Q&A With Halsey Minor, The Man Behind CNET, Salesforce, and Now VideoCoin

Published on 06 September 2018 by Cryptovest Staff

We spoke to Halsey Minor about a novel concept in video encoding and decoding using a new type of blockchain.

It’s not every day that we see a big player in the Web 1.0 and 2.0 space make a token-based blockchain network, and it’s even rarer to see anyone start one that caters to business-to-business services. However, Halsey Minor—a man who either founded or led ventures like CNET, Salesforce, Google Voice, Uphold, Voxelus, and OpenDNS—is the type of person who built his reputation by filling gaps in the markets he enters.

His latest project, known as VideoCoin, is an attempt to use blockchain technology and cryptocurrency to address a pervasive problem in the video streaming and encoding industry in the internet, incentivizing data centers with unused computing power to commit some of their resources in exchange for a reward through a complex combination between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake models.

Cryptovest had the pleasure and honor of speaking with him before his trip to the World Blockchain Forum in London and asking him about this new technology.

The story of VideoCoin

The idea behind VideoCoin came as a result of Minor’s work with LivePlanet, a company that makes cameras that can stream VR video and offers cloud media services revolving around stereoscopic VR.

“At LivePlanet, we have this very deep video expertise. We take 4K video and ingest it from a VR camera and then we send it to all major platforms, which is very much like Fox does with their video as they have to send it to like 9 different platforms, different devices, different services, at different bandwidths,” Minor said.

With such services, not only are bandwidth requirements much higher than with 2D video but there’s also a need for more storage and processing power to stream the video to consumers. On top of that, we can pile on the fact that it gets more complicated when delivering video at different resolutions.

“My guess is that Netflix has a version [of its videos] for every streaming rate, for every device. It’s called encoding and you have to do it for every single device if you want to optimize it. So, a big cost has now become this process of video as you encode it for all these different devices. You look at a totally different video on your iPhone as you do on your iPad, or your Galaxy Gear. They’re all processed differently. Every device and every chip has a video encoder and decoder so that the video encoder takes HD video that’s 50 megabits and they reduce it down to 5,” he said.

Problem & solution

Halsey Minor approached blockchain technology with a stark level of skepticism while he was launching Uphold, making him doubtful about whether there were any proper use cases for it outside of the cryptocurrency and fintech world.

After seeing Ethereum’s blockchain, however, he caught a glimpse of something that sparked an idea.

“When I was launching Uphold, at the time, I was very cynical about blockchain applications. It wasn’t until Ethereum started taking off that I really started thinking deeply about whether my early perceptions have been wrong about whether there were real blockchain applications,” Minor told us.

The inspiration for VideoCoin came from how Ethereum uses the computing power of individuals all over the world to run its vast transaction network. Considering that data centers have a lot of unused resources at their disposal, it was only a matter of adapting the Ethereum model to the world of processing video streams using these resources.

“We’re very data-center-focused. We’re not really aiming at consumer use cases. We’re pretty much going after massive amounts of data center capacity at the start. But we think that over the long term, the same basic economics that drive mining [will be available], where miners with the lowest cost of power make money mining, and when they make money, they buy more hardware. That’s kind of where the model, I would say, is going to with cloud-based computing,” he said.

Proof of… what?

Though the proof-of-work model has reigned supreme in the cryptocurrency world for several years, it quickly saw itself challenged by other approaches to consensus on the blockchain. This is nothing new.

However, VideoCoin’s model was specifically tailor-made for the video streaming industry. Although we probably won’t see its consensus and mining model used by many of the top coins, it doesn’t need to be popular.

VideoCoin’s blockchain aims to be one that separates consensus entirely from mining in its equation. The eccentricity of its inner workings have been made specifically so that data centers have a reason to use it while at the same time providing a clear benefit to both end users and content platform providers.

“Some [cryptocurrencies] like Bitcoin create arbitrary proofs to solve. That’s not useful work. What our miners do is useful work… We have proof of storage, proof of encoding, proof of streaming, and we have one thing that I don’t think anyone else has done—and that’s because we have a lot of data center experience. We have relay miners, which can connec