Today we take a look at how Microsoft is working with blockchain in Azure. Stefano Tempesta is a senior program manager at Microsoft on Azure confidential computing. Azure confidential computing focuses on securing data in use and one of the technologies they are working with is blockchain. Microsoft is working to develop blockchain solutions that can be used for things like digital signatures and supply chain management. 

We also find out how Microsoft is using blockchain on some internal projects. Since Blockchain technology is here to stay, Stefano discusses a number of future uses outside cryptocurrency. Even so we had to ask Stefano about bitcoin, etherium and NFTs. Have you used Blockchain? Do you see any use for it in the enterprise space? Let us know on Twitter at @dotnet_Podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of adventures in dot net. I'm Sean Klayberg, your host. And with me today are your cohosts, Caleb Wells. Hey, y'all. Hey all, Caleb.

How's it going? Oh, I'm doing pretty good. Good. And our other cohost, Wailu. Sean, how you doing?

Hey. Good. How are you? Alright. Thanks.

Good. I heard I heard you recently got your 2nd COVID shots. So Yeah. About 2 days ago now. So, yes, been pretty good.

Things haven't I mean, I didn't get sick because I thought I got really, really tired yesterday. That was about it. But, yeah, things are good. Good deal. Any side effects?

Just a bit of fatigue yesterday. Basically slept during the day pretty much. It was exactly good. But, I'm not not as bad as I was imagining, but No. That's good.

Yeah. I'm probably gonna be going in for my, booster sometime next week. So I'm trying to do for my booster. So and my wife has made that a condition of me being able to play hockey this fall. So Okay.

Gotta do it. Gotta be safe. Yep. Alright. Let's welcome our guest today, Stefano Tapesta.

Is that right? That's right. Yes. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me today.

It's great pleasure to be together and, sharing a bit of news, updates from, the industry. You you do the introduction in a moment on the topics, but, yes, yes, definitely happy to be in this, podcast with all of you. It's good to have you. Thanks for coming on. Yeah.

So why don't you kinda tell us a little bit about yourself, you know, how you got into, development and and how you got into dot net, and then what you do now? Yeah. Thanks. Look. It's probably a long story, but I'm currently based in Melbourne in Australia.

I'm originally from Italy, and I started my career in Italy just out of uni. And, at that time, it was a c, c plus plus, as one of the main languages, in university. But then I joined this, innovative organization that brought me into the sort of the the global market because I was the one in Italy probably speaking a little bit more decent English than than my colleagues. So I started working on international projects all the way from the US, South Africa, and the UK. And then in one of these trips, I met the the sort of the founder or cofounder of the dot net language at Microsoft, and he was still in beta release, so over 20 years ago now.

Right? And then he he intrigued me. C sharp intrigued me. And they say, oh, look. This is c plus plus with another plus.

It's even better. So let's try to make it, work in my organization. So dotnetone.0 was born. C sharp was the language of reference, and we start building we started building application on the dot net framework since the very, very, very first version. So I'm really proud.

It's a way to be one of the early adopters of dot net directly from the Microsoft space. And then, with Microsoft, I had a long term relationship because over the time being a Microsoft regional director, which is a community event, a community sorry, a community role, not a employee role. And then MVP, Microsoft, the most valuable professional on Azure technology and a few other things. And then last year, I joined Microsoft. So eventually, 20 years after working on all the dot net technology, I'm now part of the Azure product group.

My focus currently is on cloud security. There's a lot that goes into cloud security. We actually had, Christos Matzkas, a couple of months back. So you guys are doing a good job there. We definitely appreciate it where that's concerned.

So There's a lot going on. That's right. Yes. Yes. Right.

So you mentioned that you've been working on some some block chain projects in Azure. And I think that was gonna be the the the focus of this episode or at least the primary focus. Can for people who aren't familiar, which I'm sure most devs are, what's blockchain and how do you use it? Yeah. Let's talk about blockchain.

And, again, Microsoft has been a sort of a pioneer, very early adopters in terms of blockchain for the enterprise space. So I managed blockchain platform running in the cloud. When there was back in 2016, so already good 5 years ago, when blockchain was coming out mostly in the context of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, and then later Ethereum. And and everything that people knows about blockchain or knew at that time was purely, you know, investment, or speculative investment in crypto. But blockchain is much more than a cryptocurrency.

Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed digital ledger with a proof of consensus, which means a technical proof, technology based proof of consensus, which means that all the parties involved into this peer to peer network must agree on accepting a transaction. Now think for a moment how normal digital transactions hope happen in our world. There are 2 parties that are exchanging value. It can be, you know, financial transactions like making a payment. And when that happens, there is an intermediary party that authorize the transactions.

Like, you make a payment with a credit card, the credit card vendor is there as the middleman and the intermediary party to authorize the transaction based on whether you have enough credits or not. With blockchain, we are removing this intermediary and creating a peer to peer network where everybody, all the peers, all the nodes in this network have a copy of the entire ledger, encrypted, digitally signed. And when the transaction happens, basically, you have to reach a consensus for making sure that the the transaction is genuine and not fraudulent. Why is this good? Well, it's good, first of all, because of intermediaries typically an interest is often a financial interest in making transaction happens, could be compromised, and we, as people of, IT, we know that when there is a single entity, is a single point of failure, and it can compromise the integrity of the entire system.

