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Gideon Greenspan, a computer scientist and CEO/Founder of the Israeli startup Coin Sciences, joined us for a discussion of their private blockchain platform MultiChain. Besides diving into the popular question of what's the point of a private blockchain, we covered his earlier colored coins implementation as well as his view that blockchains are best understood as a novel database paradigm.

Topics covered included:

- How Gideon got involved in the blockchain space

- Their colored coins implementation MultiSpark and why it failed to get traction

- Why he saw a market for an open-source private blockchain platform and started MultiChain

- What mining diversity is and how it is used for consensus in MultiChain

- How permissions work in MultiChain

- The issues of privacy in blockchains and why you can't have auditability and privacy

- How private blockchains differ from regular distributed databases

- The five criteria to decide if a project needs a blockchain

- The problem he sees with smart contract blockchains

Links mentioned in this episode:

- Multichain website http://bit.ly/1HAp61D

- Multichain Whitepaper http://bit.ly/1MZE12a

- Colored coin protocol CoinSpark http://bit.ly/1lqg390

- Avoiding the pointless blockchain project: http://bit.ly/1SsbOEP

- Private blockchains are more than 'just' shared databases http://bit.ly/1ToiODm

- Smart contracts: The good, the bad and the lazy http://bit.ly/1SsbTII

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Show notes: http://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/107

YouTube: https://youtu.be/T7F-kvackBQ

Epicenter Bitcoin is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain, Sébastien Couture & Meher Roy.

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