On Thursday, September 29th, AutoHall Foundation organized a conference, which Barlaman Today was invited to, by Professor Rachid Guerraoui under the theme “Cryptocurrency Demystification”
Rachid Guerraoui is a computer scientist and a professor at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). In addition to his contributions in the fields of concurrent and distributed computing, Professor Guerraoui won an ERC Advanced Grant Award (2013), the Google Focused Award (2014), and Best Paper Awards at the following scientific conferences of ACM Middleware (2016, 2014, 2012), and got appointed by King Mohammed VI as a member of the Special Committee on Model of Development in 2019.
Professor Guerraoui explains how blockchain technology could revolutionize finance and data storage in Morocco, what is exactly the Bitcoin protocol, and why it consumes so much energy.
During this conference, Rachid Guerraoui reveals the potential of Blockchain technology and the opportunities it would create in Morocco, both in terms of financial flows and the modernization of data storage. Something Professor Guerraoui corroborated by stating that “today, Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a country like Switzerland for example, just for the sake of mining, which is completely a useless process.”
Professor Guerraoui got down to basics, leaving no room for ambiguity on this topic answering all the questions that were raised during his presentation.
Solid, irrefutable, and trackable, these new systems of storage and exchange could revolutionize various sectors of the economy, such as real estate, health, and finance. The blockchain could allow the development of a virtual currency that the Central Bank is currently studying. Moreover, it would facilitate and secure financial exchanges with no risk as “it is something very solid, it is not shady at all, it is not passion at all, it is mathematics and computer sciences and it can be extremely useful for a country like Morocco,” says Professor Guerraoui.
Seeing as there were hesitations regarding the use of virtual currencies, Professor Guerraoui emphasized that it is the currency fluctuation that is unreliable, thus it leads to uncertain forecasts. However, the system itself is not questionable, reminding the audience that Blockchain technology produces a structure of data with inherent security qualities, which is based on principles of the art of writing or solving codes, known as cryptography, decentralization, and consensus, which ensure trust in transactions between parties.