Tezos team member talks about the purpose of the platform, blockchain industry and more

Recently, Nithin Eapen, the Chief Investment Officer at Arcadia Crypto Ventures and a team member of the Tezos Commons Foundation spoke at the World Blockchain Summit, Singapore. He spoke about the story of Tezos, explained the purpose of the platform and self-amending ledgers.

In the opening line, he defined Tezos in a single sentence, stating:

“It’s a self-amending ledger, which means that it has a mechanism to adjust itself based on what the community wants or what people want in it.”

To elaborate on the significance of Tezos, Eapen took his audience back into the history of Bitcoin where he opinionated that Bitcoin is the mankind’s biggest innovation. He also referred to Bitcoin as being the greatest socio-political and economic experiment. Moreover, he believes this to be true because there is money involved. In his words:

“…Bitcoin came in and it allowed us to transfer value without a central third party or a government or whatever it is now. That is HUGE. It was a big answer to a computer science problem that Microsoft had published a paper that … said that the Byzantine Generals problem cannot be solved mathematically. Well Satoshi, he did it as a mathematical or a computer science problem plus an economic incentive problem… He solved it using all these things.”

Eapen went on to discuss the problems related to blockchain and cryptocurrencies after the community started making developments. One of the problems that he mentioned were hard forks due to the difference in communities such as Ethereum [ETH] and Ethereum Classic [ETC].

The investment expert made a point that in times of doubt, it is hard to take sides on one decision. For this purpose, a paper was written wherein a solution to this decision-making problem was mentioned. It was self-amending ledgers, which had the feature for the people to vote on the protocol in order to fix it.

He also explained how beneficial this feature could be. He stated that any of the protocols, whether Bitcoin or Ethereum, is successful and valuable due to the network effects. It is the community where people agree in masses that makes it valuable. He further said:

“…so let’s say there are 100 of us and a fork happens and 20 of us go to one place and the 70 of us remain at the other one, the value is kind of decreasing for the one that has a lesser number of people. So if we could come to a consensus between us and they could work on it and then if that split did not happen maybe this would have been more valuable.”

To execute this solution, Tezos came into being as a mechanism, as stated by Eapen.