Blockchain in Mining - Disrupting Old Mindset | Mining Mindset Clips

We are now in more of a philosophy of disrupting everything. Disrupt the thing that was disrupted last week, then disrupt that process again. Everybody talks about it and calls it innovation, but I look at it differently. That process you have been using for 10 years should be done better, and we are going to disrupt it. That disruptive technology we developed last year - guess what, there is somebody coming out of university that wants to disrupt that. So it is disruption everywhere.

Getting back to blockchain - we were in a co-creation workshop that was hosted and funded by USAID to explore how we could facilitate tracking gold leaving the so-called back door in the Congo. A lot of that artisanal gold goes into the illegitimate supply chain, and we were proposing a blockchain solution to address that.

It came down to the fact that in 2017 there were a lot of charlatans in the market, and by 2018 there was a whole group of people in that community that were completely anti-blockchain. So the project did not get approved. There were some other groups that continued to press and push blockchain forward in the mining space, and they are getting some minor traction, but I would not call it mainstream.

There are some diamond groups basically using blockchain more for tracking and ensuring what I call high-value assets - whiskey, art, diamonds, real estate. You digitize an asset and stick it on the blockchain. But it becomes that age-old problem of having a solution looking for a problem. A lot of people at that point were viewing blockchain as a solution to a problem that does not exist, or an overkill solution to a problem when there are other tools you can use.

The other issue was that back in the early days there were a number of different blockchains. Intel had one, IBM had one - roughly five or so that you might call more mainstream, plus the blockchain behind Bitcoin, plus Ethereum, and others. The question becomes: which platform wins? Will these platforms talk to each other? Bigger companies want to let everybody fight it out to determine who is going to win and then go with whoever wins, whether it is better or not.

Then you have got transaction costs. We were developing on IBM and Intel blockchains, and it was essentially free for us to develop and build on. We then did some work on Ethereum, and it was expensive to develop because you had to pay all these transaction fees. There are certain places where blockchain fits well, and certain places where it does not.

The traceability question extends into batteries as well. The minerals that go into batteries - where are they coming from? We want to make sure they are not coming from a high-risk area that is making a bad actor rich. Being able to trace all these materials through the system is critical. A relatively easy way to do it is with a blockchain - you just have to set it up. When you transfer something, you click a button and away you go. It is not that difficult.

The decision makers are typically the supply chain people, and they have to be technology adopters. They also have to be willing to push the envelope a little bit, because there is a lot of headwind in a big corporation. You have to be a relatively strong personality to push something through the system. You could almost argue that those corporate systems are designed that way - if you do not have the champion to push something forward, it is not going to get done, and therefore it is considered not worthwhile to spend time on.