performing three functions simultaneously. The first is that they're keeping a redundant copy of the ledger. Right. One of the core tenants of blockchain. The second is any smart contract code. They're executing that, running any applications built on top of that ledger. And then number three, they're all working amongst each other to ensure that not only are they recording the same data across all these instances of the ledger, but just as importantly, that data is being recorded in the same order on all those instances. Then if we slide over to the other side of the spectrum, we get into platforms like Hyperledger to an extent. Multichain, some of the more enterprise focused platforms Corda kind of fits into there. And that's typically where we we start to slide away from a true peer to peer architecture into something which is still very decentralized. But we do have specific server roles and for performance reasons, many times we're taking those three different functions and we're splitting those out into distinct node types to let them just specialize in that. That's kind of an overlay of the technical architecture.

I think what's important for architects, developers, administrators and even folks in the business to remember is that technical architecture properly view that at least in the enterprise, space is shared I.T. infrastructure between organizations. And this is the part of blockchain, at least in the enterprise space that is very, very new to us. We're we're very used to going out and acquiring technology as an organization and that's ours, we own it. We paid for it. We have an administrator to it. We have full access to it. If we want to remove some components and change some components, we absolutely can. We own it completely and entirely. When you get into the blockchain world, that's no longer the case. You you just own a portion of it. And this introduces some new concerns to a blockchain project that we're just not typically used to. So I'm probably starting to wander off the beaten path on the answer there. But hopefully that that for anyone who's new to the space, that kind of gives you a little bit of lay of the land architecturally.

Anthony: I think that's a great overview, Kris. And this is where you get into the good stuff is see, that's the technical description of how blockchain works. But then there's the overlay on that, which is what changes. Well, what's different? And you talked about a shared I.T. infrastructure for two decades. I.T. CEOs, companies are happy running their own applications, their own cloud architecture on premise, whatever it might be. And the goal was, to an extent upped up to a point. We were talking about digitization. We were talking about adding apps, making it easier to do certain things, doing more with our data all under our own control. Right. Well, under our own steam. And then once we kind of reached 'peak digital' maybe to five or six years ago, then it became a little bit about simplification and saying, you know, we want to take applications out of the stack. We want to move more of our workflows to cloud, you know, make make our I.T. infrastructure functional, componentised, easy to run. To take out the difficult bits. Then along comes blockchain architecture and say, well, actually, you're going to share information, you're going to run nodes, you're going to have information and data move differently than it has before. And from a CIO perspective, unless you're a true believer or pioneer or an early adopter, that's completely against your your direction of travel or the kind of imperatives that you've had for the last little while. And I wonder, as you've talked to people in technology, people who work in enterprise, how do you help walk them into that? It's a very different way of working. But don't worry, it'll be fine.

Kris: You know, I think you can look at it from or through two different lenses through the technology lens. So much of blockchain is about forgetting or reloading a lot of these unquestioned principles. These these universal truths that as technologists we've always accepted, you know, for example, things like as you scale up the size of a blockchain network, performance goes down, not up. We're not used to that in the world of distributed solutions. We scale up the network and things get faster. So from the technologists there, it just involves a very different way of thinking, a very unintuitive way of thinking on the business side. I think we're we're starting to see the hand be forced a little bit. And what I mean by that is the problems that blockchain really aims to solve and the ones that in my mind, it solves the best in the enterprise space are problems we are just beginning to explore and they're just showing up on on people's radar. So, you know, I'm always in the digital world, know working with blockchain heads down in front of a laptop. So when I get a little time off, I like working with mechanical things, working on old bikes and cars. I still get to use the engineering part of my brain, but it's it's not digital. So I just out of personal interest, follow a lot of what happens in the automotive industry. And the big show in the automotive industry every year is the Geneva Auto Show, which typically happens in March. And quite organically, this wasn't planned. It just kind of came up naturally. One of the big themes at the Geneva Auto Show last year was that different participants in the automotive industry are going to have to team up that cooperation is the new competition.

