Greg Meredith: Synereo – Rebuilding the Attention Economy from the Ground Up

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As content becomes more and more abundant and immediately available at our fingertips, our limited attention is a barrier for those whose business it is to attract and harness it. In this context, large (social) media companies understand that attention is a scarce commodity, and, as has been demonstrated, those who control attention wield enormous power over our society.

We’re joined by Greg Meredith, CTO of Synereo, to talk about how this new Blockchain platform rebuild the attention economy. In a sense, Synereo is to attention, what Bitcoin is to money, in effect, removing intermediaries from the transaction between those who have attention, and those who wish to attract it. Greg, also gives his insights on how functional programming languages could allow for verifiable computational smart contracts.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Greg’s background as a mathematician and his work on Microsoft’s BizTalk Process Orchestration
• How he transitioned into the crypto-currency space
• What is Synereo and what the project is trying to achieve
• Greg’s thoughts on the attention economy and how it is fundamentally broken
• Synereo’s technology stack
• How Vlad Zamfir’s Casper consensus algorithm influenced Synereo
• Rholang, Synereo’s functional smart-contracting language
• Synereo’s economic model and product roadmap

Episode links:

• Synereo
• Synereo White Paper
• Logic as a distributive law
• Quit social media by Dr. Cal Newport
• Deep Work by Dr. Cal Newport

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/154