It�s morning and you�ve just had breakfast. What are you going to have for dinner? 49% of people in the U.S. do not know what they are going to have for dinner. That stat comes from David Portalatin�s address at the Art of Beef Summit, sponsored by Cargill. As he was addressing foodservice executives and salespeople, he emphasized that not knowing what�s for dinner, just hours before consumers are supposed to eat it, is a problem. Not for the foodservice people, but for consumers. They don�t know what they want, and whether they know it or not, they are looking for help. Not necessarily in the form of a plea for help, but in the form of wanting an easy and convenient way for them to decide what they are having for dinner.

So, the customer�s problem becomes an opportunity for smart people in the food industry. Grocery stores are seeing an increase in numbers of their ready-to-eat meals prepared with fresh ingredients. Companies like Blue Apron and Hello Fresh, who deliver ready-to-prepare fresh meals, are seeing increases in sales. Then, of course, there are restaurants that make it easy. When the kids ask mom or dad, �What are you going to make for dinner?�, the most convenient answer when they don�t know just might be, �Reservations.�

The point is that these businesses aren�t just selling food. They are selling the solution to the problem of not knowing what�s for dinner. A grocer may sell food, but what the customer may want is the family dinner. A family taking dozens of pictures every day while on vacation isn�t looking to have a bunch of photographs. What they are after are memories.

Once you understand the �why� behind what you sell, you�ll start to be able to solve your customers� problems. Questioning the �why� behind the �what,� you get a better understanding of what�s driving decisions, and as a result, can create a better customer experience.

Why does a person want a fancy red sports car? What�s driving that desire? Is all they want transportation? No. There is more to it than that. It might be congruent with the customer�s lively personality.

You may or may not know I�m hired to do keynote speeches at conferences around the world. Why do my clients want a speaker? Is it just the information? Absolutely not. If all they wanted was information, they would buy everyone a book. One of the first questions I like to ask my client when they are interested in having me speak is, �Why do you want to hire a professional speaker for your conference?� Another question is, �Why is the topic of customer service or customer experience important for this audience to hear?� The answers give me great insight into solving my client�s problems and needs for a program that will meet (ideally exceed) their expectations.

So, next time you are engaging in a conversation with your customers, think not just about what you�re talking about, but why you are talking about it.

Cypherium | Comparing Public Blockchains

The third generation of blockchains is imminent, with a number of projects cropping up in recent years to address the shortcomings of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and some of the other early players in the crypto space. So what exactly are the major problems in the space, and how do today�s most prominent new projects intend to solve them? Here we explain simply in the context of �The Blockchain Trilemma.�

The Blockchain Trilemma is an overarching term that often gets tossed around as a description of the issues facing our industry. Simply put, the trilemma refers to a trade-off that many projects have had to make between three pillars of an idealized blockchain: Decentralization, speed, and security. The popular wisdom holds that blockchain technology cannot truly scale until a single distributed ledger technology leverages all three of these characteristics � a decentralized revolution that doesn�t appear to be fully achievable.

Certainly, this trade-off is at the heart of today�s scalability issue. Despite its reliability and clear decentralization, Bitcoin can only process six transactions per second and confirms transactions with a minimum waiting time of an hour, while other competitors like EOS and Ripple are hardly decentralized at all. Meanwhile, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, and numerous other high profile coins have suffered serious attacks on their systems� security. In order for blockchain to scale, we need an emergent protocol that has the decentralization of Nakamoto�s consensus, while ensuring the speed and security that modern enterprises require in order to utilize blockchain.

However, underneath the broad banner of the Blockchain Trilemma, there is a series of more detailed, technical issues that every new blockchain needs to address in order to achieve true scalability. We�ve outlined several of these important technical areas in the table below, listing Cypherium side-by-side with a number of our peers in order to show how our solutions are lasting, solid, and proven.

So, what do these categories mean, why are they the significant factors in solving the overarching trilemma, and why have these leading projects made the choices we�ve identified above?

Throughput: Often a complicated issue touted as the be-all-end-all of new blockchain projects, Throughput is generally the figure that refers to the processing rate of a network operating at full capacity. However, many nascent companies take advantage of this by posting a theoretical processing number rather than the rate of the full throughput � often a number that the network could never truly reach. For example, Visa, which claims to be able to process upwards of 30,000 transactions per second, never realistically exceeds 1,500 TPS. Similarly, when projects claim that they can process half a million transactions per second, they are often referring to a mathematical aspiration for their design and not a practical achievement. Some companies also do this on a smaller scale, either citing blueprint theory or a soft test on a handful of centrally held practice nodes. Ultimately, higher throughput does not mean faster transaction speed, and a blockchain with high throughput could still take several minutes or longer to process transactions due to the structure of its resolution finality.