And that's because if you look at what's going on in the auto industry right now, they're facing two enormous challenges. Number one is the electric electric vehicle technology, electrifying our platforms, moving away from internal combustion. And the second very big engineering challenge is autonomous vehicles. And either one of those challenges by themselves are far too big, far too complex and far too expensive for any single manufacturer to pursue alone. So we heard last year about Ford and Volkswagen teaming up to Co-develop E.V. technology. And when you think about what they're doing, it's it's pretty impressive. They are going to co-develop technology, then they're going to put it into both of their respective cars and then they're going to compete with each other to sell vehicles with that technology that they could develop. And it's not just Ford and Volkswagen. Last year, Daimler, the parent company of Mercedes Benz, announced that they're going to partner up with BMW to spend over a billion dollars developing autonomous vehicle technology because they want to compete with Uber, you know, five years ago. I don't know about you, but if you'd told me, hey, Mercedes and BMW are going to team up to the tune of a billion U.S. dollars to co-develop technology that they're then going to use to compete with each other. I would have said you were crazy. But these are the new business challenges that we're facing. And if you think about, OK, this is the business landscape, how do we as technologists support that? You start to see where blockchain steps in. So if if Ford and Volkswagen are going to work together, who's database, are they going to keep that information and who's going to own it?

Who is going to maintain it? Who's going to pay for it if that relationship breaks up? Where where does the data go? These are very, very difficult questions to answer in a world of centralized technology.

And just to kind of put a bow on it, I read yesterday in the news because we're hearing so much about the spread of Corona virus right now that this year's Geneva Auto Show, the upcoming one, has actually been canceled. And I think that if things continue to track the way they are with this virus, one of the outcomes that we're going to see is we really don't understand their supply chain the way that we think we do. And here in the states, at least, we're already starting to have conversations about what if this supply chain breaks down? We're not in a position domestically anymore where we can really manufacture very much. We're very, very dependent on overseas manufacturing. If if businesses come out of this and one of their takeaways is, hey, we've we've got to investigate our supply chain. We've we've got to put some some fault tolerance in there. We have to ensure business continuity vis-a-vis our supply chain. That's that's the kind of area where blockchain really shines. So I think the kind of coming back to answer your question, Anthony, on the business side, the smart executives are starting to see that the ground underneath them is changing quickly and the smart ones are starting to adapt.

Anthony: I think you've put in a couple of really nice examples out that automotives and supply chains and then also the 'who owns the data challenge'.

Is it actually we've had cooperation models before, but oftentimes date the technology we've used with things like portals, which again could have a very large volume of data in it which you might not want to have hacked. You've had EDI, lots of it's a point to point connections, which I'm sure you'll know from your previous work is a very, very inefficient way of managing information, the way that I kind of peel it back saying this is a technology that can help us solve problems that we could never do previously alone by working together. And it's likely to involve data. So it's going to be about sharing information that may be competitive. It may be particularly proprietary to one or multiple of those providers. But to get an end to end view of how much product there is. Just go back to what Corona virus example. If there's, you know, a certain amount of vaccine in a certain geographical space, certain parties may only have visibility on what they have in stock and what they have in stock. And if you want to optimize that particular system, you want to try and see if you can have a vaccine availability database.

You don't want any one person to know where all the vaccines in the United States are. That's really just not a helpful thing. But we can agree the standards of, you know, certain types of vaccines at certain times, if we can all agree that we'll share certain information on the amounts and where they are, we can try and optimize and reallocate to help reduce the effects of a pandemic or a particular crisis at any one time. You don't want to create a centralized database or organization with hundreds of people working in their I.T. team to do that. That's just inefficient and risky. Rather, say let you manage your own businesses, run it in isolation, but connect up across the piece. So I think we'll definitely date the podcast by mentioning coronavirus in here and, you know, hopefully three weeks and I will be saying. Wasn't that just a common cold, but I think it gives you a relevant example.

