Today, we are talking to Daniel Wingen, one of the founders and product & business manager of BlockKepper. Get inspired by his biggest mistake, his best accomplishment and hear about the future of blockchain.

Daniel Wingen, Co-Founder of BlockKeeper

Daniel, glad to have you here. What do you think is the future of the blockchain space in the next 3 years?

To answer your question, I think it is important to differentiate between open (public) and permissioned (private) blockchains.

The private (or permissioned) blockchains will have a very bright future in the next 3 years, because every company and institution will do their research about blockchain, use cases and hire consultants to make their internal processes more efficient with the help of blockchains. They will assumably realize that blockchains make more sense with multiple participants to enforce trust among each other. Together with others, corporations will form consortiums and use closed blockchains where every party will need a permission to be able to participate. These blockchains will be fast, but they will eventually not be fast enough. This might force them to move over to new technologies like Tangle or Hashgraph. This approach will help companies and institutions to stay competitive for a longer time, while they are protecting themselves from real disruptive forces coming from open and permissionless blockchains. It will be similar to the situation of interacting within an private intranet vs. interacting with the Internet.

Open and permissionless blockchains, on the other hand, will have a difficult time during the next 3 years. These completely decentralized Blockchains started to create a completely new form of asset classes which are very difficult to value. Assets like Bitcoin and Co. are something entirely new within many aspects of their existence.

And what do people do with something they don’t know or don’t understand? They start to pigeonholing and put them into conceptional frames they can understand. They might feel that there is something more, but they are not able to understand it like they didn’t understand the Internet at first. They will handle these assets like most other assets without understanding their real (hidden) value, and therewith ignore the most important characteristics of this kind of new money — meaning complete autonomy and equality for every human being by disrupting almost every system of power we know today.

In the next years, 90% of the people who buy Bitcoin, do not understand in what they have been investing in. That means they are just driven by speculation, based on rising prices and fear of missing out.

More and more deceptive blockchains and assets are entering the playground and using the opportunity to scam greed-driven people with high speculative, but fabulous looking ideas and not existing products.

Prices will go up, while causing FOMO and go down while FUD is spreading, and everyone who does not understand what’s going on, will lose a lot of money and pillory this too complex to understand technologies. I’m pretty sure, we will see a similar situation like the DOT-COM bubble where only a few people really understood the value of the Internet, and companies with non-existing or poor products were able to raise a load of money. All they needed to do was to say that they are were doing something on the Internet. But this time it will be the buzzword blockchain which attracts the money and there will be almost no regulation possible. Everyone will learn their lessons the hard way and then hopefully try to understand how this new technology can bring real value.

Additionally, we will have a problem with those who started to understand the technology but profit from the current systems of money and power. They will do everything to prevent the disruption of their systems.

We will have attacks on Bitcoin and co. from every possible angle, and situations of conflict we can’t even imagine at the moment might be applied. I just hope, it does not end in war.

The good thing is though, that this innovation is unstoppable and fearless like a “honey badger” because it’s nature of existence is decentralized, and it can’t be taken down. Every attack will force it to evolve and become stronger.

There will be hard times, but if you ask for my opinion about the future of 10–20 years from now, this technology will have disrupted almost every system of power we know today. It’s not because older generations will adopt to this new systems of completely decentralized power managed by computer algorithms and mathematics. No, the change will happen, because our children will grow up with technologies we can only surmise yet, and they will not be able to imagine a third party acting as an intermediary. For them, being independent will be completely normal f.e. to wind up their affairs from their smartphones and to have control over their own and their community’s sovereignty without the need of trusting an intermediary. They will grow up with a completely new understanding of money and power because they have access to almost every existing information over the Internet.

But even the generation born after 1980 grew up with technologies and the Internet. Most of them witnessed many times how our legacy systems of money and power are heavily liable to corruption. They might not understand completely what is going on out there, but they are seeing and feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong in this world and money seems to be the key to that malady of our society. These young adults want a change towards a better world for their kids and public blockchains are their tools to enforce the necessary change.

The more you go down the rabbit whole of decentralized, permissionless blockchains, you will realize it’s not just a romantic imagination of a better world — it’s about time to rethink the concepts of money and trust. And if you do so, you start to understand what’s really going on and how disruptive this force will be to all the corrupt legacy systems of trust. Eventually, it might appear to you, that there is no possible way how this global revolution can be stopped — and it’s that future you invest in, if you buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If you really understand the technology and don’t just speculate, you become a co-designer of that future. Hundreds of thousands developer, entrepreneurs and investors are already working on making this radical change possible.

