But there’s a catch: what about the faithful ‘execution’ of a contract? Doesn’t that require trust as well? What good is an agreement, after all, if the text is there but people don’t respect it, and don’t follow through on their obligations? Which brings us back to the crucial matter of how Buterin managed to piss off so many people.
The great cryptocurrency heist.
Blockchain enthusiasts crave a world without bankers, lawyers or fat-cat executives. There’s just one problem: trust.
E J Spode
The Disruption Experience this Friday in Singapore is a blockchain event with a difference. With apologies to the Buick commercial, this is not your grandfather’s conference…
I know a few things about blockchain conferences. I produced and hosted the first Bitcoin Event in New York. My organization develops cryptocurrency standards and practices. We help banks and governments create policy and services. And as public speaker for a standards organization, I have delivered keynote presentations at conferences and Expos in Dubai, Gujarat India, Montreal and Tampa, New York and Boston.
Many individuals don’t yet realize that both Bitcoin and the blockchain are as significant as the automobile, the transistor and the Internet. I was fortunate to grasp Bitcoin and the blockchain early in its history. It is never boring to help others understand the blockchain.
And so, I am an evangelist for both a radically improved monetary system and a transformative tool. During the past eight years, I have honed the skill of converting even the most profound skeptic. Give me 45 minutes in front of any audience—technical, skeptical or even without any prior knowledge—and I will win them over. It’s what I do.
An Atypical Conference Venue
As Bitcoin and altcoins begin the process of education, adoption and normalization, the big expos and conference events have begun to splinter and specialize. Today, most blockchain events market their venue to specific market sectors or interests:
For me, Smart Contracts are one of the most exciting and potentially explosive opportunities. As a groupie and cheerleader, I am not alone. Catering to the Smart Contract community is rapidly becoming a big business. Until this week, I thought it was the conference venue that yielded the biggest thrills. That is, until I learned about the Disruption Experience…
Few widely promoted, well-funded events address the 600 pound elephant in the room: What’s the real potential of blockchain trust, blockchain economy or blockchain AI? Take me beyond tokens and currency (please!). How can an international event help us to realize the potential of a radical new approach to accounting, trust and arbitration? Let’s stop arguing about Bitcoin, Ethereum or ICOs…
How can we unleash the gorilla—and grease—
a fundamental change that benefits mankind,
while providing leapfrog technologies for us?
—At least, that’s my spin on the potential of an unusually practical venue.
That question is slated to be answered on Friday at a big event in Singapore. And get this—It is modestly called a “Sneak Peak”. This is what I have been waiting for. The Disruption Experience premiers on September 28 at the V Hotel Lavender in Singapore. But don’t show up at the door. This event requires advance registration. (I do not offer a web link, because I hate being a conference huckster. If you plan to be in the area at the end of this week, then Google the event yourself).
What’s the big deal?
The Disruption Experience team is populated by blockchain developers, educators and trainers who take issue with existing events that focus on monetization. The purity of intention was overrun by greed. And so, they set out to form an event with a more altruistic purpose: Build technology, relationships, mechanisms and educational tools that better mankind. The focus at this event and the conferences that follow is to educate, expose and innovate. The focus is squarely on disruptive technology.
With their team of blockchain innovators focused on benefits and progress, I suspect that attendees will get what we have been searching for: Education, investment opportunities, an edge on new technologies and job opportunities.
Cusp of a Breakout Year
As an analogy, consider the race to understand Bitcoin and consider the engines & motors.
Bitcoin and the blockchain were introduced simultaneously in a 2009 whitepaper. It’s a bit like explaining the engine and the automobile together—for the very first time. One is a technology with a myriad of applications and the potential to that drives innovation. The other is an app. Sure, it’s useful and important, but it’s just an app.
For 8 years, Bitcoin was a radical and contentious concept. Of course, there was the mystery of Satoshi and an effort to pinpoint his or her identity. And, a great debate raged about the legitimacy and value of decentralized, ethereal money. But, the interest was reflected primarily on the pages of Wired Magazine or at Geek-fests. Bitcoin was complex and costly to incorporate into everyday purchases and there were questions and gross misconceptions about hacking, regulation, taxes, criminal activity. The combined audience of adopters, academics, miners and geeks was limited.
That changed last year. With serious talk of exchange traded funds, a futures and derivatives market began to take shape. A critical operational bottleneck was addressed. Ultimately, 2017 was a breakout year for Bitcoin. You may not be using it today, but the smart money is betting that it will enhance your life tomorrow—at least behind the scenes.