Kris: Absolutely, you know, and I'm with you, I hope that in a few weeks this is kind of behind us and just a bad memory. But I think even if it works out that way, it's it's certainly causing us to think about some of these issues that we otherwise wouldn't have. Because even even if this isn't the event that exposes some of those vulnerabilities, you have to imagine that's right around the corner as we just continue to become more and more interconnected.

Anthony: Sure, I want to click on now to you spent a good amount of your time with Blockchain Training Alliance and doing education and training work, but you do get your hands dirty from time to time. All right. You do actually get back you get pulled back into a little bit of architecture and development work from time to time.

Kris: We do. We do. You know, it's very common. And, you know, we'll go out and teach a class. And folks ask, hey, can you stick around and help us? I always use the baseball analogy. You know, our our classes are like teaching about baseball. We'll teach you about the form and how old the bat and how to swing. You know, all in the classroom. But that first time you stand up to the plate, it's sometimes nice to have the coach there. So, yeah, we do a bit of that as well.

Anthony: Very good. So I'm really curious to know. You know, obviously, we won't talk about who you work for, but you've worked with some of the largest and best known companies in the world on blockchain initiatives, which I think is phenomenal for for a lumberjack from Denver...

I'd love to know some of the kind of typical questions or typical worries or concerns that some of your clients have had over and over the time. What are the things people typically kind of worry about and how do you help to kind of allay the fears?

Kris: You know, great question.

I think at least what I see right now, we're still so early on in this trajectory that so much of the fear just comes from misunderstanding. And that's that's really what drove me into the education space besides just really personally enjoying the work. You know, so great example. I think there's there's a big misconception right now in the enterprise space that blockchain is this technology that is designed to replace legacy systems. And so a conversation I seem to have at least once a week is, hey, Kris, thanks for telling me about all this blockchain stuff. This sounds great. I absolutely agree with you. This is going to be transformative. We definitely have blockchain on our radar. But, you know, maybe maybe come back and talk to us next year.

As far as actually doing something. Yeah, we we just upgraded our ERP system, our CRM system, our H.R. system. It was a very long, complex project. It went over schedule, over budget. We had this army of consultants camped out in our conference room for six months. So, yeah, all this blockchain stuff sounds great, but we just don't have any appetite right now organizationally to get into another legacy system, upgrade or replacement. And in my opinion, blockchain properly used all else being equal. Isn't this replacement for legacy systems? It's it's this layer that you can build above them and connect them to a larger ecosystem. One of the examples I always talk about in class is imagine that I'm a manufacturer. My manufacturer would say electronic devices. I'm somebody like Apple, but I don't sell them. I rely on you. I rely on this network of resellers to go out to the market and sell my items for me. Well, if you go out and you meet with a potential customer and you have a good meeting, and at the end of the meeting, they say, Anthony, that sounds great. We want to place an order for a thousand crates of widgets. Well, you're very likely to walk out of that meeting, plot your smart phone, log in to your internal CRM system. That could be something behind your firewall.

That could be Salesforce out in the cloud and you're going to go find that opportunity in your CRM system, because it's not an opportunity anymore. It's a deal now. So you need to update it. Well, if you go and you do that, how does that change get propagated into my ERP system? So the folks on the factory floor can start manufacturing those widgets to fulfill that order.

So a lot of of easing in allaying fears on the business side, I've found is really just education and clearing up some of those misunderstandings. And when you start to talk to an executive who really has their pulse on the business and the market and the directions things are going, I found that once you clear up some of those misconceptions, a lot of the value proposition behind blockchain becomes fairly self evident.