Real world use cases for cryptocurrencies are important. What are your favorite use cases?

To be honest: at the moment cryptocurrencies do not have much real world use cases. The reason for that is, that broad adoption is the key to the success of a monetary system.

At the moment the use cases of cryptocurrencies are changing and growing with their networks and ecosystems. Bitcoin for example is evolving to a really good store of value at the moment and it will get better in that function in the next years. While being a good store of value, it slowly evolves to a medium of exchange, as price stabilizes and than to a unit of account, as soon as our legacy systems collapses.

But before that is thinkable at all, we need to improve the technology with second and third layer networks and applications which then might enable the necessary amount of trustless transactions und easy to use interfaces. That’s a long way to go, but as I said, hundred of thousands out there are already working on cutting edge technologies to enable easy and trustless interactions with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies at scale.

A great use case for Ethereum at the moment is to fund new decentralized protocols, apps and innovative startups with ICOs. This will go on, while Ethereum slowly evolves to a platform for DAOs which will help communities to come together for projects and govern this projects together through smart contracts.

This will bring up companies with not just one CEO, but hundreds or thousands of CEOs. It will enable liquid democracy on many levels of societal interaction.

If you ask for my favorite use case of cryptocurrencies at the moment: I don’t have one! But if you ask for my favorite use case of decentralized and permissionless blockchains, I can tell you, that I really like the idea of a global, common basis for one version of the truth everyone can agree on, without trusting each other — this is the most important use case at all, and can potentially serve so many applications, including the most obvious one: monetary systems.

What was your biggest (crypto) mistake? What’s your personal learning out of that?

I would say that my biggest mistake was not to study Bitcoin the first time I heard about it. I did not understand how this could be a solution to the problems with our financial systems, and instead focussed on studying community- and local-currencies. I was already working on my bachelor theses about Silvio Gesell at that time, and the implications of demurrage currencies vs. complementary currencies used by local communities (Wörgl Freigeld vs. Chiemgauer), when I experienced my first Bitcoin transaction which immediately got me hooked. Maybe to ignore Bitcoin for a while was a good thing, because thanks to my studies of different monetary systems, I had a better understanding about how money works and in which kind of shapes/versions it can appear.

Another big mistake was the investment into TheDAO. This idea of a DAO impressed me that much and I saw the sales going up causing a lot of FOMO on my side. I just assumed that the developer had made the DAO unhackable. Than, the TheDAO got hacked. I think it was to early for a vehicle like that in this very early stages of smart contracts on Ethereum.

The positive outcome, thanks to the Ethereum hard fork, which caused the separation of Ethereum classic, I got all my Ether back and I am now very conservative with ICO investments. This taught me to double check every little aspect and really understand how things work before investing into a protocol, DAO or business based on blockchain.

What is your biggest personal accomplishment?

My biggest success in this space so far is the team around BlockKeeper. I’m so happy to have found the best people I know, who believe in a shared vision and just started to build this product with me. The quality of each team member is very unique and valuable and combined, we form a team where our individual skills perfectly amplify each others.

As one the Founders of blockkeeper.io, can you tell us something more about your solution and how it helps people?

Yes, of course. If you look at blockchains, they are just database artifacts as a result of a consensus about one common truth. These databases consists of public entries everyone globally can rely on. To the public they are just anonymous or synonymous transactions of a value, but for the sender and the recipient they have a meaning. These transactions are in a context which just the sender or recipient knows, and this context is not only different for everyone, but mostly a very personal information you don’t want to share. We want to enable people and entities to record the context of their transactions in a very easy but secure and private way. The public should just know that there was a transaction, but they are not supposed to know the context of that transaction. We try to build a documentation solution for useful public blockchains, to enable a secure and private documentation of transactions and to oversee the amount and value of the assets you really “possess” on these blockchains. The BlockKeeper app works similar to a multi banking app, but for blockchains. The current version is just the minimum viable product, which will help us to better understand the need of the users, and based on that we will proceed with building that private and secure documentation layer for most of the blockchains and 2nd-layer transactions.

Thank you Daniel for sharing this great insights about your personal view on the blockchain. Don’t forget to visit blockkeeper.io and create an free account to manage your transaction and track your crypto portfolio.

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