With blockchain, there is no single point of failure. There is a network or appears to be a network where everybody can I everybody agrees on the transaction? And when that happens, we have a guarantee that the transaction can, be genuine and correct. So, obviously, one of the main use cases is payment or cryptocurrency, and it does make sense. But there is so much more.

This is why Microsoft started building a blockchain service for supply chain, for example, for digital signature, for, connecting IoT devices, all everything that has, multi multiple parties involved involved, and you need to guarantee a trust between these parties using technology. And this is where blockchain is incredibly helpful, providing these technology based trust that can automate processes, supply chain, for example, and without the need for, manual intervention and without the need of expensive intermediaries. So I think most of us has probably heard of Bitcoin. I'm guessing all of sort of Bitcoin and and probably Ethereum as well. But, also, what other big, I guess, crypto projects are there that, especially the ones that have been hosted on Azure?

Yeah. So look, Microsoft is taking, an interesting journey on blockchain starting with offering platforms like Ethereum, but not only as a managed service, on Azure. Now if you take a step aside for a moment and you ask, okay, but what is blockchain? Show me the blockchain. Right?

And is a distributed database with some computing capability, with some networking capability because obviously all the different nodes have to connect to each other and and with storage. So at the end of the day, he runs some some Linux boxes. So it's a perfect example of hosting infrastructure on a cloud provider. Now the challenge of going your way, so installing everything on installing your own blockchain, is that it's not trivial. It's not, it's not something that you can do, you know, in a few minutes.

It's something that is definitely not trivial. It takes some good time to configure. And this is why Microsoft, decide to help the emerging blockchain community of developers creating a managed platform where developers can focus on building smart contracts, and the old infrastructure is just hosted in the cloud. Now you asked the what main projects are hosted in the Azure cloud? Well, what happened is, that, the developer community started using this platform for building, some very, very specific applications using the Azure Cloud as, what it is, infrastructure or platform as a service.

So there are no, know, significant project or applications that are built on the blockchain service. There are a number of extensions in some way to to the blockchain service itself that are leveraging the Azure platform for, what this, which is, you know, infrastructure and platform as a service. One that I is worth mentioning is a platform called Corda. And, and it's important because, it is a blockchain for the enterprise. It's built by a company called Consensus, and they are one of the leaders in the enterprise blockchain.

I'm I'm I'm mentioning this because, this is not about cryptocurrency. This is not about doing going the way of DeFi, decentralized finance, but it is about providing enterprise services using blockchain technology for the different use cases that I mentioned. So providing trust in automated way in a distributed network. Corda is doing this job, basically, connecting all the different parties, creating smart contracts that can automate supply chain, digital signature, and, also payment using Azure based blockchain network and using programming languages like .net, like, c sharp, TypeScript, everything that can be integrated in with the blockchain back end. So you mentioned that the Azure blockchain services is mainly for, like, enterprise blockchains.

Are we talking like kinda like Yeah. Like, B2B type thing or like kind of in internal corporate stuff? Because I'm just wondering why what use cases there would be for if, like, for an enterprise to turn to to use a blockchain really. Yeah. Look, it's mostly B2B for sure.

And the typical application that we are seeing in aspect of tokenization of digital asset starting for now mentioning again the supply chain. You can have a distribution of some products all the way from the producer to not the shop around the corner that where they sell it. The the the provisioning of of all these end to end supply chain has different stages. After the producer, you have distribution, you have warehousing, and everybody has some way conflicting interest or competing interest in the distribution, selling, and packaging, and so on. So blockchain, together with the the Azure IoT Cloud, for example, can, track, the the the origin, the shipment.

Using GPS devices, we can track the journey of these goods or these products over the entire global supply chain. We can use tags for tracking the handling of of parcels. And all these combination, all this integration of IoT devices, blockchain, and the entire process automation guarantees that what you buy is a genuine party. And this has been applied in a lot of industries. Here in Australia, where I'm based, for example, there is a big big attention to tracking the origin, the provenance of food.

So there is a Blockchain, a ledger for, coffee. There is a ledger for beef as in meat. And so there is a there is an interest to make sure that the what we buy is where the producer claims is for. And blockchain can help. I'm not saying that it's the only solution, but it's definitely a technology that can create that level of transparency.

Because at the end, this ledger, which is, you know, sort of a list of all the transaction that happens on the blockchain itself, is owned by no one, but is, but a copy of it, is, is obtained by all the parties that are involved. So if someone try to tamper with this, distributed database, then they, they sort of try to manipulate evidence for a sample, then, their entry, the the block in the blockchain will be invalid because it will have a digital signature, a lot sort of a hash value. It is completely different than anything else, any other copy, among all the other parties. So this creates, no, the automatic trust because, you know, you say if I try to tamper with my copy of the ledger and say, no, this product is not coming from Australia, but it's coming from South Africa, then everybody else can say, well, no. This, the hash value, the digital signature is different because as you know, when you change a single byte of information, the hash value will be completely different, then, automatically, you can reject my my attempt to tamper with the with this information and, and kick me out of of the supply chain, kick me out of the circle of trust.