Anthony: Well said, Kris. I think the the complexity to implement blockchain, obviously it's not something done in an afternoon, but it's probably less complicated than many think it is at a basic level. Blockchains about data aggregation is saying that I've got some information, my suppliers got some information, their suppliers got some information. And if we all work together, we can present a single view of what's happened to a product. Well, we can get a real time view of stock levels that we couldn't get to before. We can reduce the risk of of a particular process somehow. And then we just need to we just need to find a way to agree to how how we spend, how we spend on how we project manage that and how we get information to feed back and forth. It's really not that much more complicated when you're talking about data aggregation or single customer views have been something that, you know, in technology we've talked about for a long time. Instead of just talking about customer from an enterprise perspective, what we're talking about is a single supply chain view or a single industry view or a single competitive view or a single regulatory view. And so if you're looking at saying, well, that that's a real benefit, because now we can make decisions based on that, we can optimize a system based on that. You've got a much, much more compelling story, you know, challenges as you're going into implementation. You need one, two, three, five, 10 parties all working together to make that happen. And I guess that's where stuff gets complicated.

Kris: Absolutely. And, you know, I think so much of it is we we just have this very siloed view of our business processes. We just kind of are siloed into the part that we're responsible for in traditional technology. Hasn't done a very good job giving us that Indian view. And I think we're just starting to explore technology that care. You know, it's very common.

If you're talking to folks on the business side about this technology for the ROI (Return on Investment) conversation that come up. What's the ROI of blockchain? And certainly that's something you can calculate traditionally, hey, if we can take the X, Y, Z process and make it 10 percent more efficient, what does that do to the bottom line? Those are typically easy calculations to make the more difficult ones. And I think where blockchain really potentially adds a lot of our why is is not in what it can do, but oftentimes what it can prevent from happening. You know, I look at Boeing right now, I think they're a great example of this. Not to say that using a technology like blockchain would would do anything to solve some of the mechanical or design issues they're facing right now on the 737. But I have to imagine that if they could go back and they could tell the story about every decision point behind the design of that aircraft and who signed off on it and when. And every part and component from every supplier and why that decision was made, if they had a much more rich, detailed audit trail, again, it wouldn't solve some of those mechanical and design issues. But I'm willing to bet their stock price would be at a much different place.

And we see this all the time. I don't know if it's it's settled yet, but, you know, they call themselves Ireland's most famous brand Kerrygold butter. I always think the folks at Guinness might disagree with that. But they're facing a class action lawsuit in the state of California for a little over one hundred and fifty million dollars. It was in the news a couple of years ago because they they can't verify the claim that all of the milk they source to make that butter comes from grass-fed cows. So a lot of times the R A Y component isn't necessarily easy to calculate the biggest ROI can be. What does this prove them for?

Anthony: I hear you. And also as you're telling those stories, you didn't mention the word blockchain once or maybe it just at the beginning. But actually what you were talking about is the outcomes of putting the capabilities that we have together. So we talk about traceability. We have the ability to verify. We have a history of certain information or we can have information fed from a sensor that we can then do something else with or we can optimize a system based on certain business rules. All of these are digital capabilities. And my take on this particular blockchain is talk about what are the components of technology that using blockchain or distributed ledger will allow you to to use in your enterprise or to solve the problem that you're looking at. You know, there are lots of ways that we can do data aggregation. But some of those non-functional requirements might be I don't want any one party in the ecosystem to see all the data right or I don't want all the data to be in one place because I don't think that's a good. Or we might say, actually, I want both to aggregate data and automate activity. Well, I could aggregate things into a portal and then I could put a lot of robotic process automation behind it and that could do a manual verification.

But actually, why wouldn't I try and create a protocol that allows you to do all of those three things in one step and you've standardize once and you can you can have everybody jump onto that same platform and apply the same standards. I think there's a story and under under implementation of blockchain, which is, yes, you can do it with anything else. But people who've spent more time in technology architecture will understand that it's very, very inefficient to do it the other ways. But it's not it's not a '101' story. I say, well, let me take you down how EDIs work. And let me talk about point to point connections. And let me tell you how much of my team's time is spent on maintaining ice or sink single single interfaces that I have with individual companies. And then let me tell you about standards and standardization. And and you get done a really very long winded conversation by which time somebody is already lost interest. Now, I don't know if that story resonates with you, but it's you know, it's one of those ones that only the architects can really argue for. But sadly, they don't get the voice most of the time.

