Persons of Interest

By Jillian Godsil

Persons of Interest

Timestamped in Blockchain and Cryptocurrecy, Vol 1 2020

This book is for anyone interested in this sector, focusing on the saucy, thoughtful, quirky, energised, crazy, intelligent, and inspiring players in the space. From world Presidents to Models on OnlyFans – this line up could only be found in the weird and whacky world of blockchain and cryptocurrency.

Andreas Antonopoulos – ‘We must be patient’

Tim Drapers’ eyebrows make a special appearance

John McAfee ‘On his tombstone – Lover, Adventurer and Poet - but not yet.’

Vít Jedlička ‘Who has thought about founding a country?’

Jon Noorlander ‘Disturbingly Satisfying Digital Art’

Samson Williams ‘Nothing in Space is Free’

The artwork will be provided by international digital artist and photographer- Lars Kommienzuspadt; author and inventor of Dark Pinup. The cover will be revealed on December 15th 2020.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jillian Godsil
• Release date: Dec 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005763268

Book preview

Persons of Interest

Timestamped in Blockchain and Cryptocurrency

Jillian Godsil

Jillian Godsil

Copyright 2020 Jillian Godsil

[e-mail]

Published in association with The Writer Company

https://writer.io

All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Dr David Koepsell – Who Owns Your Data?

Anish Mohammed - Why DeFi will improve Traditional Finance

John Mcafee - On his Tombstone – Lover, Adventurer and Poet

Jessie Reich - Playing Games on Blockchain

Bridget Greenwood - Baking a Bigger Pie for Women

Andreas Antonopoulos - We must be Patient

Andrew Hamilton - JPB Liberty files David and Goliath Class Action

Eric Lonergan - Angrynomics; The Book Satoshi Nakamoto never Wrote

Philipp Kothe - From Dog Food to Charity

Vít Jedlička - Who has Thought about Founding a Country?

Jax Harrison - Can Blockchain help Stop Human Trafficking

Jordan Lyall - $MEME; the DOGE of DeFi

William Quigley - The Art of the Hustle

Teana Baker Taylor - Regulating the Financial Sector

Richard Ells - From Crypto to Cash

Joel Comm - Saving the World one NFT at a Time

Jon Noorlander - Disturbingly Satisfying Digital Art

Stefan Rust - Save the Planet and Earn Money

Erica Stanford - Curry, Crypto and Networking

Robin Schmidt - The Defiant

Lafayette Tabor - Infinity Token Generation

Tanya Hardie - Helping the Unbanked earn Crypto

Edward Buchi - Running Meaningful Hackathons

Simon Cocking - Separating the Wheat from the Chaff

Stefano Contini - Get Paid to Watch Porn

Daniel Polotsky - Driving Mass Adoption one Bitcoin ATM at a Time

Sukhmen Nijjar - Filming Tim Draper’s Eyebrows

David Harney - The Future is Emerald

Nikolay Shkilev - Building a Marketplace where Everyone Wins

Evan Vandenberg - NFTs; the new Drug for the Digital Classes

Samson Williams - Nothing is Free in Space

Alex Fedsseev - Engagement is King

Rhiannon Fletcher - Blockchain and BDSM / BodybyCrypto

Aly Madhavji - What VCs want

Heather Montgomery - A new Playroom for Adults

Mru Patel - Asset Backed DeFi

Sebastiaan Van Der Lans - In a Trusted World

David Waslen - Automating Trades

Pete Wood - From Police Suspect to Successful Entrepreneur

Jason Wu - Trust, Trust, Trust

On Yavin - Scam Hunter

Marc Coleman – History of Money

Sean Ballent - Afterword

Foreword

I was delighted to be asked to write a foreword of this book – Persons of Interest, timestamped in Blockchain and Cryptocurrency – and at the same time disclose I am also here as an interviewee.

I have known Jillian for a couple of years now – which is a lifetime in crypto – and share her enthusiasm for the people, energy, passion and ideas in this space.

I love the diversity of people working in crypto across blockchain. People in this sector cover every spectrum of personality and conviction; from the developers and entrepreneurs who’ve just travelled across 3 continents attending 27 conferences in as many days, to the trader who wants to mimic financial systems, to the accidental DeFi founder, to the person writing on blockchain and BDSM – you can’t make this stuff up.