So the the the register, does it contain every transaction from the beginning of that blockchain? It actually does. There exactly the odds. Yes. Which is creating a bit of a trouble when, scaling this.

So there are some techniques It could get huge. Exactly. It can get very huge. There are some techniques for charting values so that you don't have to have, the full COVID from the very beginning, introducing some snapshot, and then progressing from that point in time into to the future or distributing also the the storage itself. But at the moment, as of now, Blockchain networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, which are the the most popular, you know, from a public perspective, the you you you get the full copy.

So if you want to join one of these network, you you have to download the gigabytes of storage on your device, on your node for, for joining the network. Yeah. But you're right. You're you're actually, raising a point of scalability, that is not trivial. And, and it's not just the storage.

It's also the the the performance of the network that is at stake at the moment. Bitcoin typically takes 10 minutes for processing a transaction, a block of transaction, not just a single transaction. Multiple transaction are combined in a block. And and this, block is validated every 10 minutes, which has an average, which is been there by design, but obviously creates a little bit of a challenge when you want to scale for application that require real time, validation of transactions. So there are use cases, but I wouldn't say blockchain is for everything and certainly is something that before being adopted in the enterprise space requires a little bit of thinking.

And this is why the Microsoft evolved the the offering of blockchain. So when I mentioned on the blockchain service, this platform as a service with infrastructure and parts, altogether, the offering evolved. And in the last year, rather than focusing on this generic platform as sort of, you know, you you get the VM, you get the virtual machine, and then, you you build whatever you want. Microsoft, they came out with more specific, more tailored services that address use cases that are more more specific. Let me clarify.

The challenge that we have observed, you know, in this generic blockchain platform as a service is that the complexity of getting into now the the adoption, the development in, in the corporate space was too big. One side is, there is still a lot of misunderstanding on blockchain from a logical and technical perspective, and also the learning curve is not is not as obvious. I'm not saying that other programming languages or other technologies are easier necessarily, but, you know, you go on Stack Overflow and ask questions about, building an API or web service, you find 1,000 and 1,000 of answers. You go and and find you go and search for a digital signature on using a smart contract on Ethereum, you will probably find the 2 or 3 answers. Right?

And the reason is that the community is still growing. It's still not there to to provide that kind of large scale support, which is one side of the story. But then the other side is, look, doing blockchain, in a such a generic way without specializing the use case for the industry is, sort of going there with going in any company with a VM, with a empty virtual machine and say, hey, you customer. Tell me what you want, and then I can build everything from scratch. Yes.

Good luck. But the cost of this approach is, sometimes unsustainable. Hence, specialized services. So the last one that has been announced at the build conference in May. The Build Conference in Microsoft is one of the big events for developers.

So it was just a few months ago in, in May, May 2021 is called Azure confidential ledger, ACL for for friends. And ACL, this confidential ledger is based on blockchain technology and provides a specialized ledger capability hosted in Azure, obviously, and where you have the possibility to store transaction logs at scale. And when I mean scales, I mean millions and millions of transaction in fraction of a seconds and with confidentiality in place. Confidentiality is what I'm doing at Microsoft at the moment is, protecting data when it's being processed, when it is in memory. So not just encryption of data arrest, which, no, we've been doing for years years, not encryption of data in transit like HTTPS, for example, these sort of things, again, industry standards for years years.

This is a protection of data when it is in memory, when it's being processed inside a virtual machine, a container, and it is in clear text. In that moment, IBM under attack can be compromised and someone can take a memory dump and see everything that is running in memory in the in and it's been processed. So confidential computing introduce that sort of a hardware based encryption of the memory, and this confidential ledger allows to store transaction logs of any type. Can be also even your log analytics. Now it can be even your application logs, whatever you want to store that has some sort of requirement for confidentiality, but in an immutable digital ledger.

And this is the important part of using the blockchain technology that is immutable. So no one can edit, no one can modify, no one can tamper with the ledger. Once it's written, it's for good. And it can be used exactly for the purpose, not that I mentioned before. If it is in the blockchain, it must be true.

So you can use it as evidence for for as a proof that something has happened. Is Microsoft using blockchain internally, or do they have intentions on using in any of their products outside of Azure? We are. Yes. So there is a I I don't know if you have heard the the goal or the intention of Microsoft to go negative on carbon by 2030.

So in Right. Less than 10 years now. Internally, there is a project that is, doing carbon measurement, offsetting a tokenization with the intention of, and and not just carbon, is is, green tech in general, but we specifically focus on carbon at the moment with the intention of measuring all the different services, and processes that have a carbon footprint. And, by tokenizing this on a blockchain, you have the possibility to to measure and trade and offset for value. Like, they were tokens on a crypto equivalent of a cryptocurrency.

So you can actually tokenize the quantity of talk of carbon that is consumed, that is used in a in a specific line of business and and use techniques to offset it by trading carbon for alternative, green tech. This is an internal project, but there are this platform is also available for for for customers to to use it also for their own carbon negative strategy. And and, actually, Microsoft has introduced something. I I need to check the name. I can't remember, but it's called it is a grant.