Kris: Yeah, I think that is common.

You know it to me, it kind of touches on on this larger change or evolution that I've seen, you know, which is when I when I first started my career, you know, information hadn't hadn't yet become commoditized. And so in the early days of my career, you you always knew who the smartest technical person at your organization was because they were the person with the biggest bookshelf, because that's that's how you acquired knowledge. This stuff wasn't out on the Internet. See what you bought these these giant tomes of from the technical bookstore. You know, nowadays, all of that that information is out there. It's it's become commoditized. But I think so many times we as as technical resources still view our value proposition as being the information that we know. How much stuff do I have in my head? If you look at still to this day the way that a lot of organizations conduct technical interviews. It just doesn't align with the age that we live in. You know, asking someone to memorize methods from an API or to sit down with no Internet access in a pen and paper and, you know, write out a block of code or something like that. You know, that's those are skills that mattered 30 years ago. They're just not relevant today. The information's become commoditized. And so I think as as this evolution continues to unfold, we're seeing that our value proposition to the organization as technologists is changing. And we can't just be the repositories of technical information anymore. We start to have to be the ambassadors of it. It's not enough just to know it.

How can we communicate that out to the rest of the business in ways that they can understand without sitting there in front of a whiteboard just going through the ones and zeros. And so I've been trying to challenge technologists in the industry to reframe their way of thinking your value doesn't come because you're the winning Jeopardy! Contestant. When it comes to technical trivia, it comes because you're you're the best ambassador of what these new tools can do.

Anthony: I think that's right. And there are various different flavors of architect out there. And as you said earlier in the show, there's some out there who are designed to just keep it simple, keep it low cost, run my business, don't add complexity. And these might not necessarily be the guys who are gonna be first up, but they're going to have a vested interest at some point because either their business or other other parties in the industry or maybe their clients or their suppliers come to them and say, as of next week, I need you to either adopt this particular system that allows us to join up across the supply chain or across a network. Or the regulator requires that, you know, at your particular level, whether you be a Fortune 500 company or a mom and pop pharmacy, we need you to run a node on a network, because we need to trace by regulatory requirement every particular product that's been through your shop. And that gets into a really kind of, you know, you you're forced into learning and you suddenly you can't hide anymore. You know, somebody who is, I guess, running I.T. landscapes, pre e-commerce would probably be saying, you know, this really isn't something that's gonna have to affect me or, you know, my online presence or my web portals or my sales management, CRM systems. It's not really for us. We can get away without them. You know, five years later or ten years later, either that person's not working there anymore or they've had to go through a dramatic reskilling process because industry and technology has changed really fast. And I think we're we're starting to get that. You know, it's not every industry, it's not every domain. It's not every use case. You know, the premise of this show is not the blockchain will transform everything. But as an architect, I think it's there's a responsibility to understand. I work in a certain industry. One of the general directions of travel in terms of collaboration or 'cooperatition' or whatever you can to call it and say, how likely is this to be my problem in the next little while? What would need to be true in my industry or with my company for me to then need to know more about this or for this to be the next technology off the roadmap? Not because I want to be innovative, but because actually that's mandated. And I think the better architects can look two or three years down the road and realize I don't need to invest in it, but I need to understand the implications.

Kris: Right. Right. You know, and I'm always very vocal about, you know, obviously there's this technology isn't for everyone. And that's okay. You know, there there are some folks there, even, you know, some technologies or some folks where what makes them happy is just going out Googling the problem and getting the best practice, getting the answer or getting the recipe and just following it. You know, there are certain technologies I've worked with in my life I've had to work with professionally that I just never found that interesting. I never got the passion. And I very much fell into that camp.

Anthony: So, do you spill the beans, Kris? What are those technologies? What was it? Was it Kobol, you know? Was it PHP? Go on. Give us the good stuff.

