“It’d be great to see more students [learning blockchain],” Canty says. “There’s a huge shortage in talent, with one viable candidate for every 15 to 20 jobs out there.” coffee at a neighborhood cafe, “this would be crazy fast for buying a house,” says Eric Overby, an associate professor at Tech’s Scheller College of Business. Overby has been teaching a class about Bitcoin since 2013—a class that now routinely attracts 40 to 50 students each semester it’s offered—and sees great potential in blockchain systems and Bitcoin. “There is a huge opportunity to track things other than currency, from real estate to medical records,” he says. A related issue is that the computationally intensive nature of blockchains require a lot of computer horsepower—see the spike in GPU prices as individuals around the world set themselves up as “Bitcoin miners”—as well as energy consumption. A report by financial economist and blockchain specialist Alex de Vries indicates that Bitcoin power consumption worldwide is currently equal to the energy demand of the island of Ireland, and growing at an alarming rate. But walling off blockchains breaks the fundamental proposition and innovation of open participation, says BitPay’s Pair. “You already have a platform that’s open, that works and builds trust,” he says. “Relying on private parties is PayPal, and we already have that.” Besides, he says, scalability isn’t an issue—he notes the Bitcoin network currently handles 300,000 transactions per day—because capacity can be added with additional blockchains. “All the companies working with us are aware of blockchain,” says fintech analyst Jeff Gapusan at the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), the startup inc u bato r at G e o rg i a Te c h t h at h e l p s te c h n o l o g y entrepreneurs. He adds that established financial leaders like Goldman Sachs have responded to blockchain’s promise. “There are a number of consortiums, including R3 and HyperLedger, and a lot of public and private partnerships being put together.” Ensuring a steady flow of trained and talented workers for these initiatives is where Georgia Tech and other schools come in, Gapusan says. “The real question will be: Will there be the amount of talent required to continue developing blockchain for startups and industry?”
“It’d be great to see more students,” says Kell Canty, CS 93, co-founder of Verady, a cryptocurrency accounting and audit technology services company formed in 2016. “There’s a huge shortage in talent, with one viable candidate for every 15 to 20 jobs out there.”
BLOCKCHAIN’S FUTURE So universities like Georgia Tech that have invested in not only the research of blockchain, but also the teaching of it to students—from undergraduates to post-docs to the entrepreneurs in ATDC and other Institute incubators—are playing a huge role in charting its course. While some industry analysts have concerns that blockchain technology might fail or be impeded by governments wary of the anonymity afforded by its core cryptosecurity, the Tech faculty and alumni interviewed for this article held a very optimistic view of blockchain’s future. “People need privacy and security, but there’s this issue of when bad people get hold of these tools,” says Alexandra Boldyreva, an associate professor in the College of Computing. “Finding the right balance [between security and opportunity] remains an interesting, important and difficult question.” Cautious corporations, for the most part, are waiting on the sidelines for now. Only 1 percent of CIOs say their companies have blockchain projects currently underway, according to a recent survey by Gartner Research. But that doesn’t mean blockchain isn’t worth investing in now. Gartner analyst and fellow David Furlonger says that forward-thinking organizations should be at least setting aside some resources to explore the technology now so they’ll be ahead of the curve when mass adoption takes place. “It is critical to understand what blockchain is and what it is capable of today, compared to how it will transform companies, industries and society tomorrow,” Furlonger says. Others are doing much more than that. The use of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies shows no signs of slowing down, and companies like BitPay are capitalizing on its growth. Even bureaucracies are getting into the act. The City of Dubai, for one, plans to put its entire government on blockchain-based systems by 2020, says Verady’s Canty. Provided that governance standards are eventually worked out and no vendor holds this immensely promising technology hostage, DeMillo says, blockchain will have a profound impact on the world—and sooner rather than later. And when it happens, you can be sure that Yellow Jackets will be among the vanguard, helping to leading the way.
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