It is a sort of, so it's, the possibility to provide grants as it funds money for organization that want to go into this direction and and access, no, engineering support, r and d support, infrastructure support as in Azure credits. So all these services that Microsoft can provide to the developer community and to the to organization that want to start the journey into carbon negative. This can have massive impact on climate change if we do it right and if we do it, properly, in the time frame that we have given. Yeah. I think that's one of the biggest complaints about Bitcoin right now is how much power that it's taking to do all the mining, plus all the transactions, and all that kind of stuff.

So Bitcoin, you know, is really very carbon positive at the moment. Massively. Yes. Is one one of the big challenges because, it's not only about, it's not only about consuming energy, but is, the quantity that is required to to mine, no, which is the technical term to say to validate a block, so mining a block is often compared to the level of energy that even big countries consume in a year. So that look.

To be honest, there is no exact benchmark. You know, sometimes they say, oh, is the entire country of Sweden or the entire state of Texas or the entire, New Zealand depending on the region or depending on the people you're talking to just to give a reference. But it's huge. It's huge for sure. Now the Bitcoin community or the blockchain community defends this position by saying that over 80% of this energy is actually green tech.

So it's, green energy from renewable sources. So but still remain the point that which is not denied that there is a big production, a big need for energy depending on which source it's coming from. Even if it is a renewable source, even if it is from solar, from wind, there is still a massive need. So Blockchain is not green and, and but this is why the application of Blockchain to Enterprise use cases can remove the need for this, extreme energy consumption. Why?

Well, going public like Bitcoin, like Ethereum requires a a method, a protocol for, for approval of transaction, which is called a proof of work. And this proof of work is a mathematical quiz that requires, no GPUs or dedicated hardware. So the the expensive, computation to to happen. And because it's done in the public, you can't trust anybody at all. Right?

So there is no way that you can trust any party in the blockchain. So you have to perform this mathematical computation, which requires a lot of energy. Going enterprise, you have the advantage that you can filter in some way who is part of this blockchain and is call a permission blockchain as opposite to someone that is completely public. And being part of a permission blockchain, the advantage is that you actually know who is, your your party. So who, you know, in a supply chain, who are the vendors, the couriers, the producers, the suppliers, and so on.

So by having an an a sort of a digital identity, reduce the need for extreme validation using, you know, this, this expensive computation protocol. So there are different other ways. No longer proof of work, but proof of stake, proof of time, proof of a lot of other things. And in this way, you can reduce the energy consumption because, the the parties that are involved are sort of prefilter or pretrusted in the beginning. It's an interesting journey.

It's, it's an interesting space. It's there is a lot that is changing over time. So I've heard that, yeah, like, the the power consumption of, Bitcoin is mainly due to proof of work and actually most modern, blockchains are moving to proof of stake for that reason because it doesn't require the this mathematical proof. So are you basically saying that these your blockchain services mainly cater for, I guess, centralized blockchains and not decentralized? Yes.

Yes. So, well, it is both, but the the initial service that was meant to be to go public, and and offer the decentralization for a real public blockchain, so with use cases that are more aligned to cryptocurrency has been retired as of September. So you cannot create the blockchain service any longer, and and it has been intentionally done, obviously, to reduce, one is, this energy consumption and also because our customers over time have espresso decide for more specialized services like the digital ledger, the confidential ledger that I mentioned, and a few others that are coming in the market soon. So at the end, the current offering is, centralized, which means that the parties that are involved are are they integrated? They have a digital identity and can be verified in much easier way.

So one service that now is using this approach of the digital identity of the different parties in the in the network is called verified credentials. And this for me can be revolutionary in some way. I've done, collaboration on advisory level with the government here in Australia, the Department of Industry on, digital decentralized digital identity, DID, and verifiable credential. The idea is, your identity doesn't belong any longer to the authority that owns it, like a Microsoft account, a Google account, as well as a Facebook, Twitter account. So if you sign in in in a service with your Google account, with your Microsoft account, with your Facebook account, but then, the like of Microsoft, Google, Facebook decide to shut down the service, you're automatically out of the service.

Right? So you cannot access even if it is not connected to Microsoft, but you're using that service to use, to authenticate. So the idea of the identity that you own is a self sovereign entity. So something that you own, that you as individual decide what kind of element of this identity you want to share. Another thing, for example, you're going to buy some products and you ask for age, for proof of age.

And sometimes the way to do this is to show your driving license for a simple. Right? But your driving license contains much more information than just your date of birth. So why sharing additional information that is not required? So the concept of DID, the decentralized identity, is that you decide what you want to have in your identity, wallet.

And what you want to share with other parties. So if you are sharing also proof of age, you just have to share the, the year of birth. And not even, the day and not even and not your certainly not your address, certainly not your driving license, and so on. Blockchain is used for validating all these transactions because, again, it's transparent and immutable dig digital ledger, and verifiable credentials are all based on this technology. This is another specialized service in the Azure cloud at the moment, which is the result of, now these years of investment in blockchain technology and a transformation from a generic platform everybody could use, but no one was exactly certain how to use it 100% to specialized services that the corporate space, the the companies now can can use because they address a very specific requirements that they are tailored for for need, other than having being a generic development platform.