Kris: You know, it was actually back during the 'SOA' days. And there were just so many misguided implementations of service oriented architecture that you kind of knew as a technologist, we're never going to bear fruit. But, you know, this this was early enough in my career that no one really wanted to hear what I had to say. It was got to know, just shut up, keep your head down, keep writing code and yeah, building out some of those those silly implementations that you knew just were never going to see the light of day that that was a drudge. It. It's funny. It kind of gave me this question that I love to ask other technologists, and that is, hey, if you go back over your whole career and you look at all of the projects you've been a part of, what percentage of those made it into production? And it's it's typically a startlingly low number. I would say probably the peak of the bell curve, at least in the responses I hear is now somewhere between 50 and 75 percent, which means that if if that really is reflective of of the larger I.T. landscape, 25 to 50 percent of our I.T. budget is being spent on projects that never see the light of day. So I don't know. Antony, I'd be curious to hear your response to that. Have you noticed a higher, lower percentage or does that kind of align with with your gut feel, too?

Anthony: So I think in blockchain, it's probably going to be lower than that. But I think there's a factor in terms of time. And I think implementing blockchain is different to traditional kind of data transformations, cloud transformations, frontend builds, single-sign-on type of programs that you'd see in single enterprise. I think what you can observe the blockchain is very quick to get to a proof of concept. And I think we've probably done that to death now, I think in 2020. We don't need to prove any more concepts. We can hash stuff, we can put things on multiple different types of ledger. We can add IOT, we can make it immutable. We can make it zero knowledge. Everybody at this point has built a blockchain for some use case in some industry that's either directly analogous or is the exact use case that most of my clients once talk about you that you're then getting into pilot, which is saying, you know, I wanna use real data, I want to use operational systems. You know that's challenging, but not that challenging in terms of cost. And, you know, being being able to run on Live systems, I think that's, again, probably a three to six month challenge depending on where you go. And that's that's the logical conclusion of getting past the POC (Proof of Concept) challenge. Oftentimes is was the POC done with a vision on scaling at all? So saying, OK, well, I'm going to prove concept. I'm going to put something in me to be on a blockchain. But actually, there's no commercial case for this whatsoever or to do this...I need an MI5 and MI6, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and The CIA to all work with me to do this particular initiative and there is not a hope in hell you were ever integrating their I.T. systems, you know, so have have I thought through the POC that can actually scale. Never mind whether it makes any sense to go to pilot. So I think there is there is an absolutely natural culling of POC's that should be probably something like 10 to 20 percent should ever get past POC on paper, let alone technically. But then to get from there, if you've understood the business case, if you understood that it's technically feasible, you're probably challenges then twofold fold funding and governance. As we've said plenty of times on this show, getting multiple parties together to co-develop or to co-invest in technology is challenging. It's hard and it's not that we haven't got to production or we never will, but it's that actually it takes, you know, three, six, 12, 24 months to get that critical mass together, to get an agreement in place, to get funding in place. So I think we're probably seeing a second wave now where a bunch of the early POC's. that had value are finally starting to surface in production or that those things that people have been using blockchain for in pilot are now getting there. And I think in the next six to 12 months, you're gonna see a lot more production commentary. But it wasn't because the technology wasn't mature. It wasn't because, you know, necessarily it couldn't be done, but that it's hard to do.

Kris: Yeah. You know, you mentioned two things that are funding and governance, and I think, you know, this is another area where we're blockchain has just flipped everything on its head. It used to be that our focus was on funding. Right. We've got to convince the CFO to open up the purse strings. That's gonna be the hard part. If we can get him or her to go ahead and fund the project governance. Hey, that's that's easy. We know how to do that. Just go out and Google, I.T. project governance, best practices and we'll just follow whatever comes up in the search results. You know, I think blockchain is really flip that on its head where again, if you get a smart executive who understands the technology, it becomes pretty easy for that executive to see the ROl. But the governance portion becomes something we've never had to deal with before. You know, if you and I represent different organizations and you've got a great dev ops process, it's solid, it's secure, it's efficient, it's well-known, it's well documented. I've got a great devs up the ops process. It's great. It's efficient, it works. But our processes are different.