Consensus: Consensus may be the single most important aspect of any distributed ledger technology, given that it remains at the heart of the blockchain trilemma. Most improvements made in the space have attempted to advance Proof-of-Work (PoW) by improving transaction speeds and its effectiveness. However, some of those replacements, such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and Asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerance, ultimately sacrifice decentralization. Similarly, unproven designs like Avalanche�s slush have not been appropriately battle-tested, which scalable implementation requires. Cypherium�s hybrid consensus finds a way to maintain the innovative decentralization of PoW by bringing it to scale with Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus. Combining the initial designs of Bitcoin with those of ByzCoin and Bitcoin-NG, Cypherium�s dual chain structure puts the best conceptions of consensus in conversation with one another.

Governance: A truly open, decentralized network is governed by its users. In practice, governance is the process by which users recognize a common set of rules for operating the network. This puts the power of the network truly in the hands of its community, offering them the opportunity to associate and organize freely into factions through a process known as forking. New projects often seem to centralize their governance in order to expedite the network�s decision making. However, putting power into the hands of a few administrators often lends itself to centralization.

Finality: Finality is a large, encompassing topic in blockchain technology. At a glance, finality represents the time it takes for a transaction to be considered approved. Finality speed generally refers to the time it takes for a transaction to be recorded, validated, and accepted into the ledger. Although related in some ways to throughput speed, finality has different implications for a network�s trilemma solution.

Following the lead of Bitcoin, most blockchains operate with probabilistic finality, where transactions are recorded into the ledger and are subject to forking. To avoid the slog of probabilistic finality, many projects turn to centralization to achieve instant and permanent finality. However, Cypherium�s design deploys a dual chain structure that allows for instant and absolute finality while maintaining its decentralized block creation.

Turing Completeness: Some might say that Turing-completeness is irrelevant to the blockchain space because it has not yet been implemented by many third-generation smart contract protocols. However, Turing completeness is a standard that indicates the power of a programming language. The nature of tech, especially new technologies like blockchain, artificial intelligence, or cloud, is to grow, innovate, and change. Turing-completeness gives smart contract platforms the best opportunity to flourish along those lines.

Total Ordering: Total ordering is a natural feature of a blockchain. It refers to the fact that each block has a single antecedent, which allows the ledger to be traced back in its entirety to the very first transaction. Importantly, blockchains use total ordering for more than good bookkeeping. Total-ordering is an important way that blockchains solve the double spending problem, in which a single account uses the same funds to pay two debts. Total ordering requires that one of these transactions be validated before the other can be processed. However, in protocols like Avalanche, which uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), there is no automatic solution to double spending. Instead, DAGs, just permanently isolate and avoid such instances, effectively losing the balance as a punishment for a perceived attack on the network. However, this is an untenable solution � especially given the fact that not all double-spending originate with an individual attempting fraud.

Incentive: In addition to being ledgers, smart contract platforms, and app infrastructures, blockchains are also economic ecosystems. Successful blockchains must be equipped with adequate economic incentive structures that will make participation in the network sustainable and profitable. Economic justification and planning bring blockchain to scale by transforming it from an academic interest to a professional industry with viable money solutions. Projects that lack incentive structure will force themselves onto an academic bookshelf and hinder the growth of our industry. When developing a project, consider the following: What is the cost of running a node? Will the miners have to pay exorbitant prices for expensive equipment? Will they need to incur high electricity costs? How do the miners make money? How does the network sustain itself? These questions are as important as any transaction or consensus issue.

Attack Vulnerabilities: With every decision a new DLT project makes, it exposes itself to attackers who look to exploit its designs, which we have already witnessed a number of times through critical attacks on popular projects. As these technologies continue to develop, there will inevitably be more of these kinds of attacks and it is critical in the early stages of this industry that we solve these problems rather than abandon them. New blockchain designs must not only keep tabs on the latest marketing and enterprise trends, but also stay in touch with the designs, breakthroughs, and false steps that have led us to the state of blockchain in 2019. This is the ethos that has guided Cypherium�s development and it will continue to direct our network�s progress beyond the aims of the current iteration of our technology.