Blockchain in Mining – Disrupting Old Mindset | Mining Mindset Clips

Brian (00:00)
I would say that we’re, that we’re now in more of a philosophy of disrupt everything. Disrupt the thing that was disrupted last week, disrupt that process. And so I think, you know, everybody talks about it. They call it innovation. And, and I look at it more from, from a, we’re in a, we need to be disrupting everything, everything. Everything should be disrupted. That process that you’ve been using.

Anya (00:17)
Yeah.

Brian (00:29)
for 10 years should be done better and we’re going to disrupt it. That disruptive technology that we developed last year, guess what? There’s somebody that’s coming out of university that wants to disrupt that. it’s disruption everywhere.

Giving back to blockchain,

we were in on a co-creation workshop that was being hosted and funded by the USAID to how do we facilitate our

gold that’s leaving the so-called back door in the Congo. And a lot of that artisanal gold goes into the illegitimate supply chain. And so what can we do to solve that? And we were proposing a blockchain solution to do that. And again, I think it came down to the fact that 2017, lot of charlatans in the market, 2018, there were just a whole bunch of people in that community.

that were completely anti-blockchain. And so the project didn’t get approved. There were some other groups that continued to press and push and move the blockchain down

track and they were using them in the mining space. And they’re getting some minor traction, but I wouldn’t call it mainstream.

there are some diamond groups, know, basically almost kind of calling it more for

for tracking and ensuring what I call high value assets. Whiskey, art, diamonds, I guess, real estate. could you could do that. Basically, you you digitize an asset and you can stick it on the blockchain. And it it becomes a function of

Anya (02:00)
you

Right.

Brian (02:17)
You know, it’s that age old problem also of I have a solution looking for a problem. And so a lot of people, I think at that point, were viewing blockchain as a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist or an overkill solution to a problem when there are other things that you can use, right?

Anya (02:34)
Good.

Brian (02:39)
The other issue was, you know, back in the early days, there were a number of different blockchains. So Intel had, IBM had one, they were what five-ish, kind of what you might call more mainstream, plus, you know, plus the blockchain behind Bitcoin, plus Ethereum, plus et cetera. And so the question becomes, what’s, you know, what platform

Anya (02:46)
Yeah.

Yep.

What platform?

Brian (03:08)
Will these platforms talk to each other? Which one’s gonna win? Because they wanna let everybody fight it out to determine who’s gonna win and then go with whoever wins, whether it’s better or not. So you have that issue, then you’ve got transaction costs.

Anya (03:11)
Yeah.

Brian (03:25)
you know, we were developing on IBM’s and, Intel’s blockchain, and it was essentially free for us to develop and, and, and do that. we then, did some work on, on, on Ethereum and it was expensive to develop a blockchain because you had to pay all these transaction fees

Anya (03:43)
I am.

Yeah.

Brian (03:47)
think there are certain places

a blockchain. The question becomes from a traceability. This even gets into batteries, right? So the minerals that go into batteries, where are they coming from? And we want to make sure that they’re not coming from someplace of a high risk and that’s making a bad guy rich.

Anya (04:12)
Yeah.

Brian (04:12)
Right, and then you’ll able to trace all these things. Well, how do you trace all this stuff through the system? A relatively easy way to do it is with a blockchain. You just have to set it up and do it. And it’s just when you transfer something, you click a button and away you go. It’s not that

difficult.

Anya (04:33)
But who will make a decision? CEOs of the company or those who are on the supply chain?

Brian (04:41)
Yeah, it’s probably the supply chain supply chain people and they have to be technology adopters Then they’ve also be willing to I guess push The envelope a little bit because there’s a lot of headwind in a big corporation

Anya (04:57)
Yeah.

Brian (04:59)
and you have to be a relatively strong personality to push something through the system and you almost could argue that maybe those systems are designed to be that way. So if you don’t have the champion to go do something, it’s not going to get done. Therefore, it’s not worthwhile to spend your time doing it.