Greer's Treis Blockchain looking for the next big thing> GSA Business

Empty racks can say more about Treis Blockchain than complete ones.

For the time being, the shelves stand solitary and mostly empty in 25,000 square feet of space echoing in footsteps when the rare visitor passes through the Greer structure. But space is the optimism of Treis Blockchain LLC, whose partners are in charge to fill them.

They will place one server on the computer next to the next: one compact device after the other until the shelf is full, then the entire rack, then the entire warehouse. And then another warehouse and another – four or five scattered around the Upstate. In a short time, the servers will be too old to keep up, and one by one the application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, will be replaced, one after the other, line by line.

They have the same optimism as the gold miners of the 49, but these miners are looking for something valuable in the digital world. Unlike the 49ers, they have a modern business plan and a patent pending idea that would shift the value of things in and out of the blockchain realm that has collected a large amount of print, albeit with a minimum of understanding.

All of these ASICs will burn a lot of electricity and take many hours to install, but managing partner David Pence believes that he and senior management members Michael Bolick and Senter Smith are pioneers in the next big thing.

Several years ago, Pence was one of those who called "a group of guys" around the world who aimed their personal computers for cryptocurrency. Called mining, computers are dedicated to validating information, recording information in blocks and linking each new block to an ever-longer chain. As a reward for solving very complex problems to validate information, the miners are rewarded with parts of the digital currency. Just like a dollar can be broken down into .01 pieces called penny, a bitcoin is divided into .00000001 pieces called satoshi. The integrity of the chain is maintained by 30 miners who validate the information, Pence said.

Computers that validate the block are randomly chosen and are spread all over the world, making it almost impossible to hack the system because a hacker would compromise all those randomly selected computers at the same time.

Only a few years ago, a person could install it at home and start mining, said Pence, but with the increase in computing power required, the cost of running the machines exceeded the profit.

Pence, who had run his IT company – Acumen IT – for almost 20 years, knew it was time to pull the plug from the cryptocurrency or grow up. With a large space, powerful servers and industrial tariffs for electricity, he thought it could be done. He approached his partners – Bolick, an expert in downsizing, and Smith, an expert in trade – and three of them launched Treis Blockchain, which began with a special focus on bitcoin mining.

Like many others in the world of IT and business, Treis partners believe that the technology that makes bitcoin work, blockchain technology, is the real opportunity, and they believe that the rise of blockchain is on we and the role of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are just ahead.

"One day you will enter the supermarket and go to the hot dogs and a hot dog pack will have a dollar price and then will be evaluated in satoshi on the right," Pence said. "So it will be $ 2 for a pack of hot dogs or 14 satoshi, you'll see it in five years."

Most people will use their phones to make the purchase and these purchases will be guaranteed and verified through a blockchain. That's how the buyer knows that the money is gone and how the seller knows that the money is now available.

"I'll make you a sandwich and instead of paying me cash, you pay me in satoshi.When you hit send what happens is the network in the world that says" Ah, the sender wants to send to the recipient "and there are supernodes out there asking 30 servers volunteer to control the blockchain, "Pence said. "If one of our servers in Greer is chosen to verify this transaction, another 29 are selected all over the world and we check the database to see if you have enough satoshi to pay for the sandwich. next and all the blockchain are updated. "

And each of them receives a small part of the transaction, like a penny. Profit comes from making millions of checks.

If one of these chains is hacked or destroyed, the others will recognize it and overwrite that block.

"That's why hackers can not hack a chain of distributed blocks," he said.

Because such security is widespread throughout the world, the system is superior to any mass storage system that preceded it. The next challenge is to find a way to shift the value in and out of a blockchain.

Treis Blockchain recently filed a patent to address this problem by allowing separate blockchains to communicate and make transactions between them. They call it "web blockchain" but no industry-wide term has emerged, although much of the technology world is already moving in that direction, Pence said.

"The whole world is exploding with blockchain … Mastercard, … everyone is starting to put their data on the blockchain because it's a good idea," he said. "Just as everyone has moved data from servers to the cloud, the new cloud is blockchain, so we have a patent that shifts physical value into our blockchain world in the blockchain world."

They are currently developing software to support the patent and have registered the domain name Nstant.io. They believe that smartphone apps will develop around technology and Nstant.io will be a recognized brand and a favorite way to carry out cryptocurrency transactions in everyday life.

"We think in the best case you'll be able to get to a store and they'll have it on the door: Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Nstant accepted here." This is the big dream, "Pence said.

Bolick said the blockchain and the technologies that will follow will add a new economic layer to the world economy while the next generation gets used to the blockchain with the same naturalness with which the current generation has adopted the internet as part of life.

"The whole concept of connection is a different paradigm than 10 years ago," he said. "A whole mindset will change." A whole generation of people is going to know that there is an immutable dataset out there and the blockchain apps will be faster and they will be reliable. The market is pulling us, and competitors who do not adopt this technology will be left behind and will be overtaken by companies that do it in a new way. "