Do NFTs, non fungible tokens, use blockchain? I I read all these stories about kids getting rich off making the NFTs. Yes. They, they do. Actually now going back, to a little bit, to the, the dot net space, there is a platform called, a blockchain platform called Neo, where you can call the, smart contract in dot net and create an NFT.

And, I I think this is fascinating in some way because an a nonfungible token is a little bit the opposite of a cryptocurrency, and they're getting very trendy at the moment. A cryptocurrency at the end is, you know, from a transactional perspective is equivalent to regular currency. So if you have a a $10 bill and and you can exchange for 2 notes of 5 each or 10 coins or $1 each. And, and this would be something the same value. Right?

It's still $10 at the end. And the same happens also with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency, you can exchange for something equivalent, and it still represent value. So that is a fungible token. An NFT, a nonfungible, is unique, is a piece of a masterpiece, can be it can be music, it can be videos, it can be art.

No? So we have seen a lot of especially in, in painting, or digital painting happening that is sold as a right of of use of use of this asset. And, and it is a token. It it is coded on a blockchain. So what you buy is, the right of owning that digital asset, not the right of, possessing from a physical perspective because there is no physical, tangible tag, asset in there.

But there is the right of owning. To some people have even in some way not not abuse, abuse is a bad word, but going went a little bit extreme. For example, they have tokenized their Twitter and and sold as a NFT their first tweet ever. And someone decide to buy the the tweet of that person, that that possible person. Why would you do that?

Bragging about right to use it. Now they own the tweet of that person. That's okay. I am in a the mechanics of this world sometimes is confusing. And, but but this is true.

Yes. This is what's happening at the moment. A lot of interest in this NFT, platform like Ethereum can develop NFT, Cardano is another one, And Neo, as I mentioned, that is a bit more related to the dot net world. Do do they actually own it then? Like, is it like a legal ownership of of an n NFT?

Look. The funny thing is that, this is legal from because people have decided that it is. So And again, this is people that are on a Blockchain, peer to peer network, outside of any jurisdiction and outside of any legislation of any country. So, because they bought it, they own it, and they say this is mine. And this is purely a convention because, of, people being on that network, on that blockchain network.

Is you receive a unique sequence of characters that represent an address on a blockchain. And because you own that address, then you can say that is mine. But there is no legislation by any country that says that, because you have that address, now you have it. So if you go on court, who knows what happens? There is no legislation.

This is a funny word. I find it very interesting. Yes. Well, what Stefano is saying with, like, like, tweets. Right?

Yeah. You can pay for a tweet, but the whole NFT process, and you can own it. And I'm using quotes here. But it doesn't mean the tweet transfers to your Twitter account. It is up to you.

It is still It is still on the account of the original person, and they still have the right to delete it. Yeah. And it disappears. And you still own it. It just doesn't exist anymore.

So it's a very weird weird concept. Jack Dorsey Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, sold his very first tweet for $2,900,000. That's right. So when you buy when you so when you make an NFT of a tweet, does that mean that the tweet is actually kinda saved on the blockchain, or is it just a URL that points to the division tweet? Yes.

So on on and this this is not just for the tweet. In general, you don't store content on a blockchain. You store a reference tweet and the hash value. Hashing is a a, a cryptography technique for building a unique sequence of characters, a value that identifies an asset, a content of an asset in a unique way. If you change a single byte in, any content in a file, in a picture, in a tweet, the hash value is completely different and, also unpredictable.

So you can't generate, you can't reverse engineer a hash value. So it's only one way encryption. So with this, with this assumption on a blockchain, you store the way to get to the asset. So in this case, the Twitter will have a URL, for example, and the hash value of the asset that has been calculated at the moment where you store it. If someone modifies the content now I don't know if you can edit an existing Twitter, but in general, if you can modify a file in general.

Right? So if you modify a digital asset, a file, then the hash value will be completely different, which is then, different from what is stored on a blockchain, then the 2 things don't match. Hence, you can say, hey. You have modified, you have tamper, you have version that, that initial asset, so is no longer valid or something has happened, which is great if you want, for example, to to certify the some, diplomas, some certificates, or credit records, or medical records, anything around credentials. Universities are doing this.

MIT for example in, is issuing this certificate on a blockchain. They're not storing the certificate on a Blockchain itself. The certificate can be anywhere, but by signing digitally signing the documents and storing the hash value on a Blockchain network, then if someone don't Photoshop the certificate, they change their their grade, the hash value will be completely different and, which doesn't match what they store on a blockchain, hence, is evidence that has been tampered. So coming back to your question, no. The content is not stored on the blockchain.

The URI and so the way to reach the content and the hash value of the content is stored on a blockchain. You don't want in general to store content on a blockchain because of storage requirement. You remember what we said at the beginning? Every transaction is, in the digital ledger. So everybody will have to download all the content in the world to, on their node.

This is absolutely practical. Instead, what they download is the ledger itself that contains who has done what, so which transaction between the two parties. A time stamp is absolutely important to have a time stamp for each transaction because it's a proof of assistance. So if I sign that asset before you, it belongs to me. Because again, a tweet can be signed by anybody or any file can be signed by anybody, can be stored on a Blockchain.