Well, we've got to work out that difference. We've got to come to some kind of standardization or alignment or agreement before we can move forward. And these are just things from the governance aspect of an idea implementation that we haven't had to consider yet, which to me actually makes the technology really exciting. But we are in uncharted territory in that regard.

Anthony: I hear you and there really aren't too many open source playbooks for getting 13 banks together to create a startup or working with multiple governments and different organizations to share data, to reduce fraud or to reduce risk or to combat human trafficking. This is a lot, a lot of times new to world organizations and they all startups. There's different governance models for each. There's different participants for each, there's different regulatory rules for each. Anti-trust comes to the fore. IP management, GDPR, you know, lots of lots of challenging things, but not insurmountable. And as I said, I think we're going to see a lot more in terms of production credentials over the next little while, because it's taken a lot of those worthwhile postseason pilots, you know, 12 to 24 months to get to the stage where they deserve to see the light of day.

I want to change the tone just a little bit, Kris. I think we got a little bit deep at the end there. The point here is really around education, helping people to get up the curve in terms of understanding and knowledge and comfort around blockchain. I wanted to ask, obviously, you know, you work in training, you're an educator. What are some of the tools or the resources that you that you can really enjoy that you share with your students that help them to understand better or use get the hands on blockchain technology? What are some of the things that you'd recommend people to check out?

Kris: You know, for me, I think probably the greatest pool of knowledge out there is just in the community.

You know, it's not a particular blog or YouTube channel. I of course, I would definitely recommend Anthony Day's podcast if you're not already tuned into that. But there's there's just a tremendously good community on on LinkedIn. And what I really love about that is it's a very well-rounded one. You know, you can find the blockchain subreddits and those are filled with typically very technical folks, developers, solutions, architects. You can find the YouTube channels where someone will hyperfocus on this technology or that and really get down to the bits and bytes. And that's that's great if you really want to become an expert in something. But I think the kind of topics that we're talking about, I don't know if there's any better resource than just just linked in because you get people from so many different backgrounds and you see this technology from so many different points of view, not just from the technologists point of view, but from the business point of view as well.

And we keep talking about the business point of views as if it was something cohesive and unified and homogenous. But you're gonna look at this technology very, very different. If you're over in sales and marketing, then you will if you're in H.R. or if you're in finance. So even on the business side, it can be a very different nuanced perception depending on what your role within the organization is.

And I think, you know, just just generally, I years ago, I got into photography. A fun thing to do when I'm outside or traveling around. One claim that that I'm really good at it. But it is something I enjoy. And what I noticed is, is when you start picking up a camera and thinking about taking pictures, it kind of changes the way that you see the world. And you look at things different. You look at form and color different. And you can't ever really go back.

And I think, you know, technology blockchain is is kind of the same way when you start to look at things through that lens, when you start to understand what the technology is about. It's impossible, at least for me now, to open up to the news and read the headlines every day and not find at least one or two stories that have some kind of connection back to blockchain. Not not blockchain stories, but something in my mind where I could go, hey, this is where this technology might fit in. I think I smell and use case. There are boy bet this narrative would have turned out a lot differently had had this technology been involved somewhere. You know, so I think just learning what it's about and having some of those light bulb moments and letting it slowly wash over you. It's not the kind of thing that you're going to walk away understanding in an afternoon. It's a series of realizations. But it it slowly starts to reframe the way that you see the world. And once it does, I think it becomes very obvious where it where the good applications use cases are and where maybe they're not so good ones are.

Anthony: I love that quote - "blockchain is a series of slow realizations". I can definitely, definitely relate to that. You know, there's that point where you think you've got it and then you think you know it and then somebody challenges you all over again.

