Foresight Vision – Blockchains – Master Key to Unlock the Future – Panel
Zooka Wilcox, Nathan Sharma (Singularity University), Mark Miller, Nick Kritikos on how to build better realities block by block.
Beyond Crypto – ICO hype and hope. Decentralized governance
Zooka Wilcox is working on zCash.
Bitcoin does five things now
1. Store of value
2. Medium of exchange
3. Name service (alternative to DNS)
4. ICOs
5. Technical functions
Permutations of the five.
Settlement.
Land Registration.
Bundling people to make them credit worthy. Community credit rating.
Blockchain can be used for governance systems using smart contracts.
Blockchain combined with Artificial Intelligence also could be applied to governance.
Blockchain also embeds computation.
Blockchain systems are required to be secure and insecure systems get hacked.
Zooka believes that there are barriers to investment in cryptocurrency and bitcoin. It will become easier for people to invest over the next 6-18 months. There is about $10 billion to $1 trillion being blocked from investing now.
Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and Fiat currencies are all bubbles. Bubbles do not necessarily come down.
Nick Kritikos talks about propellent depots in space with a blockchain commerce system.
Nick Kritikos is involved with Consensys. ConsenSys is a venture production studio building decentralized applications and various developer and end-user tools for blockchain ecosystems, primarily focused on Ethereum. New York-based Ethereum design studio ConsenSys has hired a number of new employees in the fields of entrepreneurship, finance, engineering, policy and enterprise delivery.
The blockchain venture studio has hired a large amount of talented individuals that come from a range of backgrounds in an attempt to expand their global business efforts.
ConsenSys’ has a newly announced $50 million venture arm.
Nick Kritikos, Global Business Development; Formerly served as the VP of Alliances & Channels, Director of Global Solution Sales, and Business Development at Oracle
Ryan Selkis, Entrepreneur in Residence; On the founding teams of CoinDesk as Managing Director and Digital Currency Group as Director of Investments
Manu Marchal, Business Development; Former MD, Basho, Former VP Sales & Services, Acunu
Chris McKibbin, ConsenSys Spokes & Global Operations; Worked at companies including Electronic Art and consulted with Google, Tent Cent, and other startups
Mohammad Shaikh, Director of Strategic Iniatives; Previously of the Boston Consulting Group in their Private Equity practice, where he had experience in investments and strategy.
There is some background information on blockchain – society and economics.
There are four core technological building blocks that are coordinated to enable the Ethereum decentralized application platform to operate:
1) Cryptographic Tokens and Addresses: a mathematically secure unique voucher system that can act as numeraire and be used pay for goods, services or assets, and can also be used to represent a mathematically secure, pseudonymous identity;
2) Peer-to-peer Networking: individual users connect their computers together forming a network to exchange data without a central server (both Bitcoin and Ethereum run on P2P networks);
3) Consensus Formation Algorithm: this algorithm permits users of the blockchain to reach consensus about the current state of the blockchain (the Bitcoin blockchain reaches consesus on a global state change every 10 minutes on average whereas the Ethereum blockchain reaches consensus approximately every 15 seconds).
4) Turing Complete Virtual Machine: a virtual machine is a computer that exists as software, and can be run at a layer of abstraction above the underlying hardware; “Turing complete” means that this software computer can run any computer program one defines and is powerful enough to implement any program defined in any similarly computationally complete system (as opposed to Bitcoin, which has a virtual machine but can only run a much simpler class of programs);
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.