Nathan Williams is back! The CEO and Founder of MineSpider joins us to talk about the deeper ramifications that blockchain may have on manufacturing. Danny: Hey, welcome to IndustrialSage, today I've got a special treat for you, I'm going to be talking with Nathan Williams, who is the CEO and founder of MineSpider. And we're going to be talking about blockchain in the supply chain. So let's jump into it, Nathan thank you so much for joining me today. Nathan: Thank you so much Danny for having me on the show. Danny: Our pleasure, you know, but first for those who aren't familiar with MineSpider, tell us what you guys do. Nathan: So MineSpider is doing blockchain, supply chain traceability. So what we do is we create digital passports for raw materials that travel along the supply chain with the raw material so they get stamped along the way, data gets uploaded so that you have a better picture of what you're buying, where it came from and under what conditions it was produced. And so blockchain is a rather integral part of what we do because it solves a key problem of trust, that when you received this data about what you're buying, you know that the data was not altered, that no matter how many hands it went through that it is your data and that it is unchangeable and that it can prove the authenticity of what you were buying. Danny: Great, you know, and there's a lot of misinformation around blockchain, so, you know, we'll start right there, the basics, what is it? Nathan: So blockchain was, is this technology that was created to solve this problem of trust, picture it back in 2008, when we had this financial crisis and people had trouble trusting banks for good reason, there was a big financial crisis and it had to do with certain groups of people who have more control over making financial rules than others. And there was a group of crypto anarchists who said, "Well, what does the bank do? They're just a group that keeps track of a ledger, a ledger of transactions of who owns what. Could we keep track of that ledger amongst ourselves without having a trusted third party." The problem, of course, if everyone participating is keeping track of the ledger amongst themselves, is, what do you do in case the ledgers different? Under the traditional system that bank would have the real version and so we could compare our own records to the bank. But because there's no authoritative bank you need, it's really not an easy problem to solve. So what, there was a fellow or maybe a group of people under a pseudonym, we're not sure, named Satoshi Nakamoto, who came up with a rather elegant solution to this problem. So the solution was instead of a continuous ledger, we break that ledger into blocks and then we link blocks together and secure them so that they can't be changed and it gets a little technical. Each of these blocks contains 4,000 transactions and then you add a what's called a mystery number and you basically run and hash all of that together to make a code. If anyone goes and changes a transaction then it would affect the next block in the ledger, so they would have to fix that block and then the next one, and then the next one. And so all of the participants, all of the people that are keeping track of the real record of transactions, will always have more blocks in their chain than someone who goes and tries to fiddle with the record and chain cause it'll be broken. So essentially all of all of the participants are what are called nodes, they're their computers that are keeping track of this real sequence of transactions, and so as a result, you've got this bank account essentially that can...