But because I do it before you, I have my time stamp in there, so I can, I can prove it that I own it before anybody else? Which is also a nice way of having, right management, you know, for songs, music, videos these sorts of things. So don't store the content, on a blockchain ever. It's it's just a very good practice. Also, don't forget the content that is stored on a blockchain is immutable.

You can't change it. So another best practice is never ever store any personal identifiable information, PII. Because if you store your email address, your telephone number, or anything that is identifiable to an individual, it can be removed. It can be updated. Are they coming up with ways to protect your wallets, you know, or have it so you can you know, if you've misplaced it or it gets corrupted or things like that?

Because, you know, a lot of people, you know, they they have this Bitcoin wallet they had years ago. They forgot the password, or they don't know the machine it's on, and they've lost Yeah. 100 of 1,000 or 1,000,000 of dollars. So Oh, yeah. Are they come up with solutions for that?

Yeah. That's interesting. There've been people that have lost really 1,000,000 of dollars because well, I don't know if loss is the right word because, they didn't realize that they have that money until, now the value of Bitcoin, grew to the 1,000 of dollars that is now. But basically, what happened, is that people bought Bitcoins when it was probably a few dollars worth or a few $100 worth, then they forgot about it. Years later, it's $50,000 now.

Maybe I I have some there is some value in there. But then, oopsie, I can't remember the password, of my wallet. I didn't write anywhere because it's a good practice not to write down password. And and the problem is that they can't access their wallet any longer. So, yeah, the problem is that, to be honest, there is no a good solution for it except using cloud storage for or or password manager for your password.

Delete when I said cloud storage. Cloud storage is not a good practice. A password manager is a good practice, but, obviously, if you want to protect your password manager, cloud storage is convenient. And cloud storage can be confidential. Cloud storage can be something that you own on a hardware secure module, HSM, without any other parties, including the cloud provider.

So say that you host your password on, on the Azure cloud, you want to make sure that no one can accidentally access it, including the cloud provider, including the folks at in the Azure data center. So by protecting your keys, your secrets in what is called HSM, hardware secure module, you can be confident that you own the access to it and no one else can take it. So this is a way. Protect your keys using a password manager. You have to remember only one password, but it is stored in the cloud in a HSM, in a hardware secure module.

No one else can access, and you have a hardware encryption, hardware protection. Speaking of hardware protection, the other way to protect your blockchain wallet is use a hardware wallet. So not an app, not a piece of software that again can be compromised and can be, and if you lose the password you you lose the access to it, but USB key typically that you plug into your, your workstation and then, provides you with access to your wallet. Now the problem is that what if you lose your USB key, right, your hardware wallet. But that's the problem if you lose your real wallet with your money in it.

Someone is good and find it and return it to the police, then you get your wallet back. And the same is for any hardware device. Right? So I don't think there is a a single solution to it. Probably, the community doesn't want to find a single solution to it because in the moment that you find a solution to recovery the password, you are introducing a backdoor in the system.

Yeah. I think that's probably one of the things that stop kind of cryptocurrency adoption because there's really no way to unless you have a third party, manage all the stuff that, like, the only solution is either the right pathway down or to have some sort of lock that you can't unlock basically. Yes. Look. I wouldn't trust third parties necessarily.

I don't want to be dismissive or negative here. I want to be very pragmatic. Another good practice in, for who is serious about doing crypto is, first of all, differentiate among different wallets. Don't centralize everything to one wallet because you lose that access to that one wallet you lose everything. So first good strategy.

The second one is, don't necessarily trust that this exchange for storing your values. Now you say, use intermediaries for storing your asset. Yes. For the sake of performing your transactions. But then if you store value in there, there unfortunately there have been stories, not many, but there have been a few where people have disappeared because, with, the keys or the wallets of everybody else.

And there was a case now, I can't remember the name, and I don't want to mention anyway. A CEO of a company suddenly died and with, over $100,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. And no one knows. There is a big speculation in the community whether he actually died or fake his death and disappearance of Caribbean Island. We don't know.

But the point is that people investors trusted this company. They put all their money in there and because the CEO was the only person with the keys apparently, which is again is so absolutely something that I will never ever trust, he disappear if he were he he died. Right? So until there is a different evidence, I can't be the person judging that. He died and it took with him the secrets of over $100,000,000 worth of investment of of people that trusted this company.

That what happened. Anything else is speculation. So but there's a lot happening in the community there. I guess sometimes I say that, like, yeah, I I get the the risk in trusting a third party, but I'm guessing most of the there's actually also substantial risk in just or the average person just forgetting the password. Yes.

You know? Like, Yeah. And there's really no good solution like you mentioned. You know? Yeah.

At the end, the good solution is, stick to the traditional finance plus your banker, and everything will keep on working as it is. But this is why DeFi, you know, the decentralized finance is something that is emerging. There is an interest in it before getting on the broader adoption. It will be yeah. It it will take some time.

It's more of a mindset transformation rather than technology for sure. I think the biggest use for cryptocurrency right now is just trading it. Yes. You know, not really Yep. Buying it or selling things with it, but just trading it.

Trading. For sure. I've I've looked at that, but right now, a lot of the places, if you wanna trade it, they charge you, like, 1% fee to buy it and then another 1% fee to sell it. And it's like Yep. So that's 2% right off the top.

