Who the F*** Is Blockchain?: A Beverage Entrepreneur's Journey to Understanding Crypto

By Arial Gordon

Who the F*** is Blockchain: A Beverage Entrepreneur's Journey to Understanding Crypto takes you through the odd story of how the author Arial Gordon co-founded Hone as a way to break up the technical explanation of blockchain technology through storytelling.

After attempting to start many blockchain-

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Sep 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885046503

Book preview

WhoTheFIsBlockchain-COVER.jpg

Who the F*** Is Blockchain?

A Beverage Entrepreneur’s Journey to Understanding Crypto

Arial Gordon

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2022 Arial Gordon

All rights reserved.

Who the F*** Is Blockchain?

A Beverage Entrepreneur’s Journey to Understanding Crypto

ISBN 979-8-88504-534-6 Paperback

979-8-88504-860-6 Kindle Ebook

979-8-88504-650-3 Ebook

Thank you to my friends and family for giving me the support while I wrote this book. It took a lot of time, so thank you all for sticking with me.

Persons of note are my mother, Claire Yarmo, and my father, Gilad Gordon. Plus, all of my Seattle friends, for your patience in waiting for me while I was writing this book. I published this f***ing thing; who would’ve thought?

I am incredibly grateful to you all for believing in me. Truly, thank you so much.

***

I named this book who .. instead of the original title what the Fuck is a blockchain? because as I was writing this technical book, I decided to break up the complex topics with personal stories to make the book a little easier to read. Quickly, these life-written dialogues became very sentimental, then a whole story within a story was created describing my journey to co-founding Hone. So, Who the Fuck is Blockchain? suddenly felt like a much more relevant title.

I hope you enjoy the read :)

Contents

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Cannabis Kombucha

How in the World Did I Get in This Situation?

You’re Writing a Damn Book!

Part 1

What the F*** is a Blockchain?

Food Chain

The Power of a Receipt

JORA Green

The Galactic Network

Secure Decentralization

Silk Road

Green Bankruptcy

Part 2

Vipassana

The CryptoJoule

Energy Trading

Blockchange: Reversing Climate Change

Columbia Tower Club

The Wealthy Artist

The New Economy with Blockchain

Hone

Acknowledgments

Appendix

It was just a moment in time, and that is all.

–Claire Yarmo

Cannabis Kombucha

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It’s three in the morning. Our faces, arms, and legs are covered by t-shirts and gardening gloves. My mom and I are about to go to the basement to spray all the marijuana plants with a nasty pesticide called Eagle 20. At that point, we didn’t have a choice. It was either use this poisonous spray to kill the microscopic, weed-eating insects called spider mites or let those critters destroy all our cannabis flower.

This pesticide makes plants so sensitive that any light scorches the leaves, potentially kills them, and burns a person’s skin.

We sprayed in makeshift hazmat suits and complete darkness with only a green flashlight to guide us.

It felt like a war zone.

This was the summer of 2016. I had completed a Vipassana ten-day silent meditation a few weeks prior and was in summer classes at the University of Washington, double majoring in Geo-Physics and Political Science. At that time, I took classes during the week in Seattle and helped manage a waste diversion startup called EvoEco. On Friday afternoons, I drove three hours south to Portland, OR, and helped run my mom’s business, JORA Green. My friends all thought I was crazy for how much I put on my plate. Looking back, I certainly was.

All my life I’ve been interested in everything, wanting to learn and attempt to master as many skills and lessons as possible. This led me to change university majors five times, eventually landing on the double major of Political Science and Geophysics then dropping down to just Political Science. My ever-extending curiosity is what likely brought me to entrepreneurship. When I was seventeen, my childhood friend Alex Lugbill and I started a landscaping company that ended up being fairly successful. In the course of two summers, we made enough profit to travel to South America for five months.

When I look back, it was this small success that made me realize starting a business was possible. Plus, it could yield a much higher income than having a similar job: working for a landscaping company versus having your own.

My ambition was ignited. From then on, all I wanted to do was start my own company.

