Celebrating Fearless Ideas (the #d10e Blockchain event)

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Celebrating fearless ideas, the subtile of the #d10e event about blockchain developments. In this blog my aim is to provide a summary of the day.

Upon entering the venue of the event you could see banners that provided an overview of what could be expected that day:

  • Fintech;
  • disruptive tech;
  • the future of work and
  • the sharing economy.

The common theme in all developments listed above is the blockchain. For those not familiar with the blockchain, this film below (not shown at the event) does provide a clear explanation of the technology.
Decentralized autonomous world
Some clear trends could be identified during the day. We’re moving towards a decentralized autonomous sustainable future.

David Orban from the singularity university explained in his keynote that: “widespread social and economic change only happens once a solid technological foundation evolves to make it sustainable. Globally distributed and decentralized technologies have emerged that achieve superior results with respect to centralized and hierarchical ones. These unstoppable technologies undermine and disrupt the Nation State’s supporting pillars. The resulting socioeconomic organization is the Network Society.”

Ronald van den Hoff from Seats2meet explained that we’re on the move via a collaborative economy to an autonomous world.

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In the morning Jeff Garzik from Bloq explained the growth of Bitcoin. Bitcoin 3.0 will enable autonomous agents. These autonomous agents will prove to be the backbone of the autonomous world. No longer we will only know B2B, B2C and all varieties. Aditionally we will also have H2M (Human2Machine) interaction, and M2M (machine2machine).

Below I’ll quickly dive into the evolution of Bitcoin.

Evolution of bitcoin.
You can replace the word bitcoin by blockchain in this paragraph. Bus since Jeff Garzik talked about Bitcoin I’ll also use that word.

Bitcoin 1.0 consisted of a network and a token. It enabled people to transfer Bitcoins to others.

Bitcoin 2.0 adds smart contracts and digital assets. With digital assets you can not only store Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies on a blockchain, but you can also digitally store other objects uniquely identiefied by the blockchain. With smart contract you can add logic to a transaction like a payment. This adds an inifite amount of possibilities to the blockchain

Bitcoin 3.0 adds components like digital identity, digital facts, reputation & digital attestation to the platform. Overview of all components of Bitcoin 3.0:

  • Censorship-resistant security
  • Cryptographic token
  • Digital asset
  • Digital facts
  • Digital identity
  • Reputation & attestation
  • Smart contracts

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With these we can create the autonomous agents stated above. A simple example of an autonomous agent. Suppose you’ll own an autonomous driving car in the near future. You can use this car to drive to and from work. Another option would be that the car functions as an Uber during the hours that you don’t need the car. People then pay the car for the trip… The car then earns money. With this money it could also provide for its electricity and maintenance. If things go well, the car then could buy another car and so on.

Technology will save us

dumb machinesTalking about cars; David Orban states that we should embrace the smart machines. Technology will save us. Most progress in the past has been caused by technology. Without technology we would still be slaves. An example: according to David Orban a car is a dumb machine. These dumb machines kill 1 million people and injure many more on a daily basis. Autonomous cars will decrease this amount of victims significantly, so rather than fearing machines we should embrace the arrival of smart machines.

Other use cases
As said blockchain, can be used for so much more than just transferring money. During the day several examples were presented. Below an overview of just some ideas that were presented.

The people of OpenBazaar are creating a peer-2-peer marketplace based on the bitcoin. They state that they are disrupting eCommerce… Their code is open source, and in march people can test their platform.

HelperBit is developing a platform where people can aid others (directly) in case of an earthquake. The system knows which people are geographically present in the disaster location. So no third party or charity organizations are needed therefore people providing financial aid know their money is well spend.

Pax.Directory has even more ambitions they want to start a virtual nation with a peer2peer legal system, based on Ethereum. They’ll start with providing some basic contracts. In case of a dispute the system will decide who is right. If the system can’t decide it will use a mediation service.

Bigchain DB create a decentralized database, based on blockchain principles. The database delivers high performance for BigData.

Personally I liked the #hackhunger idea from unsung. They have made an app that aims to end hunger for the homeless. What they do is they connect people or organizations that have an abundance of food to those that have indicated they are willing to deliver the food to people or places. The app then determines who could best deliver which food to which location. This decreases the amount of food wasted by feeding the homeless. Excellent idea and great use of new technology.

unsung

Bitcoin paintings provided with portraits of the presenters. With blockchain also pieces of (digital) art can be uniquely identified via the blockchain (via an ID). Below the example of Ronald van den Hoff.

Ronald

Conclusion
The above was only a summary of parts of the day. The blockchain can be used for so many solutions in so many fields.

And I end with some advice by David Orban; there is no reason to panic. All those major changes which will take place in the near future might lead to exponential uncertainty. However since it is certain that change will occur there is no reason to panic, you cannot escape. Just accept that change is the new normal.

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