Radia Perlman has been designing network and routing protocols for a long time. In the early days, they were pretty fragile. It's been Perlman's work that's made these protocols robust and scalable. She's literally written the book on these topics, now in a 2nd edition. It's this perspective Perlman brings to “Blockchain,” which has been hyped as the biggest contribution to computing since the Internet. It's hard to define a buzzword like “Blockchain.” You could define it as something as vague and general as “a combination of computers networking,” which doesn't make it any different from the computing we've been doing for decades. Perlman simply defines “Blockchain” as data that's arranged in chains of blocks. Every chain has a “hash,” which is especially difficult to compute. It's difficulty is its only security assumption. But how safe is that really? Find out in this podcast. Here’s a few things you’ll find out: * What the downsides of blockchain technology are * Why Blockchain and Bitcoin could be over-hyped * What the dangers of Bitcoin could be