BYU Blockchain Summit Seeks To Explain Blockchain Technology

As comedian Ellen DeGeneres explained last week on her television show: “Everybody is talking about bitcoin, nobody understands it.”

Students, business professionals and investors tackled that question as they came together last Friday at Brigham Young University for its firstever Blockchain Summit. The summit, organized by BYU law student Ryan Lewis, pulled in an impressive array of experts working in this very new field.

But what is blockchain, how does it relate to bitcoin and how will it affect the layperson?

As Chad Bennett, founder and CEO of Heroic Cybersecurity in Provo, explained, the “internet is the information exchange protocol,” and “blockchain is the value exchange protocol.” Just as the internet changed the way society, at a very basic level, exchanges information, blockchain advocates say this new technology will change the way society exchanges assets.

Jonathan Johnson, president of Medici Ventures and a member of Overstock.com’s board of directors, defined assets as: real property — like land or a home, currencies — including cryptocurrencies, or even stocks and bonds.

“An asset can be anything that, when I give it to you, you don’t want a copy. You want the actual thing,” Johnson said.

Sending someone an email or PDF — those are copies of the actual thing, he added. In that situation, users don’t care if it’s a copy. But a user does not want a “copy” of $100. They want the real thing.

“The blockchain allows for the digital transfer of assets in a way they will flow free and frictionless,” Johnson said.