This is the second interview on Hbar News. I explained in the first one with Christian Hasker CMO of Hedera that I thought a simple way to this was to email a few basic questions as I know everyone in this space is generally very busy. I went with pretty much the same questions in this just because they are easy enough if someone is very busy. So without further ado I present to you:
“An Interview with Dr. Leemon Baird”
1. If you had to pick your greatest moment at Hedera what would it be?
The moment that I realized that just storing a couple of hashes in each message would allow us to run ABFT algorithms without any communication about consensus, which would give both speed and security. That was pretty exciting.
Other big moments were the big announcement of Hedera on a stage on Broadway in 2018, the launch of the network summer of 2018, Open Access the summer of 2019, and each of the major features that we’ve announced, as well as all the recent announcements about open source, the Foundation, and the restructuring. The last few years have been pretty exciting!
2. What was your biggest challenge in being the Chief Scientist for Hedera Hashgraph?
We’ve always had a big vision for everything we want to build and to do. But you can’t do everything at the same time. The hardest part is deciding which of all those things gets created first, and putting them all in order. It’s gratifying to see each one being accomplished, one after another.
3. How do you feel about both the open source news and moving your talents over to Swirlds?
This is incredibly exciting, because of what it means for the future of Hedera, the future of the project, the future of the community, and even the way it can impact the world and make it better.
4. Please tell the readers something that they may not know about you?
By this point, they probably know pretty much everything about me. 😀 Maybe some people don’t know that in college, I not only got to take a wilderness survival course, but I even got to be a survival instructor one summer. And came back years later and was able to lead the program one summer. I love playing in the woods.
5. Do you have any funny stories about about working at Hedera?
One fun thing is the nerf gun battles in the Dallas office, especially when some people bring their kids to work. The adults aren’t any more mature than the kids. 😀
6. If you had to choose one use case to showcase to the world to show the possibilities with Hedera, who would you choose and why?
For a glimpse into how the world will change, I might look at remittances with stable coins on Hedera by Standard Bank and Shinhan Bank. Or maybe even how Calaxy is creating markets for things that have never existed before, using NFTs. But just for sheer fun, I might talk about building VR worlds on top of Hedera.
7. Just to pick your brain, I am very curious to hear your thoughts on Simulation hypothesis.
It’s a fun question, but fundamentally unanswerable. For any conceivable experimental result you can imagine, there could be a physical universe whose laws give that result, and there could be a simulation whose laws give that result, especially if the simulation is running on a computer in a universe with very different physical laws than ours. So it’s impossible to ever distinguish the laws of a physical universe from the laws of a simulation. So it’s an entertaining question, but not really answerable.
8. If you had the ears of all Hbarbarians and the whole community, what would you tell them?
For all the exciting things you’re building and doing, THANK YOU, and I can’t wait to see the future we are building together!”
Interview conducted by Peter G. Uliano Hbar News 2022
Hedera ID for donations and support: 0.0.9090