I remember having a quiet lunch with a couple of colleagues in New York around Consensus Conference about three years ago. And we sit down saying, what the hell are we doing? I'm not sure this makes any sense. Why would anybody invest behind this? Why would this even work? How could you ever get these different people together? Maybe crypto is the the only way for this to go. And then you talk it out and then you kind of bring back, and you anchor yourself in a few great examples and you remind yourself you're not trying to solve everything, but you've got a number of micro components that when you weave them together, they make a ton of sense. And you say, it's all right. Don't panic. I've still got a job. I've still got something that I can get up and go and do tomorrow. And that still makes sense. But it definitely has kind of elevated and the story has changed. But things evolve over three to six monthly cycles for me. And Alison McCauley put out a great article actually a couple of days ago around the marketing blockchain. And she talks about agile marketing, but specifically being constantly aware of the difference issues, the different feedback loops, rather than saying, okay, well, we've we've anchored in on this being a particular use for the technology.

Let's just go know long and hard for that for the next 12, 24 months. Put that in all of the marketing campaigns, all of the shotgun, scattergun communications out to the world and will double down on this one. And then six months later, actually the technology's pivoted. And what you thought was going to change and transform the payments landscape of the world became central bank digital currencies. And you're like, oh, well, that's very that's very, very different, actually. Maybe the stable coin that we want isn't necessarily, you know. Maybe we're looking at a European Central Bank delivered stable coin because this actually has to work and embed with the user experience of everyday banking and the non blockchain world as much as we expect it to be pervasive. There is the rest of the world has to still talk to and communicate with us. So I thought that was a really nice way of tying it up to close out the show.

Anthony: Kris, I want to ask, what are you up to? What's going on? Where can people find you and what have you got going on in your life right now?

Kris: You know, a lot of teaching. My life is either spent in the classroom somewhere or in a plane somewhere flying to the next classroom. But just getting ready to fly out Monday, actually. So spend the weekend at home, do my laundry and then head out Monday out to the UAE for a conference out there. Be back out there in April for the Future Blockchain Summit. But really, if you want to find me two great places, you can find me on LinkedIn. Just search blockchain beard guy. You'll find me right away. Ugliest guy in blockchain. Hard to miss. And also Blockchain Training Alliance.

If you want to learn more about some of the things that we've been talking about, this technology. There are a couple of really good free courses that we've got. We have a business fundamentals, absolutely 100 percent free course. If if you're non-technical and you're just interested in exploring some of the business value behind this little more if you're interested in getting hands on if you're a technologist. We have a free class with Hyperledger composer toolset for doing rapid prototyping. So take a look at those. Shoot me a message if you have any questions where we're always here to help and to be your guides as you start to explore this brave new landscape we're entering.

Anthony: That's awesome Kris. I remember, one of one of the most epic photos I think I've ever seen of anyone posting in blockchain was you in Dubai a couple of years ago with an absolutely packed room. And for those who've never seen a picture of Kris, you know, he's he's part biker, part startup CEO / CIO, part lumberjack, part Thor with a little sprinkling of hipster and a little kind of smattering of plaid, usually red or blue. And there's you holding court with what looks like about three or four hundred people all dressed in thobes, burkas. You know, a few Western looking folk as well. The lens flare, you know, captured off the beard. And it was I think it's going to become the thumbnail for this episode, hopefully, if you'll let me borrow it. I'd love to use it, and I hope that your next time out there is as epic as that was, because that, to me, captures perfectly what it's like to get training by Kris Bennett. You've got all eyes completely compelled, completely interested and smiling and gleaming and absorbing everything that you've got to say. And thank you for spending an hour with us. Thank you for all the broader stuff that you do for the community. The vlogs, the content, the training, the posts, all of that. And wish you safe travels. Hope it's a great year for you and Blockchain Training Alliance. Say hi to Chad and Melissa for me and the rest the team. And thanks again for joining the show.

Kris: I will do. And honestly, all the thanks are on this end of the conversation today. It's an honor to be on the podcast. So excited that you're doing this. And I know the content you put out is is just great. So please let me know anything I can do to help support to anyone listening. I'll just reiterate, we're always here to help answer any questions, to provide any guidance. So so please feel free to reach out any time. And I'm happy to support you any time. I'm just so excited that you're doing this. This is cool.