Dr. Craig Wright is always 10 steps ahead of everyone: nChain’s Alec John Burns

“Craig is always ten steps ahead of everyone,” says nChain’s Alec John Burns. In an interview with CoinGeek Backstage, he talked about the significance of The Bitcoin Masterclasses, nLocktime, nChain, real-world applications, and more.

“It’s hard to keep up with him sometimes, but when you do, and you put up the effort, it’s so worthwhile. You get those golden nuggets like, ‘Wow, that’s a real-world use case that no one has thought of yet,’” Burns told CoinGeek Backstage reporter Becky Liggero.

Burns works in the product department at nChain as the new propositions manager. His job is “basically assessing the landscape, understanding what’s going on in the market…so we can create products that solve pain points.” He leads nChain’s efforts to ensure that all their products target actual problems facing their clients now.

At the Bitcoin Masterclasses in London, the big theme was nLockTime and its applications today. While Burns always knew that nLockTime was all about payment channels, he learned in London that it goes beyond exchanging value.

“It’s not just about exchanging value, it’s also about exchanging information and that’s super critical to what we’re doing,” Burns said.

As with all the other Masterclasses, Dr. Wright divided the audience into smaller groups to discuss real-world applications of the concepts he taught on stage. For Burn’s group, construction was the primary industry they chose to focus on. A vast and multifaceted industry with so many actors, it suffers from a lack of accountability and fraud.

With most of the processes being time-sequenced, construction could be one of the biggest gainers from nLockTime implementation, the former researcher believes.

“Using nLockTime to exchange information and value in that kind of project makes a lot of sense. I have some background in the construction sector and I know how much fraud is in there. Having some accountability in those instances would be very important,” he said.