Episode 93: Blockchain, Crypto Currencies & ICOs - Llew Morkel of ProsperiProp

Special Guest Llew Morkel of ProsperiProp in South Africa joins host Drew Ogryzek to discuss blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings).

Founder of ProsperiProp, a company currently in the process of an ICO (Initial Coin Offering), Morkel says the idea is to make it possible for a person with as little as USD $2.00 to get involved with property investment. There's often quite a high dollar bar, or minimum investment to get involved with property investment, so he sees this as a big game changer.

Morkel says Bitcoin was the very first blockchain coin. It was the very first way of transacting and paying digitally. The open source Bitcoin currency and blockchain acts as the reference. One can download that source code and start their own coin. When Ethereum copied it and started the Ethereum chain, then decided to better it in a way with smart contracts.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are payment systems, which makes them "coins," while ProsperiProp has an asset backed item which does not run on its own blockchain, and that makes it a token, explains Morkel.

With all the hype around ICOs circulating, Morkel says some things to take into consideration, while evaluating whether to buy into a company's ICO are:

Read the whitepaper: a whitepaper is like a business plan for technology, where everything the business plans on doing is written in detail. You can scrutinize that document to see exactly where it comes from. If that whitepaper does not make sense, then that's the first alarm bell.

The team involved: does the team have experience in what they're doing, are they capable of being validated, and do you trust the people involved?

Are the people involved open to public media: Often people who want to scam you out of a few dollars will not go into the media, because they do not want to be seen or known.

Check out propxico.com to read the whitepaper, learn more about the ProsperiProp team or get involved in the ICO.

Follow Morkel on Twitter at @LlewMorkel and Samantha Ming at @EventsPodcast.

TUE: SEP 12

Vancouver Founder Institute Information Session

(Vancouver Startup Founder 101 | at The Profile (Gastown) | 6:30 pm)

WED: SEP 13

Intro to Einstein Data Discovery for Developers

(Vancouver Salesforce Developer Group | at Salesforce | 6:00 pm)

THU: SEP 14

Everything you need to know about Kubernetes + hands-on demo

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Intro to Deep Learning with Fast.AI: Week five

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How To Build A Sales Process That Converts

(Spring Startup School | 10:00 am)

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Theme music by A Shell In The Pit from the game Parkitect

The Vancouver Tech Podcast is a weekly show focusing on the growing tech industry in the city of Vancouver. Get caught up on the events and meetups around town, startups, new businesses, developers, designers, community programs, and news. Each episode includes an interview with an outstanding member of our community.

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