0/ Thread: Trent McConaghy (@trentmc0) is the co-founder & CTO of @OceanProtocol, a decentralized data exchange protocol. Part of the #BerlinCryptoCapital portrait Series. 
1/ "I moved to Berlin several years ago. My wife and I moved here with her two young children at the time, because we were interested in a city that had culture, quality of life and technology. Berlin has all those three in the best combination of any city in the world."
2/ "I lived in many places: California, Belgium, also spent a lot of time in Paris. Actually, @BrucePon & I are from Saskatchewan in Canada, which has a lot of cooperatives (bank, food, marketing grain) — so we've been exposed to collaboration and co-operation for quite a while!"
3/ "Right after we moved to Berlin, I got to know the blockchain scene. I went to Room77 within a week moving here and I'm like wow, these are my people! So I never looked back 😄"
4/ "It's because of the character of Berlin itself as a city: It's not about optimizing for money, for growth or for finance the way that you might have in Silicon Valley, NYC or London. It's actually much more of a societal thing. It's been like that for a long time in Berlin."
5/ "Berlin is naturally very tolerant. Probably the best word to describe Berlin is subversive. It's about trying to change the wiring of society a bit from below and has long history of hacker culture around that at least there in the 90s with @cbase."
6/ "It's one of the world's 1st hackerspace. It has the myth of being a crashed space station, if you go inside it looks like the interior of the Millennium Falcon! Most of the CoreDevs for @torproject are in Berlin, the biggest @Wikipedia eng. office outside the SF is here."
7/ "There's a long history of hacker culture here as well as the subversive element. Combining those 2 things is a perfect combination for blockchain. It was a natural fit for ppl here to gravitate around the scene & other ppl started to move to Berlin when they discovered it."
8/ "We're trying to open-up data silos by actually changing the incentives to share data. How? On @OceanProtocol, people get tokens if they make their data available when asked & get more rewards the more they stake on the data & bet on its future relevance."
9/ "And if there's other people that have shared data that they like then they can also bet on that data and then make that available when asked. So over time with this does is it incentivizes people to make more and more relevant data available more of the time."
10/ "On one side, the people who have the data don't have the AI expertise to extract value from it. On the other side, people who are really good at AI don't have access to data because they're building companies, so they're starving for data! We're connecting the two parts."
11/ "Regarding data privacy, you have two sides to take into account: On the storage side you can have a) cloud-based decentralized, b) cloud-based centralized or c) stored locally (storing behind a firewall)."
12/ "On the compute side, similar thing: You can have a) fully decentralized compute network (e.g. @golemproject or something more AI specific like @Singularity_Net), b) centralized cloud-compute (e.g. Amazon EC2) or c) local compute (e.g. behind a firewall)."
13/ "If you really don't want your data set to leave your premises, that's okay. You can bring some algorithm in house that could be a) made available in a marketplace to run locally, b) vet the algorithms for yourself or c) supply the algorithm."
14/ "There's also homomorphic encryption, which was too impractical to do anything with just 3 or 4 years ago. However now, as Andrew Trask (@iamtrask) showed with @openminedorg, you can actually train a neural network practically off of fully encrypted data, which is amazing."
15/ "What @OceanProtocol is doing is make it really easy for people to provide these different services & then to chain them together in a data processing pipeline, in a decentralized fashion."
16/ "Token velocity? I don't really care about the price, frankly. What I want is to provide value to the users. What we want to do is incentivize these data silos, so I'm not going to create a design that just makes HODLers happy."
17/ "That said I'm actually not worried about price because I know that we have a lot of staking and some of this staking lasts for a month because of the copyright vetting process that naturally slows things down."
18/ "Btw @Numerai does very nicely on this too. Their network value is not crazy high, yet they have a 67% engagement rate. You can only really get positive marginal gains on the token if you're actually using it. I think that's wonderful."
19/ "And there are other examples of this happening: @decredproject has inflation, Casper will have too unless you're actually active in the network. We want to encourage engagement. Are we trying to make a $B for ourselves or trying to change the world? I chose the latter."
20/ PS: This interview part of the #BerlinCryptoCapital portrait Series—featuring the people shaping the crypto ecosystem in Berlin—to understand how the city is becoming one of the world's crypto capital. 🚀 #ShareTheLove /fin