The variety of people and projects in this space is tremendous, exciting and energetic. Nothing is off limits. There is one commonality – the Persons of Interest in these pages want to make a difference, change the world a little (or a lot) and in one case actually leave this world for Space (with a capital S). Imaginations are fired, injected with hope and inspired by opportunities as new worlds and economies are created, and old worlds jiggled around. There is something or someone for everyone in these pages.

When people dare to dream big, sometimes they shoot for the moon, sometimes they miss or maybe they overshoot. Who is to say with dreams this big? It is the wild west of technology and shares the larger than life characters of that era.

This is a snapshot of people from 2020 – a year more than any that delivered the unknown – a living smorgasbord of the people who are making it happen in blockchain and cryptocurrency.

Stefan Rust

9/11/2020

Founder and CEO of Sonic Capital, Hong Kong

Introduction

This book has been through many permutations; it was to be part of my long-form news platform Blockleaders, it was to illustrate a cryptocurrency lifecycle, it was to be a blockchain 101 explainer and more. Sometimes rival books were already launched, other times the concepts, while well-meaning, did not excite me and many other times I lacked the enthusiasm to tackle a project of this size outside my daily writings and work.

Time and again I returned to a general theme: I love interviewing people in the Blockchain and Cryptocurrency space. From my early days of journalistic interrogation, many of these Persons of Interest had fallen by the wayside, some had remerged with new plumage and in some cases, people have even held the course. Indeed, in an industry where pretty much every project is a startup, it is a triumph of hope over experience that so many people are still standing.

A fresh encounter with the team at Cryptowriter putting together a publication for the VOICE platform created new energy in my writing. After lacking editorial direction for a long time, I found a safe place to write again. I found my tribe and my bedrock. During the past three years, I have travelled the world chairing and speaking at blockchain conferences where I met many of the people found in the pages of this book. In a post COVID world, I meet many more on the screens of Zoom. It is not as satisfying but it is still good to look my Persons of Interest in the eye and ask the hard, the curious or the funny question.

And so in this first volume, I present the people; the pioneers, the leaders, the thinkers, the shakers, the movers and the doers. Some are stellar, some fleeting like a falling star, some pragmatic, some visionary and some - dare I say it - pedestrian, in ways but advances must be underpinned by spadework.

This is my first book of Persons of Interest. It is a timestamp of the people in the nascent industry of blockchain and cryptocurrency. Everyone featured is a Non Fungible Token: unique and special and remarkable. It is by no means definitive or complete; this industry and this book that reflects it is a moveable feast. I expect some people to have moved on, some to have started other positions and projects and maybe some to slink down below the horizon out of view temporarily or perhaps permanently.

It does not matter, their star shone for a time and I am happy to record them here.

Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to many people including all the wonderful people who generously gave me their time in this book. Thank you also to Marc Coleman for furnishing a short history of money and proving that modern developments are but anything novel. A very special vote of thanks goes to my editor and publisher Sean Ballent – he gave me back my joy of writing. I don’t always get the words in the right order, but I have fun trying – what more can I ask.

I hope you enjoy reading about the people who caught my eye this time out. Please return to my next book when we hope to catch the next influx of Persons of Interest, timestamped in Blockchain and Cryptocurrency.

Dr David Koepsell

Who Owns your Data?

Let’s first address the elephant in the room: data ownership. It’s a term we have all become familiar with in recent years. Data is the new oil and personal data is our new oil. Social media has in part been responsible for our awareness: both in terms of how much personal data we give away, often unknowingly like a slug’s silver trail, and in terms of the value of this data, represented by the millions of dollars harvested by giants such as Facebook.

Facebook and its ilk, once the darling of the new generation of digital citizens, has in recent years witnessed a backlash in popularity as our lack of privacy is revealed, the social bubbles that we live in are contemplated and the huge value placed on our cumulative online scratchings is counted.

Traditional social media sites are now being deserted in droves by younger populations as the unfair weighting of monetary rewards in favour of the platform over the individuals is rejected. Sites such as Steemit, Uptrennd and now Voice have been created to address the unbalance and are the new social media 2.0 darlings attempting to dispense largess in a more equitable fashion that favours the individual who owns the data rather than the platform that shares it.