During university, I was constantly involved in different startups. Instead of doing my homework, I researched business ideas, created pitch decks and business plans, learned how to design websites, researched how to grow weed, met with other small business owners, entrepreneurship professors, and investors while taking an assortment of different random classes in different majors to learn specific skills to start a business. I found the email of the professors who taught the upper-level classes and sent them messages like, I am starting [x] business, and your class would really help me succeed. Is it possible to get in? It worked every time and got me into senior-level classes without prerequisites like website development computer science, post-graduate social media marketing, software entrepreneurship, photography, applied mathematics for data analysis, and an eclectic range of courses depending on what business I was attempting to create at the time.

This innate desire to start a business coupled with the love I have for my mom plunged me right into the murky water of starting a cannabis grow operation.

I began by driving from Seattle to Portland every weekend to help the operation with longer visits as I became more and more involved. I stayed up to four days a week.

Those weekends and weeks I had little to no break and worked late into the night. Nap three hours at four a.m., hop in my car in the morning, drive one hour, nap on the same spot on the side of the highway, then drive the remaining two hours to my Politics of the Middle East class in Seattle at the University of Washington.

***

A few days before my mom and I sprayed Eagle 20, the lead grower, Chris, quit unexpectedly. Most of his ideas were as high in the sky as he was stoned—irrational. On top of this, his Napoleon complex overpowered his decisions making him want full control of the business.

It took roughly twenty weeks to fully transform the marijuana seeds into a smokeable flower. Chris left us at week twelve of the twenty-week grow. Now we had no grower, meaning there was a good chance we would lose the thirty thousand dollars-worth of cannabis currently growing. With this potential loss, the business would drown and my mom would go bankrupt.

Chris, likely being a little misogynistic and with his feelings hurt from the business partnership not working out between him and my mother, refused to teach her the necessary steps and techniques to maintain the plants. When I arrived every weekend, the relationship was, to say the least, tense.

I felt like Switzerland, standing between the Axis and Allied powers, trying to maintain some peace so we could grow those damn plants and make money. I have always been the arbitrator. Being the youngest brother of three boys, I have played the peacemaker and family negotiator my entire life. This served me well in this instance. Chris wouldn’t teach my mom; however, he and I were still on good rapport, so he was open to teaching me.

Every step of the way needed daily monitoring:

Water

Measure nutrients

Trim the leaves

Reposition plants in light

Make organic dirt

Build new structures to make the grow more efficient

The prior four weeks before my mom and I donned our hazmat suits, I spent all weekend learning how to grow from Chris, researching grow techniques during the week, then regurgitating all the knowledge back to my mom when Chris wasn’t around.

We worked our asses off and barely slept. At the end of this weed-growing course, we had our flower and thought we had saved the business.

***

It turns out, when we were selling our product, an influx of colossal previously unknown state-wide cannabis operations were also releasing their weed for sale. This over-saturation caused the price of all legal cannabis to significantly drop, and my mom’s profit margins suddenly became negative.

We needed a different business strategy.

Cannabis-infused products were all the rage and that’s where we could make a profit.

My mom, ever the alchemist, created a cannabis lotion: wonderfully healing, but not a product with high sales volume.

Think about it: how often do you buy lotion?

And let me go get you a sample of our cannabis lotion, my mom expressed.

Wait, you have that? the dispensary representative excitedly replied. Oh, I definitely would love to see it.

My mom was ecstatic. She walked to the car and grabbed the lotion samples. Back in the shop, she took the lotion out of a box and placed it on the counter in front of her.

The rep misheard her. This is cannabis kombucha? she asked in confusion.

No, this is lotion, she replied. Are you more interested in cannabis kombucha?

The rep nodded quickly. Yes, the drink is unique and flies off the shelves in sales. Do you have you any available?

No, we are currently only selling lotion, my mom replied, disappointed.

When she came back to the car, she was sad. She thought this was our chance, but all they wanted was cannabis kombucha.

Mom, why don’t you just make it? I guarantee if you can make lotion, you can make kombucha.

In a moment of thought, she stared at the roof of the car, took a few deep breathes, and her face lit up. Cannabis kombucha? my mom whispered. I can make that!

She confidently walked back in the store. Give us a few weeks and we will have some kombucha for you.

