Part 1: PowerFan & The Basics of Crypto
From Tom Morkes interview with Jesse Krieger, the Chief Content Officer of PowerFan.io and founder of Lifestyle Entrepreneurs Press.
Jesse Krieger: The quick primer here is like Bitcoin, which most people have heard. It’s like a level one technology with crypto. So that was the first major cryptographic currency asset. And then [from there], the next generation is Ethereum. And the difference [between the two] is that Bitcoin is mainly a store of value.
It doesn’t have many interactive properties and it’s a little clunky in terms of transaction times, but [ultimately] an effective store of value, kind of like gold is that exists beyond a national currency.
And so Ethereum is kind of like next-gen. Ethereum has its own token ETH or Ethereum, but it’s also a global supercomputer. And so Ethereum allows what’s called smart contracts to operate. And the Ethereum network executes [the smart contracts], using the Ethereum cryptocurrency to power those transactions. And when we say a transaction, that means it’s entering into a distributed ledger, which is what a blockchain is, that can’t be changed.
It can’t be altered and is time-stamped and official for all time. You could trace back to the very first Bitcoin transaction, the very genesis block of Ethereum [as well] and see every single thing that’s happened on each of those platforms. That’s one of the features of cryptographic assets.
So without getting super technical, I think the important thing to understand is cryptographic assets are secure as of right now. If we get into quantum computing and things like that, that may change, but now, you’ve got a real store of value that exists outside the traditional finance system.
There’s sort of a revolutionary appeal at the core of it now…
Tom Morkes: Yeah, I was just going to ask on the Ethereum front. One of the things I heard from a developer friend of mine, who works at Google was that Ethereum, what it can allow you to do. And maybe this is kind of what NFTs are spinning off into… But that he could basically use it like a server, like a distributed server in a way. So all of a sudden it’s like you could hypothetically build apps on it or software on it, on top of Ethereum. So real practical applications, real practical software solutions. But instead of like me paying like say an Amazon AWS to host it and, and be the server for all my stuff, I’d be using Ethereum.
Am I getting this right? Broad sense?
Jesse Krieger: That’s essentially right. And Ethereum, for example, powerful. And our PFAN token is minted on the Ethereum blockchain. So at the essence of PowerFan and all of our tokens and our operations at this stage is powered by the Ethereum blockchain.
(Watch the full interview here)