But do individuals own their data? This is a question posed by DrDavid Koepsell, philosopher, lawyer, lecturer, entrepreneur and author. He is also the CEO and founder of EncrypGen (http://encrypgen.com), a next-generation blockchain solution for genomic data. He is the reason for this article which is actually going to look at genomic data and how we share it, but first, we need to get over the hurdle of what is data, personal data, and who owns it? In his book Who Owns You David tackles this thorny issue from both a legal and philosophical perspective.

His book raises some pretty interesting points. He explains his premise: "my claim was broader and based not primarily on ethics but ontology: data cannot, in any rational sense, be possessed or owned at all. Neither can expressions, for that matter — a distinction recognized in the law but poorly understood in the general discourse."

What is property, and what are property rights? David defines property as a bundle of ownable rights such as land and objects. They tend to have physical boundaries and can be fenced and held by the owners. Contrast that with the non-exclusive nature of all other things and he argues that possession of those things is nearly impossible – with one exception, facts known only to you or more commonly called secrets.

In conversation with David, he points out that no one owns the data, not Facebook, not Twitter not you. "There’s no philosophical foundation for the notion of data ownership. Ownership for things like data is not exclusive and not a rival. I can use data and you can use the same data and neither of us harms the other as we don’t take anything away.

"In the same way you might have certain hopes and dreams. You don’t own them. They are something that you hold and think are important, and you might even value them, but you don’t own them in any sense that we use the term ownership. That’s why we are thinking in new ways to expand the blockchain foundation for EncrypGen, to give better control which is what we all want."

Phew – we are charting some pretty deep stuff here. On the subject of ownership or otherwise of data, may I direct you to a very explanatory medium article written by David here or directly to his book, available here. (insert links)

Onto genomics now. Let’s start by defining the term genome.

A genome is an organism's complete set of DNA, including all of its genes. Each genome contains all of the information needed to build and maintain that organism. In humans, a copy of the entire genome—more than 3 billion DNA base pairs—is contained in all cells that have a nucleus.

In 2017 David launched EncrypGen and went live in 2018. The platform is a marketplace for people to record their DNA and sell it to pharmaceutical companies. The reason he set it up was as an antithesis to a billion-dollar business that had sprung up around DNA since the human genome was first mapped at the turn of this century.

Commercial companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com are huge multimillion-dollar businesses that provide genome sequencing for individuals at a very low cost. Indeed, the cost of obtaining your genome is around $90 which is a loss leader. In an industry that is pretty much unregulated, it is estimated that this data is sold at least 200 times over.

The industry on the consumer side is termed recreational, but each person is asked at the time of purchase will they allow their data to be used for science. It is understood that some 80% of people comply. This then allows the testing companies to sell the data for commerce. It is mostly sold to pharmaceutical companies which in turn use it for science but this middle section is pure commerce and the space which EncrypGen wishes to disrupt.

There is no transparency as to the path the data sets take after being purchased. This has other implications for use, which is why we want to offer a marketplace that uses blockchain to track the transactions – and returns control to the people who submit the data as well as monetary rewards.

Having access to large data pools of DNA is significant in the research for new drugs, to identify disease patterns, to move medicine forward in leaps. Again, there is currently very little transparency on the deals. One Parkinson study run by Pfizer is estimated to have purchased 3000 data sets from 23andMe for several million dollars. It is estimated that each person’s DNA was valued at $10,000 each. Even allowing for 23andMe to recover costs and profits it would have been a tidy sum to earn if the individuals were compensated directly.

David also points out that in time this industry should move from recreational to everyday personal medical.

Imagine in time being able to sequence your DNA and then apply the results to your general health, taking preventative steps to avoid pinpointed diseases through diet, exercise or proactive medicine.

EncrypGen has been up and running since late 2018. Some 1500 people have uploaded their DNA onto the site. David’s platform does not offer testing directly but can direct people to third parties if they wish, or they can use the existing high-profile commercial companies if they wish. The difference is that the users on the site set the price and they earn money from controlling their data.

In time, and relatively short time, David hopes to hit critical mass in terms of numbers. Already scientists are dabbling on the platform and people have sold their DNA.

Asked if they are going to vet the scientists or purchasers of the data directly, David says no. There are laws already governing this area and these are set to grow as the market matures. On our marketplace, we will anonymize the people protecting their personal data and allowing them to see how many times the data is sold – to their benefit.

The whole area of genomes is still a fairy murky one.