Likewise, 2019 is likely to be the breakout year for blockchain applications, careers, products and—perhaps most importantly—public awareness, understanding and appreciation. Just as motors and engines are not limited to automobiles, the blockchain has far more potential than serving as an engine for decentralized cash. It is too important to be just a footnote to disruptive economics. It will disrupt everything. And we are the beneficiaries.
What is Interesting at The Disruption Experience?
The Friday event in Singapore covers many things. The presentations and tutorials that quicken my pulse relate to:
If you read my columns or follow my blog, then you know I am not keen on initial coin offerings (ICOs). That’s putting it mildly. They are almost all scams. But a rare exception is the Tempow ecosystem which encompasses three functional tokens. Stop by their exhibit and meet the officers of a sound economic mechanism that facilitates decentralized trading while overcoming the efficiency paradox.
What can I do at Disruption Experience?
The September 28 event is a preview for January’s Inaugural Event.
Meet the Disruption Team… and much, much more.
If you get to the big event, be sure to find the organizer and host, Coach Mark Davis. Tell him that I sent you. His passion and boundless enthusiasm for the blockchain and especially for transformative disruption is quite infectious.
Related reading:
Philip Raymond co-chairs CRYPSA, hosts the New York Bitcoin Event and is keynote speaker at Cryptocurrency Conferences. He sits on the New Money Systems board of Lifeboat Foundation and is a top Bitcoin writer at Quora. Book a presentation or consulting engagement.
Should we trust technology experts? We live in times of incredible innovations and impressive complexity. The last 30 years of technological development overturned our society, and the next 30 will likely reshape the foundations of what it means to be human. Machines have been the wealth engines of our industrial modernity, while data control and artificial intelligence will structure the power battlefields of this century.
It’s not hard then to understand why technologists, computer scientists, engineers, tech-entrepreneurs, IT experts, data analysts, etc — dress the status of champions in our age. They are shipping us into the wonders of Web 3.0, Industry 4.0, 5G communications, the blockchain transition, the G (eneticengineering). R (obotics). AI. N (anotechnologies) Revolution…and another thousand of cryptic acronyms forbidden to ordinary mortals.
We are flooded with tech-narratives. Let’s start by playing with our imaginations. What does naturally come to your mind if I say:
The virtual currency markets have been through booms and busts before — and recovered to boom again. But this bust could have a more lasting impact on the technology’s adoption because of the sheer number of ordinary people who invested in digital tokens over the last year, and who are likely to associate cryptocurrencies with financial ruin for a very long time.
The number of people who bought virtual currencies more than doubled last winter. For people who got in late, the bust has been disastrous.
Let us frame the question, by reviewing what miners really do…
Miners play a critical role in the Bitcoin network. Their activity (searching for a nonce) results in assembling an immutable string of blocks that corroborate and log the universal transaction record. They are the distributed bookkeepers that replace old-school banks in recording and vouching for everyone’s purchase or savings.
From the perspective of a miner, there is no obvious connection between their activity and the worldwide network of bitcoin transactions and record keeping. They are simply playing an online game and competing against thousands of other miners in an effort to solve a complex and ongoing math problem. As they arrive at answers to small pieces of the problem, they are rewarded with bitcoin, which can be easily translated into any currency.
What is the Problem?
One day, mining for rewards will no longer be possible. The fundamental architecture of Bitcoin guarantees that mining will end. The pool of rewards that were held in abeyance as incentives is small and will run out in 2140—about 120 years from now. So, this raises the question: How will we incentivize miners when there is no more reward? (Actually, they won’t really be miners anymore…They will more accurately be bookkeepers or ‘validators’)
Is there a Solution?
Fortunately, there are many ways to offer incentives to those who validate transactions and maintain the books. Here are just a few:
I believe in this last solution and I have proposed it as the path forward at crypto/blockchain conferences.
Today, this idea seems implausible, because of the memory and computational requirements for running a full node. But, there have been big advancements in the effort to support micro-mining—which does not require such resources. Additionally, it is likely that the current proof-of-work mechanism used to arrive at a distributed consensus will be replaced by another mechanism that does not result in a competition to see who can consume the most electricity.
More about the sunset of mining incentives:
Philip Raymond co-chairs CRYPSA, hosts the New York Bitcoin Event and is keynote speaker at Cryptocurrency Conferences. He sits on the New Money Systems board of Lifeboat Foundation and is a top Bitcoin writer at Quora. Book a presentation or consulting engagement.
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