So if it doesn't if it goes down, you've lost 2% put us whatever it went down. Yeah. And if it doesn't go up 2%, then you're not even breaking even. Exactly. Yes.

Which is in some way is a little bit disappointing from, I'm a purist of of blockchain. I like the the the use of it, and I'm very much aligned to the Bitcoin white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto in, 2008 when he wrote in this white paper that the the purpose of Bitcoin is to create a cryptocurrency that doesn't depend on central banks and central governments to perform everyday transactions. So really a currency. And now if you if you look into the the word currency, currency is doing transaction that are current. No?

So as in buying stuff in the shop, and this is not happening. Right? So what people are doing with cryptocurrency is speculative investment. So asset like, stocks and and and, and similar concept that are for long term rewards. Then obviously, DeFi has introduced a lot of different techniques for short term reward, but it's all based on speculation around the value of crypto going up and down, which wasn't the initial intention.

The initial intention of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin was to replace the traditional currency for everyday transaction. That hasn't happened. And this is what one of the challenge, you know, in entering Bitcoin, or any crypto into our real life. At the end, we still need to buy stuff at the grocery. We still need to pay for rental or for our home loans, whatever.

So we still need to buy stuff, and we can't buy with Bitcoin at the moment. Unless you live in Salvador, which is the first country in the world that has adopted Bitcoin as a legal tender for everyday shopping. Now the When it takes when it takes 10 minutes for a transaction, how do you use it for shopping? Yeah. Exactly.

Exactly. And the funny thing is though, is that I don't know how they can, price something in Bitcoin. If you think that Bitcoin is worth about $50,000 and you wanna buy some eggs, how much are you paying? 0.0001, we're good luck making the math when dealing with the decimal points. Right?

So it's unnatural. No. So you wanna buy something that cost 1 coin, 2 coins, 100 coins. But when you start dealing with the decimal and not 0.1, 0.2, but 0.001, 0002. I mean, come on.

How can you even ride the price of it? Right? It becomes a bit funny. So we'll see. We'll see.

I actually, heard someone talk about that too. You could buy eggs today for that small piece of Bitcoin that equates to a buck. And a week from now, Bitcoin's gone up. And now what you paid is worth $3. She basically paid $3 for for your eggs.

Right? Yeah. And it could be the same thing with with regular currency, but it doesn't fluctuate nearly as much as it's been. That way. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So I remember I remember hearing about a guy buying a Tesla way back when Bitcoin was, like, $1,000 a Bitcoin. So he he paid a 100 Bitcoin and bought a Tesla. But now, really, he paid 60, what, 60 600,000?

I can do the math. Yeah. Something Or Yeah. $6,000,000 for his Tesla if he woulda just held it instead of buying it something. Probably one of the reasons why it can't be a currency.

If it keeps going up, no one wants to spend it. Right? Yes. I see. That one and the the time for committing the transaction.

The workaround is a a a network called Lightning Network that sits on top of Bitcoin, which, sort of create a cash of all this transaction before being committed. So you sort of, the the feeling that our transaction has been done, been confirmed, and this works in near real time with the hope that the transaction goes, fully committed at the end of the the 10 minutes. It's not even 10 minutes, though, because 10 minutes is for a block of transaction to be committed. But the funny way blockchain works, and probably this becomes a little bit too techie, but it's basically because everybody has a copy of the digital ledger, no, as as we as I mentioned before. What happens if someone is not on active on the on on the network in that moment?

1, a block is, so fully validated, then there is a a mechanism called broadcasting that distribute all the validated blocks to all the different peers in the network so they can append to the ledger to the copy of the ledger that they have in their own, workstation, their own device. But if someone is not online in that moment, you can't assume that people are online 24 by 7 with their device, with their workstation, they will not receive the block until they connect and sync up again the next time. So where do these blocks go? Well, some blocks go to people that are online in the moment. Some people to remind a little bit behind.

So when, people then resync again, they may be 1 or 2, 3 blocks behind. So which blockchain which chain of blocks is the correct one? So the strategy in Bitcoin is, to get the longest branch because you assume that is the correct one. And, before confirming a transaction, you have to wait for at least 6 blocks to be appended to make sure that that block is fully belonging to the correct branch. So is the 10 minutes for 1 block times 6 for the full 6 blocks to be part of the correct branch that is, the the the valid one.

So we are even talking about an hour as an average. Now the Lightning Network provide sort of a a caching because it just process all the transaction at once and, sort of make an assumption that transactions are eventually validated. But if they don't for any reason, then, you have to roll back. So you go, you buy your eggs, and then an hour later, you receive a message, sorry, payment failed. So I don't know what happens in the moment.

6 weeks. Yeah. It's up it said, oh, sorry. I've already done, my home letter. What do you want me to do?

So that's that's the thing. If you're doing investment, that's okay. You just return the value automatically. So the wallet will just reprocess roll back. But if you're doing shopping, it doesn't apply.

It's gonna be interesting thing. So yeah. Look. If I can make a very small self promotion, my my first book on blockchain applied, hit the market just last month. I wrote, exactly on these use cases of blockchain for the enterprise space using Azure as a reference platform.

