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 in this episode:

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

Episode links:

Multichain website
Multichain Whitepaper
Colored coin protocol CoinSpark
Avoiding the pointless blockchain project
Private blockchains are more than 'just' shared databases
Smart contracts: The good, the bad and the lazy

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/107