293: Rob Wilson

Rob Wilson is the CEO and CoFounder of Incent, a cryptocurrency startup based in Australia, you can find you more about him and the work he’s doing at incent.com

If you’ve never heard of cryptocurrency before - let me quickly run over it with you.

So - money was a way that we found to put value into a common language that served as a way to help us exchange that value. If I spent a day digging up your garden and you wouldn’t give me a trolley full of groceries - even though that’s what I need. You give me a common language of agreed value, in this case money - which you probably got doing something of value for someone else. And I take an amount of that agreed language to the supermarket and I buy my fruit and veggies - which I didn’t have to plant or grow or dog up or transport to the market, and I give that money to the people that did and so on and so on.

Back in the day, money was of actual Value - made of metals that we agreed were valuable. Then a few hundred years back the Chinese went paper, which confounded some people but ultimately won out - but it solidified this idea that it’s just agreed value.

In our community money is plastic and metal, but it’s really just a useless object until two people decide its valuable.

But now, as we pay pass and tap our cards on terminals everywhere - money doesn’t even exist. It’s data on a file somewhere that you and the people who’s terminal you’re tapping your card on have agreed is worth something.

So now we are at essentially digital money, the next level from that is cryptocurrency.

Essentially, cryptocurrency is another agreement of value. One that by design makes all the transactions secure and importantly does away with intermediaries represented by banks, which have pesky fees and differing investment policies and things like that.

The main feature of cryptocurrencies, security is provided by Blockchain technology — which is a network of computers having an identical copy of the database and changing its records by a common agreement based on pure mathematics. It’s kind of like - there’s only one bank statement - and everyone can see it. Those who deposited and withdrew are anonymised, but the amounts are there for all to see, and every time a transaction happens, it verifies itself with another copy of this statement to be sure the transaction is legitimate.

Where things get interesting, is that within that baked in security and legitimate, there’s a thing called — smart contracts — it becomes possible to create your own cryptocurrency and issue your own token. Token is a type of privately issued cryptocurrency, a unit of value that exists and pays off within the ecosystem of a particular business model.

And that’s kind of the work that Rob Wilson and the team at Incent are working on.

Rob has a fascinating story, and the way his own life experience lead him to explore other ways of the way we run things is something I found truly inspiring.

Big thanks to my buddy Jaxon for making this conversation happen.

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Rob Wilson

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