Wilkinson set down with blockchain founder and influencer Lamar Wilson, to discuss how he got started in crypto, his platform Storj, and how he launched his first token.
LW: How did you get started in cryptocurrency?
SW: I started out mining. I had a friend at Morehouse that was mining and said ‘Hey, I got a little computer here, electricity’s free. What do I have to lose?’ I started mining away making like half a bitcoin a day. I ended up turning it off because it was making my residence room a little too hot. Suddenly the bitcoin I was mining was worth a lot more so I looked into the technology further and just fell in love with it.
I saw that there was a real need and issue in cloud storage so I figured hey, let me start my own project to solve that exact thing.
LW: Let’s talk about Storj. Tell the people about it, what it does, what the coin allows, that whole thing.
SW: It’s solving that fundamental issue. Something that we all use is cloud storage but there’s a lot of issues with it. Privacy, security. You have all of these good old corporations kind of looking through your data, which isn’t the best thing.
When I created it, it was really focused a little bit more and continues to be on the developer side. I was looking to build out applications, store a bunch of data and I was playing around with the Twitter firehose. A lot of people thought we were focusing more on the Dropbox side of things but, what you find out when you actually dig into this ecosystem is, the developers are actually building cloud tools and us as users we benefit.
LW: Can you talk about how you launched your coin?
SW: We started in 2014 back when bitcoin was quite new. There was this idea that you could build other applications on top of bitcoin and the underlying technology. There are millions of people all over the world who have extra hard drive space, they can rent that hard drive space out and get paid for it (miners who generate tokens) and the other side of that is we can build a platform where people can securely store their data. That bridging portion is both the blockchain technology to keep it private and secure but, also just to facilitate the numerous amounts of payments that you have to do.
In the end, both sides are working in tandem.
What the full video below.
This story was written by Sequoia Blodgett, the Technology Editor at Black Enterprise, where it originally published. This story is published here with permission.