Although it's not that technical book for developers, it's more for the enthusiast the of that are getting their head around blockchain in the corporate space with a technical platform as a reference. It's called blockchain applied. And and my second interest is on DeFi, decentralized finance, and I am working on now on this second book, which will be a bit more for the developer community using Python as a programming language for building a DeFi application on a blockchain. So work in progress, but it shows that there is an interest in people having a desire to learn more into this space. And I just hope that this becomes a bit more, mainstream, you know, that you can go into the Stack Overflow of the situation.

Just ask a question and and you find thousand of answers. It may take years before we get there, but the direction in some ways, is is shaping. And and when we have a programming languages like c sharp, TypeScript joining the the this this party, then, we'll be able also to reach broader communities. You can do blockchain with typescript at the moment. You can do blockchain with dot net, with with c sharp at the moment, but it's a bit niche.

It's, not something that everybody doesn't. If you have an interest, now speaking to the to the listeners here, to to the audience, if you do have an interest in exploring the blockchain, in the dot net space, c sharp mainly as a programming language, then, please reach out. I will be able to point you to additional resources. Definitely look out for Corda and Consensus, the resources on the Azure platform for sure, and and Neo. Neo is another open source platform that is that where you can write smart contracts in c sharp, which is which is lovely because you can use your preferred programming language without going into, you know, some proprietary languages like Solidity for Ethereum.

But the adoption is probably not as broad as Ethereum itself, but growing. It's certainly growing interest. Yeah. Definitely think this this deal is gonna get much, much more popular in the future as I think the the use cases are kind of not not it out and validated. Yep.

Exactly. Exactly. So it's it's a good space to to touch on. Thanks for the opportunity to have, you know, this conversation. I know that we didn't talk a lot about dot net, but we sort of created the foundation in some way, no, for interest in this space.

And I said, there is, there are initiatives of dot net and blockchain together, probably not mainstream just yet, but is a space that is worth watching and definitely competitive for also from a job perspective in the future. No? So a blockchain developer, a blockchain architect can definitely be a profile that have significant interest or appetite in the industry, in in the market. Okay. So I think we're just about out of time, so I'm gonna move us into picks.

Do you wanna go first, Y? What's your pick? Sure. So this week's pick for me, I don't know how to pronounce his name, but his name's like Ichika Nitta. He's he he has like a YouTube channel on YouTube, and he's like a he's like a guitarist from Japan and, like, his work is just amazing.

He posted these like, they're only like 1 minute songs, but just the way he plays guitar, it's just it's just incredible. Like, he he it's it's he's he's obviously really accomplished, but he's he he doesn't just play fast. He plays them in a really, like, inventive way. Yeah. I've just been like just going for his channel and just watching these one minute clips of him playing guitar.

And he's got all these, like, weird guitars, which got, like, 14 strings and things like that. So, yeah, I just thought it was really interesting. Cool. Alright, Caleb. What's your pick?

Yeah. My pick today is a new MMO, which is Amazon's new world. I've been disappointed with MMOs for years. Right? It's it's I guess it's hard to get past Asheryn's Call and World of Warcraft for me.

But also don't have nearly as much time to play as I used to with a 6 year old. And this just came out, what, a week and a half ago? It's recent. And I've got a couple of hours in and it's it's a game where you can do some crafting and you can do some PvE and stuff and not have to invest a whole lot of time. You can still get some fun out of it.

So, Amazon's new world. And this is what? On on on Switch? No. This is PC.

Oh. Yep. I threw your curveball there. Alright. So, my pick is gonna be dotnetconf.

It's coming up on, November 9th to 11th. So it's an online free virtual conference for for dot net. So this should be up before that happens. So if you're listening to this, get signed up if you haven't signed up already. Learn lots about, dot net 6, and it's actually launching or through dot net conf this year.

So check it out. Alright, Stefano. Do you have a pick for us? I do. Minecraft for good.

So Minecraft is a popular game obviously, but there is an education version for students. So some, some schools may have access to it if they require it. It's completely free to access, and is built on Roblox, which is a visual way of coding Minecraft and other applications. Very, very popular in schools, at least in the region where I live. Students are building worlds and, and, doing some experiment, some test on the Minecraft platform, coding in a visual way, and then creating their own avatar and, no, traveling these worlds in a virtual way, which is fantastic because you you see 10 years old doing this, virtual world, but from a builder perspective and not just as a a gamer.

So it it develops, you know, the mindset of becoming the future developer. It's a very important skill with us, Bill. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Alright, Stephane. If our, listeners have questions and they wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that? Oh, you find me on LinkedIn for sure. That probably my preferred platform for, interacting with the community, Stefano delvester, and I'm the one in Melbourne with yeah. I would say probably that's the the best way.

Okay. If our listeners wanna get in touch with the show, we'd love to hear from you. You can reach me on Twitter. I am at.netsuperhero. And Caleb Wells has Twitter at Oh, I I have Twitter.

That's right. Yeah. Caleb Wells codes. Alright. Cool.

Thanks, Stefano. Yeah. Thanks, everybody. It was great to have you on the show. That was awesome.

Yeah. That was great conversation. Thanks, everybody. Enjoy the rest of the day. Alright.

And we'll catch everybody else on the next episode of adventures in dot net. Bye,