Thus began our journey of starting Dr. JORA, our energy cannabis-infused kombucha. If we could grow weed at a commercial scale, we could make kombucha.

***

Neither my mom nor I had ever had kombucha before. All we knew was the beverage was becoming popular among the hippy people of Portland. Everyone around us loved it, but at that time, we had no idea why.

Traditional kombucha is fermented black tea. To make it, you use a Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast, or a SCOBY. The SCOBY is a combination of yeast and fungus used to ferment the tea. Every nutrient, from antioxidants to caffeine to alcohol percentage, increases in quantity during the fermentation process (Leech, 2018). Between seven to ten days, these nutrients increase exponentially. After this time period, the nutrients then slowly and linearly increase. Depending on the level of benefits desired, the kombucha can sit for months.

In a nutshell, you brew a batch of tea, cool it to room temperature, drop the SCOBY in, add a little sugar, cover the liquid, and let it sit for seven-plus days. Boom, you have kombucha.

The big question was where we would get all the ingredients and materials in bulk and at wholesale, while still ensuring top-notch quality.

This was when I began to recognize the complexity of supply chains.

***

Think of all the ingredients and materials needed to create a beverage sold in massive quantities. We were going to release two initial flavors: one a lime matcha and second a Dr. Pepper-flavored mate kombucha.

What we needed was bulk matcha and mate tea, fig juice, vanilla, whole cane sugar, bottles, lids, labels, cannabis oil, and a SCOBY; purchasing each at massive quantities to make a profit. We had the cannabis and the SCOBY, but nothing else.

For us and most other food producers, the ingredients are from all over the world with unknown production quality controls. Sure, the company website can say they have the proper certifications, but is each product always held to the same quality control standard?

In our case, the matcha from Japan, the mate tea from Argentina, the fig juice from a farm in Oregon, the vanilla from Madagascar, the sugar cane from India, the bottles from China, the lids from Mexico, and the labels from New York; how in the world could we know whether the packaging was truly food safe or grown in an organic and sustainable manner? We looked at each source diligently, asked for a copy of all certifications, third-party lab results, and only negotiated from well-communicating companies. Nonetheless, all we received were PDF and Word documents of their quality control documents.

Every time I received such a document, all I could think was how somebody with basic graphic design skills could have easily counterfeited it.

There was another issue for us. The minimum order to purchase the tea was usually at least ten kilograms, costing roughly two grand for matcha and five hundred dollars for the mate. If that tea wasn’t the quality stated and expected, then we were out of money we could not afford to lose. So, we ordered samples from multiple suppliers, costing thirty dollars each. This doesn’t seem like a lot, but at that time, my credit cards were maxed out, my mother’s had been maxed out for months, and she could no longer pay the heating bill.

On top of this, we needed at least $10,000 for the commercial equipment and to rent an FDA-approved facility to produce the drink.

This was an expensive endeavor for a mom and son who had never created a commercial food product before. In all truth, we had no money to spend on anything, including electricity to power the lights for the plants.

There was no way we could buy samples from every supplier and absolutely no way we could pull together $10,000.

We had to find an investor.

How in the World Did I Get in This Situation?

---

I sat on a bar stool, watching a late fifty-year-old man named Stan Barett, his twenty-year-old son, and his eighty-something father smell then swish the cannabis elixir in their wine glasses. They drank our cannabis kombucha with the same diligence as a wine tasting.

Trying to ignore this daft moment, I found myself in a family wine business’s processing facility and French Oven office space in Woodinville, WA, pitching the business proposition and market opportunity for Dr. JORA cannabis kombucha. Watching three generations of a single family drink a cannabis kombucha like a wine could only make me silently chuckle.

Whenever I had a second, all I could think was, How in the world did I get here?

***

It was a Seattle sunny summer day in 2016 when my entrepreneurship professor, Alan Leong, and I were sitting down for lunch.

Alan was then head of the Entrepreneurship program at the University of Washington and a co-founder of BioWatch News, a biotech subscription newsletter researching industry trends and important relevant information, then selling this content to biotech companies. Alan is a kind and gentle man. He fostered many of the